Fic: The Great Random Xander Story - Iteration One (1/?)
Here it is. The first installment(s) of the first iteration of the Great Random Xander Story (click link for details if you don't know how the experiment works). Below the cut (aka: the link to the first installment) you'll (hopefully) find a blank set of highlighted text, followed by the story. If you wish to know the particular idea being used for this installment, feel free to highlight the text. If you'd rather read without knowing, then just get to reading.
The following is marginally spell-checked but hardly edited, nor do I think I plan to ever go that deeply over it. I'm posting it "as is." There is definitely more on the way for this one, but already I can see that this has been too interesting to limit myself to one story. So I will eventually be trying this again. That means keep making your suggestions!
Title: Great Random Xander Story - Iteration One (rolls of the tongue, am I right?)
Author: M. McGregor, with assistance (see below)
Warnings: Some language so far, maybe a little nudity here and there. Obviously I don't know what future installments will be like.
Disclaimer: Not only do I not own these characters, I don't even own these ideas! Hell, what did I actually do here, anyway?
Highlight Here for Idea Used
38. Xander becomes a super scientist who can break the laws of physics. (Wicked_Raygun)
End Highlighting Here
The Great Random Xander Story - Iteration One
START -- EPISODE 25: SURPRISE
Buffy Summers floated across the dance floor. The Bronze was filled with the muffled, distant, and muted sounds of music and laughter. It all seemed distant and beyond understanding. Everything was beyond understanding, because there was nothing to understand.
She found Willow on the opposite end of the club. She was sitting at one of the oversized tables, and had a large cappuccino held in both hands. The organ grinder’s monkey beside her grinned at her savagely.
“L'hippo a pique' ses pantalons,” Willow told the monkey. Then she looked up and gave Buffy a friendly little wave. Buffy waved back, frowning in confusion. She was sure she would have remembered a monkey.
Oh well. There were more important things for her to do. She had someone to see.
Buffy turned away from Willow and the monkey, and found her mother standing at the edge of the dance floor.
“Do you really think you’re ready, Buffy?” Joyce Summers asked.
Buffy’s frown deepened. Her mother’s words seemed so hollow. “What?”
A hand reached out and grabbed Buffy’s wrist. She allowed herself to be pulled, and pirouetted in place twice before she came to a dizzying halt. Her hand was held high over her head by a hand covered in large, dark green rubber gloves.
“It’s not entirely stable,” he said in a conspiratorial tone. Buffy leaned her head back away from him as Xander Harris -- eyes covered by thick black welding goggles, hair sticking out in every direction, and a white lab coat covering a pair of what looked like neon yellow radiation-proof coveralls -- grinned at her. With one hand holding her wrist in the air, he held up his other hand. In it was a strange glowing blue rod covered in whirring and whizzing gears. He pressed a red button on the side of it, and a green spark spat out of the tip.
Buffy watched in confusion as the green spark sailed across the room and landed in the middle of the empty dance floor. Sizzling green light erupted from the point of impact, and soon the dance floor seemed to be dissolving away under the green tendrils of light and energy.
“That wasn’t part of the calculation,” Xander said. He shook the gizmo in his hand and frowned at it, then lifted his goggles over his eyes and stared down at it. His eyes were somewhat wild when he looked back up to Buffy. “Anti-proton cascade failure,” he said, rolling his eyes. “I should have realized.”
Another, different hand grabbed at her wrist, tearing her from Xander’s gloved grasp. Buffy was led across the dissolving dance floor, and suddenly she was floating above the gaping, sparking hole. A dark void lay below, and the edge of the hole continued to spark and dissolve with the green light. She was pulled inexorably forward until she was standing on some invisible surface above the hole.
Angel held her wrist in his hand high above her head. She looked up at him and wondered how they weren’t falling. Then there was no time to wonder, because they were dancing. Always with his hand on her wrist, always with her hand above her head, and always spinning, twirling, and floating above the unending chasm that Xander had opened below them.
And then she was there. Drusilla: skin as pale as her hair was dark, eyes full of lunacy and wisdom. Her hands snaked around Angel’s back and spread across his chest, holding him possessively. Angel’s hand let Buffy’s wrist slip away, and suddenly she was falling. The unending pit below her continued to spark with green light as she fell slowly and morosely. She could not cry out, could not reach out, and could not even feel gravity pulling her down. She was falling without movement, and every eternity sent her farther from Angel’s grasp.
She was falling through the molasses of time as she watched Drusilla’s hands reach up to Angel’s heart. She gripped him there, and Angel let out a hiss of pleasure before dropping to his knees. The two vampires floated above the void as Drusilla walked carefully around Angel’s kneeling form. He looked up at her with a pleading expression in his eyes. Drusilla smiled and ran her fingers across his cheek. A tear fell from his eyes, and Drusilla reached for the stake at her side.
Buffy cried out for him. Her voice came as a muffled, distant echo that even she could hardly hear. Her fingers reached outward for Angel, but they would not move forward. Her hair floated around her as if she were falling through an ocean.
Drusilla lifted the stake high above her head. Angel stared up at her, his hands down at his sides. He closed his eyes in peaceful resignation, and bared his chest for her. Buffy’s scream was silent and non-existent.
The stake plunged down. Angel’s body shuddered as it pierced his chest, and he smiled when Drusilla pulled it out again. A soundless chuckle issued from his lips, and then he crumbled into ash.
Drusilla spun on the spot, her dress whirling through the dust that had once been Angel. A tornado of ash and fabric engulfed her so that the only part of her Buffy could see was her face.
“Happy Birthday, Buffy,” she said, and grinned with enough malice to make the devil jealous.
Buffy screamed and woke u--
“--uffy...”
She was still falling; still floating. Everything was slow and wrong and impossible. She was dreaming, she realized. This was all a dream, but she continued to fall.
The darkness of the pit swept up over her. Buffy fell into it, faster and faster with every passing heartbeat. Soon the rush of wind against her ears had her deafened. Her hair whipped around her with fierce power, and she could feel gravity dragging her farther and farther down.
“...can’t...ouch hi...Buffy.”
Somehow, she heard the voice over the wind rushing past her ears. Buffy turned so that she was falling face-first. Xander looked up at her. The lab coat, gloves, goggles, and coveralls were gone. He looked just like Xander always looked.
“Xander?”
“...ot it all figured ou...super calcul...in reverse.”
“What? Xander, what’s happening?”
His eyes widened, and Buffy felt a thrill of fear shoot through her. Xander reached out for her. She reached back.
“Buffy! You have to--”
Buffy woke up.
It was a Slayer dream, she knew. Sometimes it was hard to tell a real dream from a prophetic one, but this time there was no question. Something bad was coming, and it was coming for her, for Angel, maybe for everyone.
It took her some time after waking to regain her composure. The feelings of helplessness and fear were slow to leave her, and the confusion over everything she’d seen kept her from putting the dream from her mind.
She went to see Angel before school, just to make sure he was okay. Their encounter was like most of the time they spent together these days: passionate, intense, and far-too-short. She was craving something more from Angel. She wanted their relationship to be more than what it was. She wanted him to know that the way she felt for him wasn’t just a schoolgirl crush. She wanted him to know that they were forever.
Was that what the dream had been? Was it her fear of moving forward with Angel? She knew it would never be easy. He was a vampire and she was the Slayer. He could live for a thousand years, and she could be dead in a month. It would never be easy.
But she wanted it. She was determined to have it. She was determined to have him.
It was her seventeenth birthday.
Xander Harris frowned as he looked down at his math homework. Could this be right? Could this be in any way correct?
He ran his fingers through his hair and squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them wide and wiped his face. No. It couldn’t be right. He was messing something up. He had to be.
“So hey,” said a voice off to one side. Xander turned in his seat to see Cordelia Chase sitting at the library table beside him. She didn’t look at him as she pulled a book out of her backpack and set it down on the table.
“Uh, hey,” he said. He quickly closed his math book. “What’s up?”
“Nothing,” she said as she dug a pencil out of her bag.
“Oh.”
Her eyes met his for a moment, but she said nothing. He swallowed nervously. Whatever this thing was that he was doing with Cordelia, it was confusing, to say the least. Sometimes when they were alone they couldn’t keep their hands off of each other. Sometimes when they were alone she would barely look at him. And every time that they were in public, she pretended she didn’t even know him.
This appeared to be a barely-even-look-at-him time. She was just doing her homework in the library. Sure, it wasn’t something Cordelia was usually that concerned with doing, but it wasn’t one of those impossible things that might indicate she was some kind of pod-person or possessed by a dream demon or something. It was just Cordelia doing her homework in the library when only Xander Harris was around.
Her eyes lifted from her notebook. With a hint of exasperation, she said, “What? Why are you staring at me?”
“I’m not staring! I’m just looking. N-not at you, I mean. Just-- around. I’m looking around.”
“Well look somewhere else,” she snapped. “I’m trying to work.”
“Right,” Xander said slowly. He opened his math textbook again and checked the mess of scribbles he’d scrawled out on his own notebook. With one final sideways glance at Cordelia, he went back to checking his work.
Which was wrong. It had to be wrong. Math was not so easy. Math was like trying to figure out Cordelia: complicated.
He must have really missed something in class today. He was never one for paying attention, especially in math class, but if he didn’t know how to do his homework he usually at least understood why he didn’t know how to do his homework.
But this? He didn’t even know what he was getting wrong. He couldn’t figure out where he should be confused. All he knew was that there was no way he’d just opened up his math book, looked at all the problems, and went one-by-one down the list jotting down answers as they just kind of beamed into his brain. It was stupid. He was obviously just writing down whatever stupid numbers came into his head.
So why couldn’t he figure out why the answers he put down were wrong?
Sighing, Xander flipped back through his textbook and read over the explanations for how to solve that chapter’s problems. It seemed simple enough. Maybe that’s why this was confusing him. Sometimes the really easy stuff could trick him like that. Because looking at it now, the whole section seemed like it was kind of easy. Just reading over the example problems, he could see that not only were the answers kind of laughably easy to come up with, but there were easier ways of figuring them out. The book wanted him to do this huge long equations that eventually got to the right answer, but why would he do that when he could just fit the numbers together and see which ones were right?
It was all about balance, really. As long as the one side matched the other side, that’s all that was important. And if one side didn’t match the other side, then all he had to do was put in the numbers that made them match. This was like Kindergarten level stuff.
That’s when he figured it out. God, he was such an idiot.
Xander looked up at Cordelia. She had her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth and was scrutinizing the page in front of her with a furrowed brow. It was rare to see her like that. It was kind of hot. Kind of really hot.
Man, she could be so cute sometimes. He loved the way her nose scrunched up as she angrily erased a portion of notes away and then sighed before scribbling down some more work. Annoyed-Cordelia was kind of a secret thrill of his.
“Hey,” Xander whispered at her. It felt somehow right not to talk too loudly while she was working. “What are the pages for the math homework?”
Cordelia looked up at him. “What?”
“I wrote down the wrong pages,” he said. He held up his textbook, which was open to chapter sixteen. “I think I’m doing stuff from 8th grade.”
“What?” she said again, and she sounded a little more annoyed this time. He tried not to grin. “Xander, I don’t have time for this. I’m already behind in math and with Buffy’s party tomorrow I won’t have time to study. So how about you leave your stupid little jokes for a time when I’m not actually busy, okay?”
“Oh,” Xander said. “Right. Buffy’s party. T-tomorrow.”
She nodded at him and went back to staring at her textbook. “I don’t even know why I’m going. Just because she’s save-the-world-girl, suddenly that means I have to cook?”
“You’re going to cook?”
She looked at him as if this was common knowledge. “I’m chips and dip girl. Duh.”
“Oh,” he said, nodding his head slowly. “That’s, uh...Yeah that’s a lot of work. All that opening and stirring.”
“And shopping!” Cordelia added, a little indignantly. “And carrying.”
“You should really have someone that helps you with that. Like a robot with a servo-activated joint system that can fully mimic the rotational effect of a human shoulder.”
“What, Xander?”
“You know. For stirring. I mean you’d have to make sure the fine motor control can handle what would be a slight vibrational imbalance thanks to the gyroscopic effect, but that’s just a matter of keeping the rotations down to the same resonant frequency produced by the friction of the ball-joint itself.”
“Are you talking about Star Trek again? You know I don’t want you polluting my brain with your nerd-speak.”
“No, I...I just meant you could use some help. F-from a robot.”
“A robot.”
“O-or not. Maybe from me?”
She quirked an eyebrow at him and gave him a little half-smile. “You want to help me make chips and dip?”
“Uh, yeah. I guess so. I mean, maybe we could do it together. G-get the chips and dip, I mean. You could get the chips and I could create an alchemical effect between the dip-mix and the sour cream, infusing them into a newly realized alternate-state of dip.”
Cordelia stared at him for a second or two, then rolled her eyes. “God, you’re such a dork. Are you trying to get me to hate myself?”
“Huh?”
“It’s bad enough I keep letting you do our whole groping thing, but could you please not do your best to constantly remind me what a complete and utter nerd you are? I feel bad enough as it is!”
“Um, sorry?”
“Yeah, well you better be. Now shut up. I have to finish this.”
“Right,” Xander said. He wasn’t exactly sure what had just happened. Was she mad at him? Had she just broken up with him? Was there even anything to break up in the first place? Was there going to be groping?
Xander frowned and looked back down to his textbook, still open to chapter sixteen. He thought about asking Cordelia again for the right assignment, but something told him that now was not the time. She was angry or flirty or happy or disappointed or something, and any of those things could backfire if he said the wrong thing.
So he picked up his textbook and started flipping through it. Maybe he could find the right assignment if he just skimmed the whole book. Something would jog his memory. Of course, if all else failed he’d just ask Willow for the assignment later. She would have it written down in her computer, although why she wasn’t using a fully realized spreadsheet system for her schedule instead of just a bulleted list, he had no idea. It was so much less efficient. If it wasn’t for the fact that he was so bad at school, he’d definitely have a better system for keeping up with his assignments.
Obviously that would just be a waste of time. First he’d have to start paying attention in class, then he’d have to start doing his homework properly.
As he skimmed through the textbook, Xander’s brow furrowed even further. Was this even the right book? Was he so stupid that he’d been using the wrong math textbook all year, and had only just realized it?
Sadly, it was a definite possibility. He hadn’t actually done any math homework in the last year, much to Willow’s constant annoyance. Math was just not his subject. It was kind of like science or history in that regard. He was a Harris, after all. His subjects were gas-pumping and door-to-door-salesmanship. Some people were just smart, and some people weren’t.
He just hadn’t realized he was quite this clueless. Using the wrong book all year? No wonder Cordelia had gotten annoyed with him. She probably thought he’d been making some kind of joke, showing her some old middle-school-era textbook and asking her what the assignment was. While he was busy trying to work on the ridiculously easy problems of chapter sixteen, Cordelia and the rest of the actual class was probably working on stuff that he couldn’t even comprehend. Like...super calculus or something.
Because from what he could tell from his book, regular calculus was kind of easy. His textbook must be the beginner’s guide stuff, and the rest of the class was using the real book. That had to be it. That’s why this was all so easy.
Sighing, Xander tossed his useless book into his backpack and leaned back in his chair. Well, another missed homework wasn’t going to kill him. He’d get Willow to help him study for the test and he’d just barely manage to pass, just like he always did. If missing a few homeworks hadn’t ruined his life yet, it certainly wouldn’t ruin it now.
Instead, it was time to focus on something more important. Sitting up a little in his chair, Xander cleared his throat. Cordelia didn’t look up, so he cleared his throat again.
“What?” she snapped in annoyance.
“Buffy’s party,” Xander said, trying to exude a confidence he did not feel.
“Yeah, I told you I’m bringing the chips and dip. Did we not just talk about that?”
“No, I mean, uh...I was thinking. About the party. And about you and me going to the party. In a together sort of way.”
“What? Why?”
Xander shrugged self-consciously and looked away from her as he rubbed the back of his head with a hand. “I dunno. I just thought, this thing with us, despite our better judgment, it, uh, it keeps happening. Maybe we should just...admit that we’re dating?”
“We’re not dating,” Cordelia said. “Groping in a broom closet isn’t dating. You don’t call it a date until the guy spends money.”
“Okay, so I’ll spend, and we’ll grope. I’ll buy the chips for you, how’s that? I just think it’s kind of whacked to hide from all of our friends the fact that we’re, uh, doing whatever it is we’re doing.”
“Well of course you want to tell everybody,” Cordelia said, putting her pencil down and closing her book. “You have nothing to be ashamed of. I, on the other hand, have everything to be ashamed of.”
“Know what? Fine. Forget it. Enjoy your super calculus.”
He grabbed his back and stalked off, unaware of Cordelia’s eyes watching him as he went.
Whatever. So Cordelia was ashamed of him. What did he care? Maybe he was ashamed of her too. After all, it wasn’t like he was the one who was the biggest bitch in school, was it? Didn’t he have the right to be all ashamed of himself for thinking he could ever be interested in her? Just because she was smart, funny, sexy, and a really good groper, that didn’t mean he could just suddenly forget that he hated her, did it?
No. Of course not. He hated her and she hated him. That was just dandy, as far as he was concerned. They didn’t have to go to Buffy’s party together, because there was no together as far as they were concerned. It was all just one big stupid mistake.
He was distracted for the next day and a half, but not just by his confusing thoughts about Cordelia. No, there was something else going on.
He was pretty sure he was getting dumber.
He noticed it that morning in Biology class. It was a class that Xander was quite used to sleeping through. He usually took his spot in the back of the class and slumped down in his chair while he tried to catch up on whatever sleep he’d missed out on the night before from researching or patrols. His teachers had long since stopped trying to get him to participate, as any such attempts would be embarrassing to the both of them. His lack of interest in the class was mostly tolerated just so long as he didn’t do anything to disrupt things.
That morning, however, class felt different. There was a series of notes on the blackboard detailing the makeup of an animal cell, and Xander had frowned at it in confusion immediately upon entering. The whole thing just made absolutely no sense. Nucleus? Ribosomes? Cytoplasm? Sure, it almost made sense, but it was just...
It was just so wrong.
Of course he knew it wasn’t wrong. He was wrong. It was just that he had never before felt that his own wrongness was...
Well that it was wrong.
When he stared at the notes, all he could think about was how the structure of the cytoskeleton should be considered a hyper-reactive state in conjunction with the vibrational frequency of its constituent proteins. It seemed to him that if one were to detail the workings of a cell, one would have to point out that its entire makeup could be altered via a resonant-cascade-induction-reaction induced by a vibrational counter-spasm directly attuned with the rate of cellular division. Leaving that out would be like leaving out that the Millenium Falcon needed a hyperdrive in order to achieve faster than light speeds. It would be missing the whole point!
That was wrong though, of course. It was just that all during class, while Mr. Heffenfoffer talked about the structure and composition of the cell, Xander just couldn’t understand his logic or his reasoning. It all sounded completely idiotic. It was like the guy was spouting gibberish up there.
The bigger shock was Math. Xander had been stunned into silence when Mrs. Tate asked for chapter sixteen’s homework back, and was even more shocked when the chapter sixteen she was talking about was from the very same textbook he’d been reading last night. Of course, since he hadn’t bothered to bring his book or the “wrong” homework he’d done last night to class, he still wound up with a zero for the assignment, but the fact that he’d been reading the right text spooked him.
Just what was going on here? Why had that work seemed so simplistic? Why was Mrs. Tate showing them a way to solve equations that was just a complete mess of unnecessary calculations and frankly backwards logic? Had he been paying so little attention that he’d completely missed the lesson where such equations were shown to be easily solved by a few simplistic tools, rather than laboriously worked out in these long and overly-complicated systems?
He just couldn’t figure out why it was worth learning the complicated, boring, and actually kind of wrong way to solve the problems. Why not just use the easy way? What was he missing?
Whatever was going on with his malfunctioning brain, he didn’t get much time to think about it. He met up with Buffy, Willow, and Giles in the library a few hours later, where there was much concern about Buffy’s recent Slayer dreams. It seemed like something bad was coming, and it was clear it had Buffy spooked, and not particularly in a mood to party. Nevertheless, it was decided that her surprise party would continue as planned, with only minor adjustments to account for the impending unknown-badness.
“I’m losing my mind,” Xander whispered as he continued to scribble into what was now his third notebook of the evening. He knew he shouldn’t be doing this, but he just couldn’t stop himself. He had to get them down. He had to make them concrete.
He should be doing other things, he knew. After the events of the last twenty-four hours, things were not looking up for Buffy and their friends. The Judge was assembled, Angel was missing, Buffy was looking more frazzled than ever, and Willow had brought her new boyfriend to Buffy’s party. All in all, it was not one of the happiest times of his life.
He was supposed to be researching ways to stop the Judge. He was not supposed to be creating super calculus.
Because that was impossible, and he was an idiot. Instead of helping his friends look for a way to keep them all from dying, he was scribbling absolute nonsense into his notebook.
“Find anything?” Willow asked from the table beside him. Xander froze and slammed his notebook shut.
“What? What?”
“About the Judge?”
“Oh. Uh, no. No, not yet.”
“What were you writing?” Willow asked.
“Just, uh, notes,” Xander said. “Nothing important. In fact,” he picked up one of the large ancient tomes that were scattered about the table. “I need to put this book back and get a different one.”
Willow gave him a curious look and said, “Okay.”
Xander sighed and headed back into the stacks. He had to clear his head. He had to focus. Sure, he might not be the big brain like Willow, but he could at least help with research. At least, he could when he wasn’t distracted by stupid ideas like super calculus and hyper biology.
Or dynama-flux virtion capacitors with non-linear spatial momentum drives.
Xander shook his head and scowled as he rounded a corner and found the shelf he was looking for. He shoved the book back onto his shelf and scanned the others for something more helpful. As he did, Cordelia came around the other corner with her own book in one hand.
“Hey,” Xander said mildly as she approached him. He gestured towards her book. “Did you find anything?”
“This book mentions the Judge,” Cordelia said, but she did not sound heartened. “But nothing useful. Big, scary, no weapon forged can stop him, took an army to take him down, blah blah blah.”
“We need some insight,” Xander said. “Something that could stop him. Some way to break the quantum chains binding his electrons to our spatial reality and cascade his potential thermodynamic imprint across the seventh or eighth dimensions, ideally.”
“Whatever,” Cordelia said, rolling her eyes. “Even if you had an actual not-stupid idea, we wouldn’t find it in here.” She put the book back on the shelf for emphasis, then turned to face him. She stepped closer to him and looked him in the eyes.
“Um, so hey,” Xander began.
“Yeah?”
“Look, I’m uh, I’m sorry I snapped at you earlier.”
He’d been a little distracted by the idiotic fantasies running through his head, and might have suggested that Cordelia was pure evil enough to face the Judge without consequences.
“Oh yeah, I’m just reeling from that new experience,” Cordelia said sarcastically.
“I’m just distracted,” Xander said. “I wasn’t thinking.”
“I know. You’re too busy rushing off to die for your beloved Buffy. You’d never die for me.”
“No, but I might die from you,” Xander said. “Does that count for anything?”
“No,” Cordelia said coldly.
“Come on. Can’t we just kiss and make up?”
“I don’t wanna make up,” Cordelia said. Xander sighed and turned to go, but Cordelia grabbed his arm. “But I’m okay with the other part.”
Xander felt the smile rush onto his face in an instant. Just like that, whatever annoyance he’d felt with her melted away. The way her eyes looked up into his and her beaming white smile shone at him, he could think of nothing else than how much he wanted to be there with her.
She stepped closer to him, and he leaned his head down. Their lips touched. His arms went around her, and hers went around his. He felt her hands slide up underneath his shirt, and then she pulled her head back and giggled softly as she squeezed his back muscles. Xander grinned at her and kissed at the side of her neck, which made Cordelia groan and flutter her eyes. Her leg went around him, snaking its way around his body while she let her hands explore his back. Xander kept his arms around her waist, holding her tight as he peppered kisses up her neck and then back to her mouth. She giggled again just before their lips touched, and then--
Xander’s eyes opened. Willow was standing right behind Cordelia. He pulled his head back and let his arms drop from Cordelia’s waist. She whined in momentary confusion, but soon noticed the look on his face. She looked over her shoulder and paled.
“Willow,” Xander said in a husky voice. “Uh, we were just, were were just...”
She turned and was gone in an instant. Xander followed after her, leaving Cordelia in the stacks by herself. He caught up with Willow in the hallway.
“Willow, come on!”
Willow stopped and rounded on him. She shook an angry finger at him. “I knew it! I knew it! Well, not in that way where I had the slightest idea, but I knew there was something I didn’t know. You two were fighting way too much. It’s not natural!”
“I know it’s weird,” Xander began.
“Weird? It’s against all laws of God and Man! It’s...Cordelia! Remember? The we-hate-Cordelia club, of which you are the treasurer!?”
“Look,” Xander said. “I was going to tell you.”
“Gee, what stopped you? Could it be the shame?”
“All right, let’s overreact, shall we?”
“But I’m--”
“Willow, we were just kissing. It doesn’t mean that much.”
“No,” Willow said darkly. “It just means you’d rather be with someone you hate than be with me.”
She turned and ran out of the hall. Xander watched her go, unsure of what to say.
It was a few hours later when Xander came out of the school bathroom to find Willow was back. He had gotten very little actual Judge-research done since getting caught. Cordelia had left, saying she had to start planning damage control for the whole school knowing about them. That left him alone in the library, trying not to be distracted by thoughts of Cordelia, Willow, Buffy, Angel, and improbability constructs within a crystalline-dynamic tertiary subspace lattice.
“Will.”
Hugging herself, Willow gave him a pitiable look. “Hey.”
“Where’d you go?”
“Home,” she said simply.
“Well I’m glad you came back. We can’t do this without you.”
“Let me get this straight,” Willow said with a slight anger to her voice. “I don’t understand it. I don’t want to understand it. You have gross emotional problems, and things are not okay between us. But what’s happening right now is more important than that.”
It was probably the best he could have hoped for. “Okay.”
Willow sighed and let her arms drop. “What about the Judge, then? What do we have?”
“On a pile of boring books that all say the same thing,” Xander said.
“Lemme guess: no weapon forged?”
“Takes an army,” Xander recited. “Or the ability to disassemble molecular chains with a nanotechnological reactive polymer, I guess.”
Willow blinked at him. “What?”
“I’m just saying it would be nice if we had a nanite swarm that could sever the physical bonds between his molecules and disassociate his matter with our timestream. It’d be a load off, you know?”
“Xander, what are you--?”
The lights suddenly shut off. Willow and Xander both looked up at the same time.
“What’s going on?” Willow asked.
“Sudden dispersal of photonic illumination,” Xander remarked. “Weird.”
“Xander, are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Let’s get to the library, see what’s going on.”
“Willow,” a voice said from behind them. “Xander.”
Xander started slightly, but relaxed when he realized it was Angel standing there. “Whew. Angel.”
“Thank God you’re okay,” Willow said, sighing in relief. “Did you see Buffy?”
Angel nodded seriously. “Yeah. Hey, what’s up with these lights, huh?”
“Probably a tripped circuit breaker,” Xander said. “Or maybe a localized EMP, but that would have had noticeable effects on us physically at this range, so probably just the circuit breaker.”
“Well it doesn’t matter,” Angel said. “I’ve...I’ve got something to show you guys.”
“Show us?” Willow asked.
“Yeah. Xander, listen, go get the others. This is important.”
“Sure,” Xander said. “I think Buffy and Giles might be back by now.”
He turned and began jogging back down the hall. Something seemed to tickle at the back of his neck, causing him to slow and then turn back around. At the other end of the hall stood Jenny Calendar, and she had a large cross in one hand.
“Willow,” Jenny said, stepping slowly forward. “Get away from him.”
“What?”
“Walk to me,” Jenny said. “Now, Willow.”
“What are you talking about? It’s Ang--”
He moved so fast that to Xander, he was just a blur. He calculated that Angel had crossed the distance between himself and Willow in less than two-hundred milliseconds, which at that distance had him moving at well over forty-miles-per-hour, which accounted for an acceleration of--
Xander shook his head from his daze as Angel’s hand wrapped around Willow’s throat. Xander lurched forward with a, “Don’t do that!”
“Oh,” Angel said with a grin. “I think I do that.”
“Angel,” Willow said in a whimpering tone.
“He’s not Angel anymore,” Jenny said. “Are you?”
“Wrong,” Angel said with a sneer. “I am Angel.” His hand gripped Willow’s throat, squeezing to the point where she could hardly breathe. “At last!”
“Oh my god,” Xander whispered. The realization of what was happening hit him like a sledgehammer. Angel was a real vampire. No soul, no good guy, no Buffy-boyfriend. Angel was a vampire, and he was going to kill Willow.
“I got a message for Buffy,” Angel said in a low drawl, lovingly sliding a finger down Willow’s pale, scared face.
Buffy’s voice rang out in the hall. “Why don’t you tell me yourself?”
Angel spun around, dragging Willow with him. She choked and gasped as they went, causing Angel to grin and hold her face up for Buffy’s display.
“Well,” Angel said. “It’s not really the kind of message you tell. It sort of involves finding the bodies of all of your friends.”
His hand gripped Willow even more tightly. She let out a strangled yelp. Xander felt frozen. Buffy looked frozen. Everything was frozen.
“This can’t be you,” Buffy whispered.
“Gee, we already covered that subject.”
Xander’s mind clicked back on in an instant. He couldn’t let this happen. He wouldn’t let this happen. Not to Willow. Not to her. Not after today. Not after he’d hurt her.
“Angel,” Buffy said while Xander began to move slowly forward. He grabbed the large cross away from Jenny and continued inexorably onward. “There must be some part of you inside that still remembers who you are.”
“Dream on, schoolgirl.”
“Then leave Willow alone,” Buffy said. Xander could see that she was keeping Angel’s attention focused on her. That was good. That gave him a chance. “Deal with me.”
“Aw, but she’s so cute,” Angel said, pinching Willow’s cheek. A tear rolled down her face. “And helpless.” He inhaled softly through his nose and added, “It’s a real turn-on.”
Xander lurched forward and shoved the cross into Angel’s face. Angel hissed and reeled back, shoving himself away from Willow and pushing her into Xander. The two of them sprawled out onto the floor. By the time Xander could get them back onto their feet, Buffy was staring out the door.
Angel was gone.
Xander stood staring in awe at the rows upon rows of ordinance. Explosives. Reactive chemicals. Machines.
“Xander,” Cordelia hissed. “Come on! Find whatever you were looking for so we can get out of here.”
Xander ran his hands along the boxes. This one would do it. At least, he hoped it would do it. It was so crude, though. A rocket propelled grenade, essentially. Sure, it would blow something up, but it wouldn’t do it elegantly. There would be so much energy wasted, so much potential for shrapnel and collateral damage. Really, what he needed was the proper power source so he could propel a chunk of lead through a semi-coherent non-tangible particle acceleration sub-matrix, charging the material with sixteen-point-four thousand times the potential kinetic energy per quantum bond, which would then release upon impact in the form of a flux implosion, severing all matter connections in the immediate area as defined by two-thirds n-minus the impact point’s multi-spectrum hyperfrequency. Or roughly four feet in any direction.
“Here,” Xander said, pulling a large box down from the shelves and handing it to Cordelia. She struggled under the weight of it, but was too confused by his reaching up to pull down another box to argue. He hefted the even larger box over one shoulder and then pointed to the window. “Okay, let’s go.”
“What are these things?” Cordelia asked as they struggled to get their stolen goods out of the armory.
“Yours is a rocket propelled explosive device. Mine is an experimental magnetic induction supercoil.”
“Whatever,” Cordelia said. “Just help me get this up there, and don’t look up my dress.”
Xander didn’t have time to feel proud that the rocket launcher had succeeded in destroying the Judge. He couldn’t make himself think about how distraught Buffy must be, how upset Willow was with him, how confusing his relationship with Cordelia was, or even of the fact that Angel was out there somewhere plotting to kill them all.
No, he couldn’t think about any of that. It was impossible to think of anything except the device that sat on his father’s workbench in their moldy old garage. It was about twelve inches long, and consisted of a glowing blue rod, several whirring gears, three separate rings of looped coils, a recently-constructed subspace energy module, and a large red button.
“There is no way this is going to work,” Xander said to himself. He picked up the device. It was light. It didn’t hum, although it did glow. There was a slight heat to it, but it wasn’t uncomfortable to hold. It was just uncomfortable to look at.
“This is not real,” Xander said as he turned the device in his hands. “It’s just a toy. I’m lucky it didn’t blow up in my face when I rerouted the proton discharge into the third capacitor.”
He took a deep breath and pointed the discharge end of the device at his father’s toolbox. This was it. It would either work, blow up, or not work.
“Please don’t blow up,” Xander whispered, and then pressed the big red button.
A spark of green light shot out of the tip of the device. It spat across the distance and splattered into the toolbox. For a few seconds, tangling green tendrils of light and energy seemed to swarm around the toolbox. Xander had to look away as the light suddenly flared into a blinding green light. When he could see again, the toolbox was gone.
Xander held his breath and clicked three of the gears down by two notches. He twisted a knob at the bottom of the device, and then pointed the tip to the other side of the garage. With another quick prayer for it not to blow up in his face, he pressed the button.
The green spark shot out once more. It struck the ground with a dull thoomp sound, and then began to roll just a few inches above it. There was a crackling sound of electricity, another bright green flash of light, and when Xander could see again, the toolbox was sitting right there on the other side of the garage.
Fully intact. Perfectly fine. Stored in perfect stasis as a total matter-energy conversion within the sixth capacitor of the device, then ejected with complete molecular cohesion attained in less than two seconds.
It worked.
Holy crap.
It worked.
“Okay,” Xander said as he reached into his backpack and pulled out the device. “This is it.”
Buffy looked at him skeptically, then took it from his hand. “This thing? Seems kind of familiar.”
“Careful!” Xander said as Buffy flipped it end over end, inspecting it. “You don’t want to accidentally set it to disassemble.”
“Xander. Come on. We don’t have time for this.”
“I’m serious, you guys! It works. I made it, and it works.”
“I’m not saying you didn’t make it,” Buffy said. “It’s impressive. Really.”
“Yeah,” Willow said. “It glows and everything. It’s neat.”
“What? No, it doesn’t just glow! It can dematerialize, rematerialize, and store matter! Potentially infinite amounts of it!”
“Did you get hit in the head last night?” Cordelia asked from her position at the other end of the library table. She was only marginally assisting in the research about werewolves, and this despite her and Xander being attacked by one the night before when making out in her car.
“What? No. Well, yeah, okay, maybe once or twice. But no harder than usual.”
Willow gave him a look of sympathy and then got up. She pressed the back of her hand to his forehead. “You’re sure you’re okay?”
Xander angrily pushed her hand away and stalked around the table. He reached into his backpack again and pulled out four notebooks full of scribblings. He threw them on the table, where the top one flipped open to reveal a mess of equations and notes. “No, I’m not okay! I’m figuring stuff out that shouldn’t be able to be figured out, Will! I made that thing. I made it. And it shouldn’t be possible to make it. But there it is, and it works.”
Willow frowned but picked up the top notebook anyway. Her brow furrowed more deeply as she looked down at the equations. “Xander, this...This doesn’t make any sense. This is just gibberish.”
“What? No it’s not.” Xander approached her and leaned over her shoulder. He pointed out one of the equations. “See this? You just balance that out by reversing the constant and incorporating the other dimensional frameworks.”
“I...oh my God. This is--” Willow looked up. “You guys. I think this is all correct.”
“What is?” Cordelia asked. “His scribblings? He’s been doodling that stuff for days now. It’s just a big mess.”
“No, I-I can’t be sure because this is so far beyond me but...But I think this is right. I think all of this is right.”
“It’s right,” Xander said. “Trust me.”
“But this doesn’t make any sense,” Willow said. She pointed to an equation. “Xander, that’s not even possible.”
Xander looked at what she was talking about and said, “Oh, well yeah, under normal physics. It works if you calculate it ninth-dimensionally with super calculus.”
“Super calculus?”
“Yeah it’s real simple, see, you just--”
“AH!” Buffy screamed as a green spark suddenly shot out of the tip of the device in her hands. The spark splashed into the pile of books on the table, and in just two seconds, the entire pile had vanished into a bright flash of green light. “Whoa! Did you guys see that?”
“Great,” Xander said with a sigh. “Buffy just vaporized all our werewolf books.”
“What’s this about the werewolf books?” Giles asked as he entered the library.
“I-I didn’t mean to!” Buffy exclaimed. “I didn’t know it would really work! Xander, it’s not supposed to really work!”
“I told you it did!” Xander yelled back. “I told you to be careful with it! You set it to disassemble!”
“B-b-but--”
“Here, just give it back,” Xander said. Buffy thrust the device back into his hands, and he quickly examined the gear settings. He really needed to implement a real interface soon. He could probably fashion a crude holo-imager out of his dad’s old black and white TV set, but that would take him a few days. For now he’d have to just go by the gears.
“Oh, okay, it’s not so bad,” Xander said in relief. “It was set to store, not disassemble.”
The others, save Giles, were all staring at Xander in shock. Giles just looked puzzled.
“Would someone like to tell me what’s going on?”
“I invented a matter disassembling, storage, and reassembling device,” Xander said. “Over the weekend.”
“You what? Is this really a time for joking, Xander?”
“I’m not joking! Look, something weird’s been going on with me, you guys. At first I thought I was just losing my mind or something, but no. It’s real. I-- I understand things. Lots of things. And I made this.”
He turned around and pointed the device at the floor. Buffy let out a, “No, wait!” but Xander pressed the button before she could move. The bright green spark shot out of the end of the device, and instant later all of the werewolf books were sitting on the floor.
“Good lord,” Giles whispered. “H-how did you do that?”
“Matter capacitation,” Xander said off-handedly. “It doesn’t matter. Look, the point is, I made this. From a stolen magnetic induction supercoil, parts from an old Super Nintendo, and my mom’s broken clock. So the real question is, what the hell happened to my brain?”
Xander would always look back at that time as one of the most significant in his life. Everything seemed to change in those days. Buffy lost Angel. Willow got a new boyfriend, only to watch him become a werewolf. Cordelia openly acknowledged dating him, even as Xander became more and more involved with the incredible ideas that flooded his mind.
Ideas which, it should be admitted, were not always great ideas. While the matter capacitation device (MCD) was a very useful invention (particularly for disassembling the constituent atoms of pesky vampires), the things Xander began to work on in the coming days and weeks were not always so benign. He might have been smart, but he wasn’t always so intelligent.
His biggest blunder had been only a few weeks after Angel had lost his soul, and shortly after Oz had become a werewolf. It had been Valentine’s day.
He’d been excited about openly dating Cordelia. It had only been going on for a few weeks, and he was finding that just being able to spend time with Cordelia without feeling like he was hiding a dirty secret was very refreshing. They spent a lot of time together in those weeks. Cordelia had even put up with his constant note-scribbling and his penchant for coming up with complicated, semi-impossible solutions for perceived problems.
Sure, he was still doing poorly in school, but that was more because he just didn’t bother to go to class most of the time. It was so boring, and half the stuff they taught was either wrong or simplistic to the point of being childish. It was much easier to just hang out in the library or work in the computer lab than it was to sit through an insultingly simplistic lecture about Newton’s Laws.
It was in the computer lab that Xander had come up with the idea to create a 3D rendering program that he could then route into the MCD, re-arranging the molecular structure of whatever energy was stored in the capacitor and discharging it in a new form. He’d created the program out of boredom during Computer Studies class one day, and had managed to render a beautiful diamond necklace with a light blue supercrystal at its center. The crystal itself was a three-hundred giga-hex data storage device with imbedded on-board personal defense programs that could -- in theory -- react to the wearer’s heartrate and initiate several defensive responses. He wasn’t entirely sure the personal forcefield would do much more than suffocate the wearer after a few minutes, but he just wouldn’t activate that for now.
Mostly, it was just a beautiful necklace with an impossibly perfect, impossibly beautiful crystal imbedded within it. He gave it to Cordelia for Valentine’s Day.
And then she’d broken up with him.
He’d lost it a little, then. The pain of having her break up with him right in front of the whole school, the pain of everyone knowing that Cordelia had rejected him, the pain of seeing Willow look at him with pity in her eyes...Well it made him a little nuts. Just a little.
Maybe more than a little.
He’d just wanted a little revenge, that was all. He wanted Cordelia to know what it was like to bare your soul to someone and have them stomp on it, spit on it, and laugh as they walked away. And it just so happened that he had a harmonic frequency generator he’d been working on that could -- in theory -- produce the proper chemical reactions and hormonal secretions to induce what was essentially love. Or lust. Or sexually fascination. Whatever. It shouldn’t have mattered, because all he was going to do was set the frequency to Cordelia’s brainwaves and then wait for her to come crawling back to him. Then he could reject her, turn off the device, and walk away the victor.
It was just that he’d been a little distracted trying to get the personal defense system of the supercrystal to work, and hadn’t been paying attention to his super calculus numbers. Instead of affecting only Cordelia’s brainwaves, it had affected everyone’s brainwaves except Cordelia.
And by everyone, it was really everyone. For about twelve hours on the night of Valentine’s Day, Xander Harris was the confirmed sexual addiction of every single person in Sunnydale, male or female. It had taken all of his cunning, all of his desperation, all of his gadgets, and a whole lot of thinking about baseball to manage to get back to his lab and initiate the shutdown pulse that would turn everyone back to normal.
And if anyone claimed they’d seen Larry making out with him up against the lockers in the hallway outside of the computer lab, well that was just filthy rumor-mongering and was to be ignored.
So Xander vowed never to play around with harmonic frequency generators again. Watching Buffy throw herself at him in the school library had managed to shock him into reality, and playing with his friends mind’s like that was scary in the extreme. The fact that they had all gone back to trusting him so easily after his horrendous mistake was a testament to just how much he owed them.
What was even more amazing was that Cordelia had actually found the whole thing kind of sweet, and they’d gotten back together the very next day. Xander had insisted on giving her a full brain-scan with his newly-invented cranial-cloud-scanner before he would actually agree to it, however. He’d been sure that he’d broken something in Cordelia’s brain, if she was willing to take him back after what he’d done. Yet somehow she seemed genuinely interested in staying with him, and the two had gone back to dating openly. She even wore the supercrystal pendant, not that he ever got the personal forcefield to actually work.
He did manage to get it to phase out of reality a few times though, so that was a start.
Things continued to change a lot in those few months, and while the harmonic frequency generator had been his biggest personal blunder, his biggest failure had been in not perfecting the supercrystal’s defense shield in time. With Cordelia wearing the only prototype, Xander had not been totally inclined to take it from her so he could work on the defense programs imbedded within it. He’d been content to just let her wear it around school, beaming with pride at the impossibly huge jewel her boyfriend had given her.
There had been more important projects to work on. Besides, at best, the personal forcefield would have provided only a minute or two of personal protection. It wasn’t as important as creating streamlined user interfaces for the MCD Mark II’s. It wasn’t as important as perfecting his multi-spectral overlay goggles. And it definitely hadn’t been as important as getting an actual directed plasma-blade (he would scoff at anyone who called it a lightsaber) made for Buffy. In those days after Valentine’s, his biggest concern besides staying in Cordelia’s good graces had been getting Buffy kitted out with every advantage he could come up with, and he figured a nice plasma-blade would do wonders.
So he hadn’t worked on the personal shield. He could have made more pendants easily enough. The MCD Mark I and his 3D rendering program could handle that. It was just that it wasn’t really a priority. He didn’t think it was that necessary.
And then Ms. Calendar had been killed. If she’d had a pendant with a working forcefield, she might have managed to escape when Angel tracked her down. Those few minutes of protection might have been all she needed.
She was dead, and he was sure that he could have helped to prevent it. For a few days after, he barricaded himself in his dad’s garage (now his co-opted lab) and gotten to work on perfecting the forcefield generator within the supercrystal. When he finally did get it to work, it had fried off the first three layers of his skin and nearly compacted his entire body into gelatin.
It was his first real failure, but it was not his last. And it was the fact that he could so often fail that managed to keep him from completely freaking out about his rapidly expanding intellect and his ever-more-impossible range of inventions. It made it feel more real, somehow. Like he was still human.
His next failure had been in the weeks after Jenny’s death. He’d worked himself ragged trying to come up with a anti-linear delta-wave transducer. It was his theory that he could, under the right conditions, contact the dreams of someone in the past. They would have to be someone who exhibited abnormally high delta waves, but he had theorized -- correctly, it seemed -- that Buffy’s Slayer dreaming would make her delta wave functions much more pronounced than the average human. After a quick scan with the cranial-cloud, his assumption turned out to be right.
Continued in Installment 2
The following is marginally spell-checked but hardly edited, nor do I think I plan to ever go that deeply over it. I'm posting it "as is." There is definitely more on the way for this one, but already I can see that this has been too interesting to limit myself to one story. So I will eventually be trying this again. That means keep making your suggestions!
Title: Great Random Xander Story - Iteration One (rolls of the tongue, am I right?)
Author: M. McGregor, with assistance (see below)
Warnings: Some language so far, maybe a little nudity here and there. Obviously I don't know what future installments will be like.
Disclaimer: Not only do I not own these characters, I don't even own these ideas! Hell, what did I actually do here, anyway?
Highlight Here for Idea Used
38. Xander becomes a super scientist who can break the laws of physics. (Wicked_Raygun)
End Highlighting Here
The Great Random Xander Story - Iteration One
START -- EPISODE 25: SURPRISE
Buffy Summers floated across the dance floor. The Bronze was filled with the muffled, distant, and muted sounds of music and laughter. It all seemed distant and beyond understanding. Everything was beyond understanding, because there was nothing to understand.
She found Willow on the opposite end of the club. She was sitting at one of the oversized tables, and had a large cappuccino held in both hands. The organ grinder’s monkey beside her grinned at her savagely.
“L'hippo a pique' ses pantalons,” Willow told the monkey. Then she looked up and gave Buffy a friendly little wave. Buffy waved back, frowning in confusion. She was sure she would have remembered a monkey.
Oh well. There were more important things for her to do. She had someone to see.
Buffy turned away from Willow and the monkey, and found her mother standing at the edge of the dance floor.
“Do you really think you’re ready, Buffy?” Joyce Summers asked.
Buffy’s frown deepened. Her mother’s words seemed so hollow. “What?”
A hand reached out and grabbed Buffy’s wrist. She allowed herself to be pulled, and pirouetted in place twice before she came to a dizzying halt. Her hand was held high over her head by a hand covered in large, dark green rubber gloves.
“It’s not entirely stable,” he said in a conspiratorial tone. Buffy leaned her head back away from him as Xander Harris -- eyes covered by thick black welding goggles, hair sticking out in every direction, and a white lab coat covering a pair of what looked like neon yellow radiation-proof coveralls -- grinned at her. With one hand holding her wrist in the air, he held up his other hand. In it was a strange glowing blue rod covered in whirring and whizzing gears. He pressed a red button on the side of it, and a green spark spat out of the tip.
Buffy watched in confusion as the green spark sailed across the room and landed in the middle of the empty dance floor. Sizzling green light erupted from the point of impact, and soon the dance floor seemed to be dissolving away under the green tendrils of light and energy.
“That wasn’t part of the calculation,” Xander said. He shook the gizmo in his hand and frowned at it, then lifted his goggles over his eyes and stared down at it. His eyes were somewhat wild when he looked back up to Buffy. “Anti-proton cascade failure,” he said, rolling his eyes. “I should have realized.”
Another, different hand grabbed at her wrist, tearing her from Xander’s gloved grasp. Buffy was led across the dissolving dance floor, and suddenly she was floating above the gaping, sparking hole. A dark void lay below, and the edge of the hole continued to spark and dissolve with the green light. She was pulled inexorably forward until she was standing on some invisible surface above the hole.
Angel held her wrist in his hand high above her head. She looked up at him and wondered how they weren’t falling. Then there was no time to wonder, because they were dancing. Always with his hand on her wrist, always with her hand above her head, and always spinning, twirling, and floating above the unending chasm that Xander had opened below them.
And then she was there. Drusilla: skin as pale as her hair was dark, eyes full of lunacy and wisdom. Her hands snaked around Angel’s back and spread across his chest, holding him possessively. Angel’s hand let Buffy’s wrist slip away, and suddenly she was falling. The unending pit below her continued to spark with green light as she fell slowly and morosely. She could not cry out, could not reach out, and could not even feel gravity pulling her down. She was falling without movement, and every eternity sent her farther from Angel’s grasp.
She was falling through the molasses of time as she watched Drusilla’s hands reach up to Angel’s heart. She gripped him there, and Angel let out a hiss of pleasure before dropping to his knees. The two vampires floated above the void as Drusilla walked carefully around Angel’s kneeling form. He looked up at her with a pleading expression in his eyes. Drusilla smiled and ran her fingers across his cheek. A tear fell from his eyes, and Drusilla reached for the stake at her side.
Buffy cried out for him. Her voice came as a muffled, distant echo that even she could hardly hear. Her fingers reached outward for Angel, but they would not move forward. Her hair floated around her as if she were falling through an ocean.
Drusilla lifted the stake high above her head. Angel stared up at her, his hands down at his sides. He closed his eyes in peaceful resignation, and bared his chest for her. Buffy’s scream was silent and non-existent.
The stake plunged down. Angel’s body shuddered as it pierced his chest, and he smiled when Drusilla pulled it out again. A soundless chuckle issued from his lips, and then he crumbled into ash.
Drusilla spun on the spot, her dress whirling through the dust that had once been Angel. A tornado of ash and fabric engulfed her so that the only part of her Buffy could see was her face.
“Happy Birthday, Buffy,” she said, and grinned with enough malice to make the devil jealous.
Buffy screamed and woke u--
“--uffy...”
She was still falling; still floating. Everything was slow and wrong and impossible. She was dreaming, she realized. This was all a dream, but she continued to fall.
The darkness of the pit swept up over her. Buffy fell into it, faster and faster with every passing heartbeat. Soon the rush of wind against her ears had her deafened. Her hair whipped around her with fierce power, and she could feel gravity dragging her farther and farther down.
“...can’t...ouch hi...Buffy.”
Somehow, she heard the voice over the wind rushing past her ears. Buffy turned so that she was falling face-first. Xander looked up at her. The lab coat, gloves, goggles, and coveralls were gone. He looked just like Xander always looked.
“Xander?”
“...ot it all figured ou...super calcul...in reverse.”
“What? Xander, what’s happening?”
His eyes widened, and Buffy felt a thrill of fear shoot through her. Xander reached out for her. She reached back.
“Buffy! You have to--”
Buffy woke up.
It was a Slayer dream, she knew. Sometimes it was hard to tell a real dream from a prophetic one, but this time there was no question. Something bad was coming, and it was coming for her, for Angel, maybe for everyone.
It took her some time after waking to regain her composure. The feelings of helplessness and fear were slow to leave her, and the confusion over everything she’d seen kept her from putting the dream from her mind.
She went to see Angel before school, just to make sure he was okay. Their encounter was like most of the time they spent together these days: passionate, intense, and far-too-short. She was craving something more from Angel. She wanted their relationship to be more than what it was. She wanted him to know that the way she felt for him wasn’t just a schoolgirl crush. She wanted him to know that they were forever.
Was that what the dream had been? Was it her fear of moving forward with Angel? She knew it would never be easy. He was a vampire and she was the Slayer. He could live for a thousand years, and she could be dead in a month. It would never be easy.
But she wanted it. She was determined to have it. She was determined to have him.
It was her seventeenth birthday.
Xander Harris frowned as he looked down at his math homework. Could this be right? Could this be in any way correct?
He ran his fingers through his hair and squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them wide and wiped his face. No. It couldn’t be right. He was messing something up. He had to be.
“So hey,” said a voice off to one side. Xander turned in his seat to see Cordelia Chase sitting at the library table beside him. She didn’t look at him as she pulled a book out of her backpack and set it down on the table.
“Uh, hey,” he said. He quickly closed his math book. “What’s up?”
“Nothing,” she said as she dug a pencil out of her bag.
“Oh.”
Her eyes met his for a moment, but she said nothing. He swallowed nervously. Whatever this thing was that he was doing with Cordelia, it was confusing, to say the least. Sometimes when they were alone they couldn’t keep their hands off of each other. Sometimes when they were alone she would barely look at him. And every time that they were in public, she pretended she didn’t even know him.
This appeared to be a barely-even-look-at-him time. She was just doing her homework in the library. Sure, it wasn’t something Cordelia was usually that concerned with doing, but it wasn’t one of those impossible things that might indicate she was some kind of pod-person or possessed by a dream demon or something. It was just Cordelia doing her homework in the library when only Xander Harris was around.
Her eyes lifted from her notebook. With a hint of exasperation, she said, “What? Why are you staring at me?”
“I’m not staring! I’m just looking. N-not at you, I mean. Just-- around. I’m looking around.”
“Well look somewhere else,” she snapped. “I’m trying to work.”
“Right,” Xander said slowly. He opened his math textbook again and checked the mess of scribbles he’d scrawled out on his own notebook. With one final sideways glance at Cordelia, he went back to checking his work.
Which was wrong. It had to be wrong. Math was not so easy. Math was like trying to figure out Cordelia: complicated.
He must have really missed something in class today. He was never one for paying attention, especially in math class, but if he didn’t know how to do his homework he usually at least understood why he didn’t know how to do his homework.
But this? He didn’t even know what he was getting wrong. He couldn’t figure out where he should be confused. All he knew was that there was no way he’d just opened up his math book, looked at all the problems, and went one-by-one down the list jotting down answers as they just kind of beamed into his brain. It was stupid. He was obviously just writing down whatever stupid numbers came into his head.
So why couldn’t he figure out why the answers he put down were wrong?
Sighing, Xander flipped back through his textbook and read over the explanations for how to solve that chapter’s problems. It seemed simple enough. Maybe that’s why this was confusing him. Sometimes the really easy stuff could trick him like that. Because looking at it now, the whole section seemed like it was kind of easy. Just reading over the example problems, he could see that not only were the answers kind of laughably easy to come up with, but there were easier ways of figuring them out. The book wanted him to do this huge long equations that eventually got to the right answer, but why would he do that when he could just fit the numbers together and see which ones were right?
It was all about balance, really. As long as the one side matched the other side, that’s all that was important. And if one side didn’t match the other side, then all he had to do was put in the numbers that made them match. This was like Kindergarten level stuff.
That’s when he figured it out. God, he was such an idiot.
Xander looked up at Cordelia. She had her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth and was scrutinizing the page in front of her with a furrowed brow. It was rare to see her like that. It was kind of hot. Kind of really hot.
Man, she could be so cute sometimes. He loved the way her nose scrunched up as she angrily erased a portion of notes away and then sighed before scribbling down some more work. Annoyed-Cordelia was kind of a secret thrill of his.
“Hey,” Xander whispered at her. It felt somehow right not to talk too loudly while she was working. “What are the pages for the math homework?”
Cordelia looked up at him. “What?”
“I wrote down the wrong pages,” he said. He held up his textbook, which was open to chapter sixteen. “I think I’m doing stuff from 8th grade.”
“What?” she said again, and she sounded a little more annoyed this time. He tried not to grin. “Xander, I don’t have time for this. I’m already behind in math and with Buffy’s party tomorrow I won’t have time to study. So how about you leave your stupid little jokes for a time when I’m not actually busy, okay?”
“Oh,” Xander said. “Right. Buffy’s party. T-tomorrow.”
She nodded at him and went back to staring at her textbook. “I don’t even know why I’m going. Just because she’s save-the-world-girl, suddenly that means I have to cook?”
“You’re going to cook?”
She looked at him as if this was common knowledge. “I’m chips and dip girl. Duh.”
“Oh,” he said, nodding his head slowly. “That’s, uh...Yeah that’s a lot of work. All that opening and stirring.”
“And shopping!” Cordelia added, a little indignantly. “And carrying.”
“You should really have someone that helps you with that. Like a robot with a servo-activated joint system that can fully mimic the rotational effect of a human shoulder.”
“What, Xander?”
“You know. For stirring. I mean you’d have to make sure the fine motor control can handle what would be a slight vibrational imbalance thanks to the gyroscopic effect, but that’s just a matter of keeping the rotations down to the same resonant frequency produced by the friction of the ball-joint itself.”
“Are you talking about Star Trek again? You know I don’t want you polluting my brain with your nerd-speak.”
“No, I...I just meant you could use some help. F-from a robot.”
“A robot.”
“O-or not. Maybe from me?”
She quirked an eyebrow at him and gave him a little half-smile. “You want to help me make chips and dip?”
“Uh, yeah. I guess so. I mean, maybe we could do it together. G-get the chips and dip, I mean. You could get the chips and I could create an alchemical effect between the dip-mix and the sour cream, infusing them into a newly realized alternate-state of dip.”
Cordelia stared at him for a second or two, then rolled her eyes. “God, you’re such a dork. Are you trying to get me to hate myself?”
“Huh?”
“It’s bad enough I keep letting you do our whole groping thing, but could you please not do your best to constantly remind me what a complete and utter nerd you are? I feel bad enough as it is!”
“Um, sorry?”
“Yeah, well you better be. Now shut up. I have to finish this.”
“Right,” Xander said. He wasn’t exactly sure what had just happened. Was she mad at him? Had she just broken up with him? Was there even anything to break up in the first place? Was there going to be groping?
Xander frowned and looked back down to his textbook, still open to chapter sixteen. He thought about asking Cordelia again for the right assignment, but something told him that now was not the time. She was angry or flirty or happy or disappointed or something, and any of those things could backfire if he said the wrong thing.
So he picked up his textbook and started flipping through it. Maybe he could find the right assignment if he just skimmed the whole book. Something would jog his memory. Of course, if all else failed he’d just ask Willow for the assignment later. She would have it written down in her computer, although why she wasn’t using a fully realized spreadsheet system for her schedule instead of just a bulleted list, he had no idea. It was so much less efficient. If it wasn’t for the fact that he was so bad at school, he’d definitely have a better system for keeping up with his assignments.
Obviously that would just be a waste of time. First he’d have to start paying attention in class, then he’d have to start doing his homework properly.
As he skimmed through the textbook, Xander’s brow furrowed even further. Was this even the right book? Was he so stupid that he’d been using the wrong math textbook all year, and had only just realized it?
Sadly, it was a definite possibility. He hadn’t actually done any math homework in the last year, much to Willow’s constant annoyance. Math was just not his subject. It was kind of like science or history in that regard. He was a Harris, after all. His subjects were gas-pumping and door-to-door-salesmanship. Some people were just smart, and some people weren’t.
He just hadn’t realized he was quite this clueless. Using the wrong book all year? No wonder Cordelia had gotten annoyed with him. She probably thought he’d been making some kind of joke, showing her some old middle-school-era textbook and asking her what the assignment was. While he was busy trying to work on the ridiculously easy problems of chapter sixteen, Cordelia and the rest of the actual class was probably working on stuff that he couldn’t even comprehend. Like...super calculus or something.
Because from what he could tell from his book, regular calculus was kind of easy. His textbook must be the beginner’s guide stuff, and the rest of the class was using the real book. That had to be it. That’s why this was all so easy.
Sighing, Xander tossed his useless book into his backpack and leaned back in his chair. Well, another missed homework wasn’t going to kill him. He’d get Willow to help him study for the test and he’d just barely manage to pass, just like he always did. If missing a few homeworks hadn’t ruined his life yet, it certainly wouldn’t ruin it now.
Instead, it was time to focus on something more important. Sitting up a little in his chair, Xander cleared his throat. Cordelia didn’t look up, so he cleared his throat again.
“What?” she snapped in annoyance.
“Buffy’s party,” Xander said, trying to exude a confidence he did not feel.
“Yeah, I told you I’m bringing the chips and dip. Did we not just talk about that?”
“No, I mean, uh...I was thinking. About the party. And about you and me going to the party. In a together sort of way.”
“What? Why?”
Xander shrugged self-consciously and looked away from her as he rubbed the back of his head with a hand. “I dunno. I just thought, this thing with us, despite our better judgment, it, uh, it keeps happening. Maybe we should just...admit that we’re dating?”
“We’re not dating,” Cordelia said. “Groping in a broom closet isn’t dating. You don’t call it a date until the guy spends money.”
“Okay, so I’ll spend, and we’ll grope. I’ll buy the chips for you, how’s that? I just think it’s kind of whacked to hide from all of our friends the fact that we’re, uh, doing whatever it is we’re doing.”
“Well of course you want to tell everybody,” Cordelia said, putting her pencil down and closing her book. “You have nothing to be ashamed of. I, on the other hand, have everything to be ashamed of.”
“Know what? Fine. Forget it. Enjoy your super calculus.”
He grabbed his back and stalked off, unaware of Cordelia’s eyes watching him as he went.
Whatever. So Cordelia was ashamed of him. What did he care? Maybe he was ashamed of her too. After all, it wasn’t like he was the one who was the biggest bitch in school, was it? Didn’t he have the right to be all ashamed of himself for thinking he could ever be interested in her? Just because she was smart, funny, sexy, and a really good groper, that didn’t mean he could just suddenly forget that he hated her, did it?
No. Of course not. He hated her and she hated him. That was just dandy, as far as he was concerned. They didn’t have to go to Buffy’s party together, because there was no together as far as they were concerned. It was all just one big stupid mistake.
He was distracted for the next day and a half, but not just by his confusing thoughts about Cordelia. No, there was something else going on.
He was pretty sure he was getting dumber.
He noticed it that morning in Biology class. It was a class that Xander was quite used to sleeping through. He usually took his spot in the back of the class and slumped down in his chair while he tried to catch up on whatever sleep he’d missed out on the night before from researching or patrols. His teachers had long since stopped trying to get him to participate, as any such attempts would be embarrassing to the both of them. His lack of interest in the class was mostly tolerated just so long as he didn’t do anything to disrupt things.
That morning, however, class felt different. There was a series of notes on the blackboard detailing the makeup of an animal cell, and Xander had frowned at it in confusion immediately upon entering. The whole thing just made absolutely no sense. Nucleus? Ribosomes? Cytoplasm? Sure, it almost made sense, but it was just...
It was just so wrong.
Of course he knew it wasn’t wrong. He was wrong. It was just that he had never before felt that his own wrongness was...
Well that it was wrong.
When he stared at the notes, all he could think about was how the structure of the cytoskeleton should be considered a hyper-reactive state in conjunction with the vibrational frequency of its constituent proteins. It seemed to him that if one were to detail the workings of a cell, one would have to point out that its entire makeup could be altered via a resonant-cascade-induction-reaction induced by a vibrational counter-spasm directly attuned with the rate of cellular division. Leaving that out would be like leaving out that the Millenium Falcon needed a hyperdrive in order to achieve faster than light speeds. It would be missing the whole point!
That was wrong though, of course. It was just that all during class, while Mr. Heffenfoffer talked about the structure and composition of the cell, Xander just couldn’t understand his logic or his reasoning. It all sounded completely idiotic. It was like the guy was spouting gibberish up there.
The bigger shock was Math. Xander had been stunned into silence when Mrs. Tate asked for chapter sixteen’s homework back, and was even more shocked when the chapter sixteen she was talking about was from the very same textbook he’d been reading last night. Of course, since he hadn’t bothered to bring his book or the “wrong” homework he’d done last night to class, he still wound up with a zero for the assignment, but the fact that he’d been reading the right text spooked him.
Just what was going on here? Why had that work seemed so simplistic? Why was Mrs. Tate showing them a way to solve equations that was just a complete mess of unnecessary calculations and frankly backwards logic? Had he been paying so little attention that he’d completely missed the lesson where such equations were shown to be easily solved by a few simplistic tools, rather than laboriously worked out in these long and overly-complicated systems?
He just couldn’t figure out why it was worth learning the complicated, boring, and actually kind of wrong way to solve the problems. Why not just use the easy way? What was he missing?
Whatever was going on with his malfunctioning brain, he didn’t get much time to think about it. He met up with Buffy, Willow, and Giles in the library a few hours later, where there was much concern about Buffy’s recent Slayer dreams. It seemed like something bad was coming, and it was clear it had Buffy spooked, and not particularly in a mood to party. Nevertheless, it was decided that her surprise party would continue as planned, with only minor adjustments to account for the impending unknown-badness.
“I’m losing my mind,” Xander whispered as he continued to scribble into what was now his third notebook of the evening. He knew he shouldn’t be doing this, but he just couldn’t stop himself. He had to get them down. He had to make them concrete.
He should be doing other things, he knew. After the events of the last twenty-four hours, things were not looking up for Buffy and their friends. The Judge was assembled, Angel was missing, Buffy was looking more frazzled than ever, and Willow had brought her new boyfriend to Buffy’s party. All in all, it was not one of the happiest times of his life.
He was supposed to be researching ways to stop the Judge. He was not supposed to be creating super calculus.
Because that was impossible, and he was an idiot. Instead of helping his friends look for a way to keep them all from dying, he was scribbling absolute nonsense into his notebook.
“Find anything?” Willow asked from the table beside him. Xander froze and slammed his notebook shut.
“What? What?”
“About the Judge?”
“Oh. Uh, no. No, not yet.”
“What were you writing?” Willow asked.
“Just, uh, notes,” Xander said. “Nothing important. In fact,” he picked up one of the large ancient tomes that were scattered about the table. “I need to put this book back and get a different one.”
Willow gave him a curious look and said, “Okay.”
Xander sighed and headed back into the stacks. He had to clear his head. He had to focus. Sure, he might not be the big brain like Willow, but he could at least help with research. At least, he could when he wasn’t distracted by stupid ideas like super calculus and hyper biology.
Or dynama-flux virtion capacitors with non-linear spatial momentum drives.
Xander shook his head and scowled as he rounded a corner and found the shelf he was looking for. He shoved the book back onto his shelf and scanned the others for something more helpful. As he did, Cordelia came around the other corner with her own book in one hand.
“Hey,” Xander said mildly as she approached him. He gestured towards her book. “Did you find anything?”
“This book mentions the Judge,” Cordelia said, but she did not sound heartened. “But nothing useful. Big, scary, no weapon forged can stop him, took an army to take him down, blah blah blah.”
“We need some insight,” Xander said. “Something that could stop him. Some way to break the quantum chains binding his electrons to our spatial reality and cascade his potential thermodynamic imprint across the seventh or eighth dimensions, ideally.”
“Whatever,” Cordelia said, rolling her eyes. “Even if you had an actual not-stupid idea, we wouldn’t find it in here.” She put the book back on the shelf for emphasis, then turned to face him. She stepped closer to him and looked him in the eyes.
“Um, so hey,” Xander began.
“Yeah?”
“Look, I’m uh, I’m sorry I snapped at you earlier.”
He’d been a little distracted by the idiotic fantasies running through his head, and might have suggested that Cordelia was pure evil enough to face the Judge without consequences.
“Oh yeah, I’m just reeling from that new experience,” Cordelia said sarcastically.
“I’m just distracted,” Xander said. “I wasn’t thinking.”
“I know. You’re too busy rushing off to die for your beloved Buffy. You’d never die for me.”
“No, but I might die from you,” Xander said. “Does that count for anything?”
“No,” Cordelia said coldly.
“Come on. Can’t we just kiss and make up?”
“I don’t wanna make up,” Cordelia said. Xander sighed and turned to go, but Cordelia grabbed his arm. “But I’m okay with the other part.”
Xander felt the smile rush onto his face in an instant. Just like that, whatever annoyance he’d felt with her melted away. The way her eyes looked up into his and her beaming white smile shone at him, he could think of nothing else than how much he wanted to be there with her.
She stepped closer to him, and he leaned his head down. Their lips touched. His arms went around her, and hers went around his. He felt her hands slide up underneath his shirt, and then she pulled her head back and giggled softly as she squeezed his back muscles. Xander grinned at her and kissed at the side of her neck, which made Cordelia groan and flutter her eyes. Her leg went around him, snaking its way around his body while she let her hands explore his back. Xander kept his arms around her waist, holding her tight as he peppered kisses up her neck and then back to her mouth. She giggled again just before their lips touched, and then--
Xander’s eyes opened. Willow was standing right behind Cordelia. He pulled his head back and let his arms drop from Cordelia’s waist. She whined in momentary confusion, but soon noticed the look on his face. She looked over her shoulder and paled.
“Willow,” Xander said in a husky voice. “Uh, we were just, were were just...”
She turned and was gone in an instant. Xander followed after her, leaving Cordelia in the stacks by herself. He caught up with Willow in the hallway.
“Willow, come on!”
Willow stopped and rounded on him. She shook an angry finger at him. “I knew it! I knew it! Well, not in that way where I had the slightest idea, but I knew there was something I didn’t know. You two were fighting way too much. It’s not natural!”
“I know it’s weird,” Xander began.
“Weird? It’s against all laws of God and Man! It’s...Cordelia! Remember? The we-hate-Cordelia club, of which you are the treasurer!?”
“Look,” Xander said. “I was going to tell you.”
“Gee, what stopped you? Could it be the shame?”
“All right, let’s overreact, shall we?”
“But I’m--”
“Willow, we were just kissing. It doesn’t mean that much.”
“No,” Willow said darkly. “It just means you’d rather be with someone you hate than be with me.”
She turned and ran out of the hall. Xander watched her go, unsure of what to say.
It was a few hours later when Xander came out of the school bathroom to find Willow was back. He had gotten very little actual Judge-research done since getting caught. Cordelia had left, saying she had to start planning damage control for the whole school knowing about them. That left him alone in the library, trying not to be distracted by thoughts of Cordelia, Willow, Buffy, Angel, and improbability constructs within a crystalline-dynamic tertiary subspace lattice.
“Will.”
Hugging herself, Willow gave him a pitiable look. “Hey.”
“Where’d you go?”
“Home,” she said simply.
“Well I’m glad you came back. We can’t do this without you.”
“Let me get this straight,” Willow said with a slight anger to her voice. “I don’t understand it. I don’t want to understand it. You have gross emotional problems, and things are not okay between us. But what’s happening right now is more important than that.”
It was probably the best he could have hoped for. “Okay.”
Willow sighed and let her arms drop. “What about the Judge, then? What do we have?”
“On a pile of boring books that all say the same thing,” Xander said.
“Lemme guess: no weapon forged?”
“Takes an army,” Xander recited. “Or the ability to disassemble molecular chains with a nanotechnological reactive polymer, I guess.”
Willow blinked at him. “What?”
“I’m just saying it would be nice if we had a nanite swarm that could sever the physical bonds between his molecules and disassociate his matter with our timestream. It’d be a load off, you know?”
“Xander, what are you--?”
The lights suddenly shut off. Willow and Xander both looked up at the same time.
“What’s going on?” Willow asked.
“Sudden dispersal of photonic illumination,” Xander remarked. “Weird.”
“Xander, are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Let’s get to the library, see what’s going on.”
“Willow,” a voice said from behind them. “Xander.”
Xander started slightly, but relaxed when he realized it was Angel standing there. “Whew. Angel.”
“Thank God you’re okay,” Willow said, sighing in relief. “Did you see Buffy?”
Angel nodded seriously. “Yeah. Hey, what’s up with these lights, huh?”
“Probably a tripped circuit breaker,” Xander said. “Or maybe a localized EMP, but that would have had noticeable effects on us physically at this range, so probably just the circuit breaker.”
“Well it doesn’t matter,” Angel said. “I’ve...I’ve got something to show you guys.”
“Show us?” Willow asked.
“Yeah. Xander, listen, go get the others. This is important.”
“Sure,” Xander said. “I think Buffy and Giles might be back by now.”
He turned and began jogging back down the hall. Something seemed to tickle at the back of his neck, causing him to slow and then turn back around. At the other end of the hall stood Jenny Calendar, and she had a large cross in one hand.
“Willow,” Jenny said, stepping slowly forward. “Get away from him.”
“What?”
“Walk to me,” Jenny said. “Now, Willow.”
“What are you talking about? It’s Ang--”
He moved so fast that to Xander, he was just a blur. He calculated that Angel had crossed the distance between himself and Willow in less than two-hundred milliseconds, which at that distance had him moving at well over forty-miles-per-hour, which accounted for an acceleration of--
Xander shook his head from his daze as Angel’s hand wrapped around Willow’s throat. Xander lurched forward with a, “Don’t do that!”
“Oh,” Angel said with a grin. “I think I do that.”
“Angel,” Willow said in a whimpering tone.
“He’s not Angel anymore,” Jenny said. “Are you?”
“Wrong,” Angel said with a sneer. “I am Angel.” His hand gripped Willow’s throat, squeezing to the point where she could hardly breathe. “At last!”
“Oh my god,” Xander whispered. The realization of what was happening hit him like a sledgehammer. Angel was a real vampire. No soul, no good guy, no Buffy-boyfriend. Angel was a vampire, and he was going to kill Willow.
“I got a message for Buffy,” Angel said in a low drawl, lovingly sliding a finger down Willow’s pale, scared face.
Buffy’s voice rang out in the hall. “Why don’t you tell me yourself?”
Angel spun around, dragging Willow with him. She choked and gasped as they went, causing Angel to grin and hold her face up for Buffy’s display.
“Well,” Angel said. “It’s not really the kind of message you tell. It sort of involves finding the bodies of all of your friends.”
His hand gripped Willow even more tightly. She let out a strangled yelp. Xander felt frozen. Buffy looked frozen. Everything was frozen.
“This can’t be you,” Buffy whispered.
“Gee, we already covered that subject.”
Xander’s mind clicked back on in an instant. He couldn’t let this happen. He wouldn’t let this happen. Not to Willow. Not to her. Not after today. Not after he’d hurt her.
“Angel,” Buffy said while Xander began to move slowly forward. He grabbed the large cross away from Jenny and continued inexorably onward. “There must be some part of you inside that still remembers who you are.”
“Dream on, schoolgirl.”
“Then leave Willow alone,” Buffy said. Xander could see that she was keeping Angel’s attention focused on her. That was good. That gave him a chance. “Deal with me.”
“Aw, but she’s so cute,” Angel said, pinching Willow’s cheek. A tear rolled down her face. “And helpless.” He inhaled softly through his nose and added, “It’s a real turn-on.”
Xander lurched forward and shoved the cross into Angel’s face. Angel hissed and reeled back, shoving himself away from Willow and pushing her into Xander. The two of them sprawled out onto the floor. By the time Xander could get them back onto their feet, Buffy was staring out the door.
Angel was gone.
Xander stood staring in awe at the rows upon rows of ordinance. Explosives. Reactive chemicals. Machines.
“Xander,” Cordelia hissed. “Come on! Find whatever you were looking for so we can get out of here.”
Xander ran his hands along the boxes. This one would do it. At least, he hoped it would do it. It was so crude, though. A rocket propelled grenade, essentially. Sure, it would blow something up, but it wouldn’t do it elegantly. There would be so much energy wasted, so much potential for shrapnel and collateral damage. Really, what he needed was the proper power source so he could propel a chunk of lead through a semi-coherent non-tangible particle acceleration sub-matrix, charging the material with sixteen-point-four thousand times the potential kinetic energy per quantum bond, which would then release upon impact in the form of a flux implosion, severing all matter connections in the immediate area as defined by two-thirds n-minus the impact point’s multi-spectrum hyperfrequency. Or roughly four feet in any direction.
“Here,” Xander said, pulling a large box down from the shelves and handing it to Cordelia. She struggled under the weight of it, but was too confused by his reaching up to pull down another box to argue. He hefted the even larger box over one shoulder and then pointed to the window. “Okay, let’s go.”
“What are these things?” Cordelia asked as they struggled to get their stolen goods out of the armory.
“Yours is a rocket propelled explosive device. Mine is an experimental magnetic induction supercoil.”
“Whatever,” Cordelia said. “Just help me get this up there, and don’t look up my dress.”
Xander didn’t have time to feel proud that the rocket launcher had succeeded in destroying the Judge. He couldn’t make himself think about how distraught Buffy must be, how upset Willow was with him, how confusing his relationship with Cordelia was, or even of the fact that Angel was out there somewhere plotting to kill them all.
No, he couldn’t think about any of that. It was impossible to think of anything except the device that sat on his father’s workbench in their moldy old garage. It was about twelve inches long, and consisted of a glowing blue rod, several whirring gears, three separate rings of looped coils, a recently-constructed subspace energy module, and a large red button.
“There is no way this is going to work,” Xander said to himself. He picked up the device. It was light. It didn’t hum, although it did glow. There was a slight heat to it, but it wasn’t uncomfortable to hold. It was just uncomfortable to look at.
“This is not real,” Xander said as he turned the device in his hands. “It’s just a toy. I’m lucky it didn’t blow up in my face when I rerouted the proton discharge into the third capacitor.”
He took a deep breath and pointed the discharge end of the device at his father’s toolbox. This was it. It would either work, blow up, or not work.
“Please don’t blow up,” Xander whispered, and then pressed the big red button.
A spark of green light shot out of the tip of the device. It spat across the distance and splattered into the toolbox. For a few seconds, tangling green tendrils of light and energy seemed to swarm around the toolbox. Xander had to look away as the light suddenly flared into a blinding green light. When he could see again, the toolbox was gone.
Xander held his breath and clicked three of the gears down by two notches. He twisted a knob at the bottom of the device, and then pointed the tip to the other side of the garage. With another quick prayer for it not to blow up in his face, he pressed the button.
The green spark shot out once more. It struck the ground with a dull thoomp sound, and then began to roll just a few inches above it. There was a crackling sound of electricity, another bright green flash of light, and when Xander could see again, the toolbox was sitting right there on the other side of the garage.
Fully intact. Perfectly fine. Stored in perfect stasis as a total matter-energy conversion within the sixth capacitor of the device, then ejected with complete molecular cohesion attained in less than two seconds.
It worked.
Holy crap.
It worked.
“Okay,” Xander said as he reached into his backpack and pulled out the device. “This is it.”
Buffy looked at him skeptically, then took it from his hand. “This thing? Seems kind of familiar.”
“Careful!” Xander said as Buffy flipped it end over end, inspecting it. “You don’t want to accidentally set it to disassemble.”
“Xander. Come on. We don’t have time for this.”
“I’m serious, you guys! It works. I made it, and it works.”
“I’m not saying you didn’t make it,” Buffy said. “It’s impressive. Really.”
“Yeah,” Willow said. “It glows and everything. It’s neat.”
“What? No, it doesn’t just glow! It can dematerialize, rematerialize, and store matter! Potentially infinite amounts of it!”
“Did you get hit in the head last night?” Cordelia asked from her position at the other end of the library table. She was only marginally assisting in the research about werewolves, and this despite her and Xander being attacked by one the night before when making out in her car.
“What? No. Well, yeah, okay, maybe once or twice. But no harder than usual.”
Willow gave him a look of sympathy and then got up. She pressed the back of her hand to his forehead. “You’re sure you’re okay?”
Xander angrily pushed her hand away and stalked around the table. He reached into his backpack again and pulled out four notebooks full of scribblings. He threw them on the table, where the top one flipped open to reveal a mess of equations and notes. “No, I’m not okay! I’m figuring stuff out that shouldn’t be able to be figured out, Will! I made that thing. I made it. And it shouldn’t be possible to make it. But there it is, and it works.”
Willow frowned but picked up the top notebook anyway. Her brow furrowed more deeply as she looked down at the equations. “Xander, this...This doesn’t make any sense. This is just gibberish.”
“What? No it’s not.” Xander approached her and leaned over her shoulder. He pointed out one of the equations. “See this? You just balance that out by reversing the constant and incorporating the other dimensional frameworks.”
“I...oh my God. This is--” Willow looked up. “You guys. I think this is all correct.”
“What is?” Cordelia asked. “His scribblings? He’s been doodling that stuff for days now. It’s just a big mess.”
“No, I-I can’t be sure because this is so far beyond me but...But I think this is right. I think all of this is right.”
“It’s right,” Xander said. “Trust me.”
“But this doesn’t make any sense,” Willow said. She pointed to an equation. “Xander, that’s not even possible.”
Xander looked at what she was talking about and said, “Oh, well yeah, under normal physics. It works if you calculate it ninth-dimensionally with super calculus.”
“Super calculus?”
“Yeah it’s real simple, see, you just--”
“AH!” Buffy screamed as a green spark suddenly shot out of the tip of the device in her hands. The spark splashed into the pile of books on the table, and in just two seconds, the entire pile had vanished into a bright flash of green light. “Whoa! Did you guys see that?”
“Great,” Xander said with a sigh. “Buffy just vaporized all our werewolf books.”
“What’s this about the werewolf books?” Giles asked as he entered the library.
“I-I didn’t mean to!” Buffy exclaimed. “I didn’t know it would really work! Xander, it’s not supposed to really work!”
“I told you it did!” Xander yelled back. “I told you to be careful with it! You set it to disassemble!”
“B-b-but--”
“Here, just give it back,” Xander said. Buffy thrust the device back into his hands, and he quickly examined the gear settings. He really needed to implement a real interface soon. He could probably fashion a crude holo-imager out of his dad’s old black and white TV set, but that would take him a few days. For now he’d have to just go by the gears.
“Oh, okay, it’s not so bad,” Xander said in relief. “It was set to store, not disassemble.”
The others, save Giles, were all staring at Xander in shock. Giles just looked puzzled.
“Would someone like to tell me what’s going on?”
“I invented a matter disassembling, storage, and reassembling device,” Xander said. “Over the weekend.”
“You what? Is this really a time for joking, Xander?”
“I’m not joking! Look, something weird’s been going on with me, you guys. At first I thought I was just losing my mind or something, but no. It’s real. I-- I understand things. Lots of things. And I made this.”
He turned around and pointed the device at the floor. Buffy let out a, “No, wait!” but Xander pressed the button before she could move. The bright green spark shot out of the end of the device, and instant later all of the werewolf books were sitting on the floor.
“Good lord,” Giles whispered. “H-how did you do that?”
“Matter capacitation,” Xander said off-handedly. “It doesn’t matter. Look, the point is, I made this. From a stolen magnetic induction supercoil, parts from an old Super Nintendo, and my mom’s broken clock. So the real question is, what the hell happened to my brain?”
Xander would always look back at that time as one of the most significant in his life. Everything seemed to change in those days. Buffy lost Angel. Willow got a new boyfriend, only to watch him become a werewolf. Cordelia openly acknowledged dating him, even as Xander became more and more involved with the incredible ideas that flooded his mind.
Ideas which, it should be admitted, were not always great ideas. While the matter capacitation device (MCD) was a very useful invention (particularly for disassembling the constituent atoms of pesky vampires), the things Xander began to work on in the coming days and weeks were not always so benign. He might have been smart, but he wasn’t always so intelligent.
His biggest blunder had been only a few weeks after Angel had lost his soul, and shortly after Oz had become a werewolf. It had been Valentine’s day.
He’d been excited about openly dating Cordelia. It had only been going on for a few weeks, and he was finding that just being able to spend time with Cordelia without feeling like he was hiding a dirty secret was very refreshing. They spent a lot of time together in those weeks. Cordelia had even put up with his constant note-scribbling and his penchant for coming up with complicated, semi-impossible solutions for perceived problems.
Sure, he was still doing poorly in school, but that was more because he just didn’t bother to go to class most of the time. It was so boring, and half the stuff they taught was either wrong or simplistic to the point of being childish. It was much easier to just hang out in the library or work in the computer lab than it was to sit through an insultingly simplistic lecture about Newton’s Laws.
It was in the computer lab that Xander had come up with the idea to create a 3D rendering program that he could then route into the MCD, re-arranging the molecular structure of whatever energy was stored in the capacitor and discharging it in a new form. He’d created the program out of boredom during Computer Studies class one day, and had managed to render a beautiful diamond necklace with a light blue supercrystal at its center. The crystal itself was a three-hundred giga-hex data storage device with imbedded on-board personal defense programs that could -- in theory -- react to the wearer’s heartrate and initiate several defensive responses. He wasn’t entirely sure the personal forcefield would do much more than suffocate the wearer after a few minutes, but he just wouldn’t activate that for now.
Mostly, it was just a beautiful necklace with an impossibly perfect, impossibly beautiful crystal imbedded within it. He gave it to Cordelia for Valentine’s Day.
And then she’d broken up with him.
He’d lost it a little, then. The pain of having her break up with him right in front of the whole school, the pain of everyone knowing that Cordelia had rejected him, the pain of seeing Willow look at him with pity in her eyes...Well it made him a little nuts. Just a little.
Maybe more than a little.
He’d just wanted a little revenge, that was all. He wanted Cordelia to know what it was like to bare your soul to someone and have them stomp on it, spit on it, and laugh as they walked away. And it just so happened that he had a harmonic frequency generator he’d been working on that could -- in theory -- produce the proper chemical reactions and hormonal secretions to induce what was essentially love. Or lust. Or sexually fascination. Whatever. It shouldn’t have mattered, because all he was going to do was set the frequency to Cordelia’s brainwaves and then wait for her to come crawling back to him. Then he could reject her, turn off the device, and walk away the victor.
It was just that he’d been a little distracted trying to get the personal defense system of the supercrystal to work, and hadn’t been paying attention to his super calculus numbers. Instead of affecting only Cordelia’s brainwaves, it had affected everyone’s brainwaves except Cordelia.
And by everyone, it was really everyone. For about twelve hours on the night of Valentine’s Day, Xander Harris was the confirmed sexual addiction of every single person in Sunnydale, male or female. It had taken all of his cunning, all of his desperation, all of his gadgets, and a whole lot of thinking about baseball to manage to get back to his lab and initiate the shutdown pulse that would turn everyone back to normal.
And if anyone claimed they’d seen Larry making out with him up against the lockers in the hallway outside of the computer lab, well that was just filthy rumor-mongering and was to be ignored.
So Xander vowed never to play around with harmonic frequency generators again. Watching Buffy throw herself at him in the school library had managed to shock him into reality, and playing with his friends mind’s like that was scary in the extreme. The fact that they had all gone back to trusting him so easily after his horrendous mistake was a testament to just how much he owed them.
What was even more amazing was that Cordelia had actually found the whole thing kind of sweet, and they’d gotten back together the very next day. Xander had insisted on giving her a full brain-scan with his newly-invented cranial-cloud-scanner before he would actually agree to it, however. He’d been sure that he’d broken something in Cordelia’s brain, if she was willing to take him back after what he’d done. Yet somehow she seemed genuinely interested in staying with him, and the two had gone back to dating openly. She even wore the supercrystal pendant, not that he ever got the personal forcefield to actually work.
He did manage to get it to phase out of reality a few times though, so that was a start.
Things continued to change a lot in those few months, and while the harmonic frequency generator had been his biggest personal blunder, his biggest failure had been in not perfecting the supercrystal’s defense shield in time. With Cordelia wearing the only prototype, Xander had not been totally inclined to take it from her so he could work on the defense programs imbedded within it. He’d been content to just let her wear it around school, beaming with pride at the impossibly huge jewel her boyfriend had given her.
There had been more important projects to work on. Besides, at best, the personal forcefield would have provided only a minute or two of personal protection. It wasn’t as important as creating streamlined user interfaces for the MCD Mark II’s. It wasn’t as important as perfecting his multi-spectral overlay goggles. And it definitely hadn’t been as important as getting an actual directed plasma-blade (he would scoff at anyone who called it a lightsaber) made for Buffy. In those days after Valentine’s, his biggest concern besides staying in Cordelia’s good graces had been getting Buffy kitted out with every advantage he could come up with, and he figured a nice plasma-blade would do wonders.
So he hadn’t worked on the personal shield. He could have made more pendants easily enough. The MCD Mark I and his 3D rendering program could handle that. It was just that it wasn’t really a priority. He didn’t think it was that necessary.
And then Ms. Calendar had been killed. If she’d had a pendant with a working forcefield, she might have managed to escape when Angel tracked her down. Those few minutes of protection might have been all she needed.
She was dead, and he was sure that he could have helped to prevent it. For a few days after, he barricaded himself in his dad’s garage (now his co-opted lab) and gotten to work on perfecting the forcefield generator within the supercrystal. When he finally did get it to work, it had fried off the first three layers of his skin and nearly compacted his entire body into gelatin.
It was his first real failure, but it was not his last. And it was the fact that he could so often fail that managed to keep him from completely freaking out about his rapidly expanding intellect and his ever-more-impossible range of inventions. It made it feel more real, somehow. Like he was still human.
His next failure had been in the weeks after Jenny’s death. He’d worked himself ragged trying to come up with a anti-linear delta-wave transducer. It was his theory that he could, under the right conditions, contact the dreams of someone in the past. They would have to be someone who exhibited abnormally high delta waves, but he had theorized -- correctly, it seemed -- that Buffy’s Slayer dreaming would make her delta wave functions much more pronounced than the average human. After a quick scan with the cranial-cloud, his assumption turned out to be right.
Continued in Installment 2