17Disclaimer: Nope, still not Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy or anyone else connected to the rights for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and/or its characters.
Warnings: moderate language, big flocking blocks of retrospective text.
Number: 6/7 (Part 2 to be up within a day or two of this)
Timeline: S3Ep13, "The Zeppo". As mentioned though, a lot of retrospective; while The Zeppo's events are pretty similar, the road to get there and the motivations along the way have morphed more than a little.
A/N: 'Weeks'. Did I say 'weeks'? Yeah, well maybe I underestimated the length of time it would take to bring this up to something less than gratuitous fluffy suckage. Truth be told, I still don't think it's all the way out – but I'm posting anyway just so I can say done with this and have it stop bugging me.
Kudos to agnar for picking the (relatively) major divergence-point for this fic - the rationale being that Amy deliberately appealed to an unsuitable goddess as a subtle form of vengeance on Xander for the blackmail. Thanks also to Starway Man (the new outlook getting Xander into trouble? yes, but the question is: how much trouble is it if he doesn't care?) for the critique.
Feedback: Yes please! Especially if there's more discrepancies you happen to spot...
Defaced, Derailed and Divergent
Epilogue: Quidiot… (Meh, who am I kidding – they're all idiots.)
—ox-oxo-xo—
(In a central reality a fair if nonsensical number of ways off to the Side and nearly two centuries into the future, a terrible and lonely immortal sat back and huffed with annoyance. Once again, it hadn't worked – though at least the problem was relatively straightforward this time.
In previous attempts it had taken a good bit of forensic effort to divine whether she'd hit another alternate reality, spawned another alternate with her interference, or her alterations had just made no difference in the end. That, or someone Else had just re-altered reality to fit the 'Central' norm at some point since. The Other leant in again, to check that last possibility against her own causal sequence – catalytic point of difference aside. But…no, there had only been the four obvious-from-an-Outside-glance paradigm shifts in her first decade of Buffy Summers' acquaintance – and Xander had always remained the goof, even (or especially) before Dawn's advent might have obscured any uncharacteristic seriousness on Xander's part to lackadaisical observers. That cut out both ineffectuality and corrective measures, leaving alternates of either type as the only option. Indeed, comparing those shifts against that of the derivative reality she'd just split off against its original alternate left only… one?
"What the…how did that even happen?" she muttered. "I figured three at least…!"
The Other looked closer over those causal frames and…
"…Huh. Guess that makes sense. Darn."
'Oh well,' she thought after a while, 'at least something useful came out of it.' Usually the Others of where/whenever she attempted to change either took steps to undo the alterations or block her influence (which usually happened if she targeted any of the Champions or other major players/pawns, or targeted the standard nexus-events where too may invested Others were watching too closely)… or just didn't notice. Or care, which did quite often happen – after all, just because she changed something, didn't mean it had to add up to anything substantial – or that the biggest, most enduring entities involved couldn't just shrug it off and try for the same result somewhere/when else.
This time, though? Almost immediately secure in the knowledge that she had hit an alternate reality – Amy Madison's calling on Aphrodite in her love spell instead of Diana serving as a rather large hint – the dimensionally-distant being had felt free to actually negotiate with four local Others (the Oracles counting as one dichotomous/dividual entity as far as she was concerned) and receive permission for her influence to play out unhindered. And that proved in turn that they could be negotiated with, under certain circumstances.
That was big. That was important. That meant that there might just be Others she could negotiate with in her own past, in order to avert her own future. She just needed to find the right circumstance, and the right motivations for the right Others to comply.
That bore further thought.
In the meantime, Willow Rosenberg took a voyeuristic closer look at what she had wrought, skimming over the course of sequential events to one of the few crimps in causality where her oldest friend's participation was relatively integral to the flow of realities, and therefore relatively easy to find…
And…she snorted. 'Yup, figured that wouldn't change…' It had after all been one of Their more consistent, not to mention blatant manipulations. Not that she could rationally blame Them for this one – when contingency became crisis, and all your standard resources were tied up elsewhere…)
Xander paused as he walked away from the boiler-room's just-closed door. He coulda sworn he'd just heard something growling, and a man screaming…?
"Oh yeah…" he whispered.
According to Willow's last update (relayed through Joyce only half an hour ago) before they were all too busy, the Hellmouth's current tetchiness had apparently been responsible for Oz's inner beast going haywire and coming out early – and with the Sisterhood of Jhe primed to invade the library that very evening, they must've needed to put him somewhere else. He guessed the next supply room over from the boiler had been the most convenient place they could think of to put him until apocalypse-time was up, it being underground with only one door out and all. 'Heh. Sucks to be Jackie-boy, I guess… Or Oz, come to think of it. Bet he won't be hungry tomorrow.'
…Of course now that Xander thought about it, that left them all with something of a problem. Namely, a massive propane firebomb with associated dynamite and detonator sitting in the same room as a boiler and a ravenous werewolf. Jack, he hadn't been worried about – it had just been a matter of reminding him that 'undead' didn't equate to 'immunity to dismemberment and/or incineration'. Oz was far less likely to care, or be capable of that kind of reasoning.
It should be fine, he mused. By the sounds coming from behind the door, the werewolf was having a hearty meal, and in sated wolfy fashion would probably prefer to curl up in a corner and sleep it off once he was done. But still, the smart thing to do would be to grab an airgun, head back in and tranq Oz ASAP so he could dismantle the damn thing.
On the plus side, it sounded like things were winding down upstairs by the stampede of retreating footsteps. On the minus side, the others were still probably up there – and the longer it took to retrieve the airgun from the book-cage, the longer Oz had to knock over that barrel. And while they'd arranged with Xander to come in for the clean-up, that didn't mean they would be at all pleased to see him turn up early. After all, his friends had gone to a fair amount of trouble keeping Xander sidelined for the violent parts of tonight's schedule…
"…Meh," he muttered, beating feet towards the library.
Oh well, if they got all shook up over him not sitting at home, twiddling his thumbs and watching TV with Joyce while waiting for their call, they could just live with it – which was more than they might get if Oz did knock that barrel the wrong way inside of the next few minutes.
In his own defence, Xander hadn't exactly planned for his night to go like this either. No, he hadn't pencilled in anything more action-packed than hopping in the car he'd helped his uncle fix up for a quick trip to the Bronze, maybe putting down a vamp if one happened to cross his path there, checking in with Jonno and maybe Scott Hope to see if they'd heard anything about one non-vamp (daylight) but still on-the-Scoob's-tallysheets-as-officially-dead Jack O'Toole… And wouldn't you know it, instead he got carjacked by the guy on his way out of the club.
The Xander of a year ago would've been freaking, sure. But this Xander had faced down and beaten Angelus and a lairful of fledglings via both the strategic and the tactical use of not caring, so he got the police officer to move along (read: get clear) and tagged along with O'Toole without undue fuss for long enough to find out that he was a zombie – a sentient one, unlike those ones that Nigerian mask had summoned, but still a zombie. There were four of them by the time he had confirmation, though. Still, ditching them while they were busting into a hardware store and banging on about cake of all things was just a matter of climbing in the car and driving off – no rush, he could tell Buffy and Giles about them later, when they weren't so busy stopping the latest apocalypse. It wasn't until after a random spot of vehicular demon-slaughter, dropping Faith off at her holy-crap-what-the-hell-is-she-doing-staying-in-that-shithole motel and relocating her shoulder, and calling Joyce for updates (of which there were none, except for the thing with Oz), that a passing thought about popping into the all-night bakery to pick up some snacks for the others later finally led him to make the mental connection between 'cake' and hardware supplies. And so the chase began, and had just ended three…no, four extra-dead zombies later.
Seriously, sometimes Xander wondered why the others even bothered trying to keep him safe when he was dragged back in so often. Maybe it was the stress or something, a ghostly shard of his Xander-Face whispered optimistically. Apocalypses were hectic things, after all.
He ignored that voice, knowing perfectly well the reason for his enforced fray-adjacence. It had been that way, to varying levels, for a year now – right now it was at a high-point, after tangling with that Council team that tried kidnapping Joyce for Buffy's birthday and coming off with some pretty nasty bruises in the process. (Yeah, so much for that potential 'apprenticeship'…) And while it often irked Xander to be treated like a special-needs kid whenever danger loomed larger than usual, Xander couldn't really blame them. Or at least, bring himself to care overmuch.
After all, he kinda did like the quiet when he could get it. Even if he wouldn't say it like that when it came up with the others – nowadays some of them tended to take that kind of statement the wrong way, when it was him saying it.
…
As the Sisterhood's footsteps receded, the tension drained away and the defenders slumped with relief and the onrush of exhaustion and forgotten pains that the adrenaline left behind. Faith straightened and exchanged a tired, exultant grin with Buffy – they'd both gone hard tonight, and Faith was willing to bet her sister-Slayer was feeling just as satisfied as she was, even if she was too uptight to admit it. Not like last night, in the cave system where the home-ground advantage went to the Jhe demons with the close walls, the poor light and so on. Not like earlier tonight, when Xander had come out of nowhere and run that bitch over in his car in the nick of time. Nope, this time Faith had got her Slay on right. And damn if it didn't feel even better than sex!
(Well…probably. She hadn't had the chance to go there before Xander had hightailed it, and far as Faith knew neither had anyone else. For all she knew, the guy mighta cooked his noodle two minutes in. Or wanted to cuddle or something afterwards. But still…yeah, even better than the mad-awesome sex she mighta missed out on but probably didn't.)
Faith's gaze flicked over the library, assessing the aftermath. Angel, darting a relieved glance over at his old squeeze before heading to the counter and the others as B followed. Off in the corner, Fang's buddy Doyle, shaking off his spikes and slumping against a wall to pant for breath. Giles and his squeeze picking themselves up to check over Willow and Amy – they musta all gone flat-out closing up the Hellmouth, by how wiped they were looking now. Faith shook off the twinge of odd-girl-out (not like she had the time for their crap anyway, even assuming they had the time for hers) and kept casing the wreckage. And wreckage was right – bookcases knocked over, railings lying on the floor, let's not forget the hole in the wall, or the puddle of canola oil in front of the door. And the books scattered round, and the she-demon bodies… Yeah, Faith did not want to clean up this shit.
Heh… Another job for the school janitors, she figured. Or Xander. Faith didn't rightly know why he'd gotten to slack off tonight, the others didn't like talking about it for whatever lame reason, but he could sure get his frigid ass over and make himself useful right about now—
Faith, Buffy and Angel tensed as they heard the sound of approaching footsteps, only one set this time. Then, as if summoned, Xander Harris stepped into the library.
He stared around at the carnage. The others stared at him.
After a moment, Xander shrugged, stepped carefully around the oil-slick they'd put in front of the entry to hamper the Sisterhood, and walked over to the bookcage, rummaging around in one of the cabinets and pulling out… an air-pistol and some darts? Then he turned round and walked right back out without a second glance.
Curious and eager to take the chance to avoid being asked to help clean up, Faith followed. So did Buffy, features set in a warring mixture of worry and anger, though not before wordlessly waving Angel off to keep an eye on the others. And Ms. Calender took up the tail, leaving the more experienced (and also more beat-up) mage to monitor the pair's protégés as they recovered from their magical exhaustion.
"Hang on, didn't you say something about Wolfy being down here?" Faith wondered as they came to a stop at a closed door in the basement. Xander cracked the door open, pointed the air-pistol's barrel in the gap and squeezed off three shots without replying.
"Next room over," Buffy muttered, barely audible over the thump of a dropping body behind the door. "He musta got out or something." Xander stepped through into what turned out to be the school's boiler-room. "But how Xander found that ouuu…"
Buffy drew to a horrified stop, gaping at the boiler-room's contents. Faith barely noticed, trapped in her own staggered scrutiny. Behind her, Jenny also came to a stop, and started quietly cussing in something Slavic-sounding. Xander ignored the trio of spectators, treading carefully around the unconscious werewolf and the extremely mangled (and…suspiciously bloodless, huh) remains of an apparently random human-shaped dead guy into the next room, and coming out with a hand truck which he trundled over to the big-ass barrel with the big-ass bomb sitting on top of it. He paused to pull the display from the sticks of dynamite (the display with three goddamn seconds left on it!), pocketing the electronics. Ms. C barely caught the inert bundle of explosives lobbed in her general direction.
"Would you mind taking care of Oz?" the brunet asked the Slayers. "I'll have to go stash the barrel somewhere – Zombie Jack over there," he nodded to the dead guy, "didn't exactly buy his cake-mix over the counter."
Faith shook herself and went to grab Oz by the tail-end. Buffy followed in a daze and got the head as Xander carted the barrel towards the entrance they'd come in. It was as they began dragging Oz's hairy ass back into the room he'd got out of that Buffy seemed to snap out of it with a whispered 'dammit!' and a long sigh.
"…That's it," the elder Slayer told Faith. "First chance I get, I'm cluing you in on all things Xander."
Faith tried not to perk up at that apparent non-sequitur, and mostly succeeded. Just 'cause she wasn't really interested in most of their crap, didn't mean it wasn't nice of them to finally get round to offering. And anyway, this was a little different – worth pushing a bit. "If you say so. What's wrong with right now, then?"
The puzzle that was Xander Harris had been just one of a whole ton of things they'd not gone over, but he was a pretty damn big one – and unlike some of the other things, it was one that not even the Watcher had more than hinted at. In fact, a lot of what she knew about Xander had actually come from Linda, back before Kakistos had…she shook herself again. Lady Linda had stuck to generalities until her activation as the newest Slayer back in late July last year, but as they had begun mixing it with Kakistos's goons on her night-time patrols Linda had started going over the lay of the land in Sunnyhell. Just in case, she'd told her Slayer – and dammit, she'd been right… Xander was actually kinda cool on paper, for the little that was known about him – a random Joe Sixpack who had somehow twinned the Slayer line in the first place, but was still a goofball until…something happened that had made him turn around, kill Angel's old running buddies and then storm his lair and capture Angelus all by himself.
In reality, he'd turned out to be just as much a letdown as the others. Nothing against the guy really, at least he wasn't a passive-aggressive bitch like Red and didn't follow her round drooling. But in the flesh, Xander wasn't much to look at. Just some guy who'd apparently done all this awesome stuff, but still got babysat by everyone else and wasn't allowed to do anything apart from help with the books, fetch the doughnuts and come up with the occasional tactic or tool (which to be fair to him, did tend to work pretty good – the oil upstairs, that had been one of his ideas). Shit, Willow and Amy did more dangerous crap than he did. And this despite Buffy's boytoy training him sometimes when he popped up from L.A. to visit her.
On the face of it, someone not worth her time, or all the effort they took to keep the guy in the loop… right up until he pulled exactly this kinda shit, apparently. What the hell was up with that?
Huh. Maybe it wasn't a non-sequitur.
Buffy sighed again after a long silence, eyes looking anywhere but at Faith. "Yeah, guess you got a point…" They dropped Oz in the corner, and B looked over at her, finally meeting her gaze as the hand-truck rattled in the background. "All that trouble to keep Xander out of it, and he still got dragged in…" she trailed off with a shiver, "and saved us all while he was at it. Again."
Faith shrugged. By the size of that bomb, yeah… he probably had. Which made her feel a little less sanguine about not going after his cherry a bit harder. She owed him a big one now, and a quick roll in the motel bed would've fit the bill nicely.
"This just keeps happening, you know? That's why we didn't just not say anything to him about tonight, 'cause he deserves to know in case, well, this… that, and he wouldn't freak like Mom would."
This was met with an incredulous stare. B's mom was one awesome woman, reminded her a lot of Linda. For a standard over-protective mom-figure, she'd still been pretty damn good about letting Buffy do what she had to – hell, she seemed to think sometimes they could actually win the whole damned war (heh, punny) and settle down some day. Sure, she mainly approved of Faith because she helped keep her own daughter alive, but Faith could dig that. It wasn't like she looked at her and saw someone to do the Slaying while Buffy went off and had a life, or treated her like Buffy Jr.. If there was one of this motley crew that wasn't a disappointment, it had to be Mrs. S – the most annoying thing about her was her constant attempts to persuade Faith to go back to school, and even that was because she didn't want to think of Faith not living long enough for that crap to matter. Honestly, Faith had begun thinking about getting her G.E.D. or something just to shut her up.
"And she would," Buffy asserted. "She's my mom. Moms are…w-well, they're meant to do that." Faith bristled, unnoticed by Buffy who was looking off towards the door that Xander had retreated through with the barrel. "Anyway… we still forget sometimes. Just because we keep people out of all this – doesn't mean the bad guys do. Xander lost his parents that way."
"Yeah?" That was a given, what with Xander living with Buffy and her mom. But hey, she seemed to be going somewhere with this. …Ah oh, his mom was who B was talking about, nothing about Faith's. Faith calmed down a bit, enough to look nonchalant when her sister-Slayer zeroed back in on her.
"Well…" Buffy dropped her voice a little, and leaned in with a conspiratorial smirk like she wore sometimes when she mentioned one of the gang's funnier pre-Faith episodes in passing. "Cordelia dumped him on Valentine's Day back in junior year, and Xander did something really stupid…"
And so Faith listened raptly as Buffy quietly ran over the whole thing, while the gang set about cleaning up the library – at least, as far as Giles felt they needed to. Which wasn't as bad as Faith had worried about. The demons' bodies were already desiccating, and would probably be gone completely by morning. It was mainly just a matter of digging out and squaring away any of Giles' special books, weapons and magical paraphernalia – the rest could be left to the janitors, and more likely the repair crew they'd have to call in to fix up the rest of the library.
Her conclusion? This was exactly why she felt no shame about 'missing out' on school. Bitches like that, like Buffy had been and Cordelia still mostly was, were behind a lot of it. That and the gorillas. And the teachers. And the early mornings.
But Buffy didn't stop there, either. Oh no – she did exactly as promised, and proceeded to clue Faith in on what seemed like all things related to her best friend Xander Harris.
Following Xander's move into the Summers' household, it would have been an obvious surmise that one Buffy Summers would be uncomfortable over this change of circumstances.
And they would have been right. As far as Xander living with her was concerned, it was wrong on so many levels. Though no offence to the guy! It wasn't like he could help it. Where else could he go, anyway?
'Fostered, somewhere else!' would have been the go-to answer, usually. Luckily for Buffy, she hadn't had the emotional run-up to raise a stink over it before her mom sat her down the next day and led her through the logic in a little more detail. Sure, being shuffled off to a nice home outside of Sunnydale would've made him safer from undead evil, but right now Xander needed to be saved from himself more than anything else.
(For a little while it had looked like he might be fostered out anyway, but Mom and Giles and Ms. Calender had put their heads together with some lawyer-y type Giles' usual lawyer had referred him to and kept the court tied up over it for a few months until their senior year started up. After that, the judge conceded there wasn't really a point trying to get him elsewhere when he was obviously fine where he was and Xander would just switch schools back again in a few more months when he hit eighteen if he was moved. In other words: not worth the extra litigation. Buffy had heard Mom muttering afterwards about how it still shouldn't have been that easy, but by that point she just shrugged it off as more Sunnydale civic incompetence.)
But still… It was going to be awkward! Here was the guy who'd had the blatant crush on her, and who she wasn't exactly sure still didn't – Buffy could just see him moping round the house, getting in the way, 'accidentally' interrupting her in her private moments alone or with Angel or with her mom… And that was even before you counted the fact that she really didn't know him that well! Ampata (or rather, the D.O.A. exchange student) was one thing – he'd just have been there for a couple weeks, and everyone else was doing that at the time anyway, and it was normal. But Xander… Well, there was history, and feelings involved. Not like those feelings, definitely not! Mainly guilt. Guilt and feeling uneasy about a Xander-shaped person that didn't act like Xander.
As it turned out, it was awkward. Just not awkward in the ways Buffy had worried about.
For starters, while she technically saw him a lot, it was a lot less than it could've been. Mom had not let Xander sit idle for a minute if she could help it – and she certainly could help it, what with him being there front-and-centre. When he wasn't at school, he was out getting work experience on building sites and in warehouses and factories and at his drunken uncle's workshop and at Mom's gallery. Or doing odd-jobs like gardening or cleaning gutters around the neighbourhood, along with the neighbourhood where he lived before – the same jobs it turned out he'd got all his 'pocket-money' from since junior high. Or after-school sessions in shop class for extra credit. Or off with Giles, slowly chewing his way through that big old 'Vampyr' book and the 'Slayer's Handbook' and a bunch of other books Giles had long ago given up on getting Buffy to study. Or with Mom, getting his maths up to speed. Or even occasionally with Angel (at least once he'd healed up and Angel had dealt with that poltergeist), trying to dig up stuff on how vampires actually thought and fought, and what tools and weapons really worked when it came to taking them down.
She wouldn't have believed it before seeing it, but Buffy actually saw Oz as much as she saw Xander. Sure, that was partly because Willow tended to hang out at her house a little more than usual to see Xander (or at least try, what with him being so busy), but he almost never Bronze'd any more and only rarely patrolled with them. She saw him in the morning (sometimes – he'd spent some early mornings on building sites, though not before sunrise where he could avoid it). Sometimes she did homework with him (though again, not often). They'd usually have dinner with her mom, though far from always. And sometimes, if he was still up when she got home from patrols or the Bronze, she'd look in on him. And outside of school, that was pretty much it.
Needless to say, that didn't exactly help with the trust issues.
Mom had asked her how she was getting along with him, after the whole thing with the Black Lagoon monsters and the insane swim-team coach (and the surprisingly yummy Speedo moment which shall never again be mentioned, ever…mainly because Xander never really reacted to good wholesome teasing any more). She'd sighed at Buffy's frustrated answer, and explained that Xander would probably never go to college – not because of bad marks or anything, but simply because he wouldn't be able to afford it. He was so busy getting work experience now so that he'd be able to line up a decent job and a good place to live as soon as he graduated. Apparently Mom and Xander had agreed on construction as the way to go, with a sideline in mechanics if he could swing it; builders in Sunnydale were never going to go hungry for lack of work, and both fields could help a lot on the support-side of the nightly fight.
But mainly it was to keep him busy, with no time to get depressed and sit around doing nothing. Her mom said that apathy was something they had to watch out for, in cases like Xander's.
Buffy hated to think about that. It made her remember just how badly she'd judged him…and again, how little she actually knew him.
—ox-oxo-xo—
By comparison, spending a month of the summer break in L.A. with her dad had been great. Dad was pretty busy with his job a lot of the time, and there was excitement about a possible promotion to the company's Spanish branch, but still. Kicking back and relaxing, some leisurely shopping – just what the doctor ordered. In the last week down there, Angel had even showed up on business! And sure, the first place he took her to was some abandoned hotel where the two of them had to summon and electrocute a tentacle-demon (ewww), and sure, she hadn't been particularly impressed about that – but there was just something about a duffel-bag full of cash that made her cheer up no end.
Interesting fact that she hadn't known about until the second place he took her: vampires could eat if they wanted to. They just didn't get any nutritional value or full tummy-type satisfaction out of it. Another interesting fact: Angel could drive, and bought a big black convertible to take her driving through the city. Sure, the theme was a little cliqué, but…well, it wasn't like she'd expected any different. (And at least he didn't get a hearse… which did lead to a good all-round chuckle a few months later, when he did get a hearse for daytime travel in emergencies.)
Anyway, good times and smoochy fun were had by all (including her dad with his secretary, if she read the signs right…ewww). Buffy went back to Sunnydale feeling a lot less stressed about her life – and also feeling a lot less like a massive bitch unlike last time she'd stayed with her dad – while Angel planned to stay around in L.A. for another week to finish up the rest of his business. Catching up with Willow and Oz was fun, though she saw Xander even less with the two part-time summer jobs he was working.
Five days later, Angel returned. He didn't bring good news with him.
Kendra was dead. And he was relocating to L.A..
The night after Hank Summers had used a day off from packing for Madrid to drive his daughter back to Sunnydale, Angel had run into a half-demon (and someone had sex with a demon? Ewww!) called Doyle, who apparently got visions like her rare slayer-dreams – only a lot more clearly and painfully, so she was told. Doyle's latest vision had pointed him in the direction of Kendra and her Watcher, who were investigating a homeless shelter in the slums which appeared to be connected to a rash of elderly amnesiacs who came out of nowhere. The shelter turned out to house a pocket hell-dimension of all things, where runaways were lured in and abducted to work as slaves, only to be spat out hours later as broken old people.
Kendra and Zabuto had been very reluctant to let a vampire and a half-Brachen demon help. But with the revelation of Doyle's visions, they eventually relented. The Watcher and the seer had guarded the hell-dimension's entrance while Kendra and Angel went in to rescue who they could. And they'd done pretty well, retrieving almost every one of the slaves there. Angel had boosted each rescuee up through the portal while Kendra held off the demonic slavers, jumping up and out at her insistence once the ex-slaves they'd liberated were all through.
She'd said she would follow. She hadn't. And only a couple seconds after Angel's exit, the portal had closed. Whether Kendra had been killed down there or had won and lived out her natural lifespan trapped away from the world, Giles had nonetheless got a courtesy-call from Zabuto a week later saying that the next Slayer had been activated.
That was depressing. But Angel's next bit of news was more personal, and thus felt worse – or at least, felt bad in a more…concrete sort of way. Angel had been making some noise about chasing up underworld connections outside of Sunnydale, trying to develop better intelligence and resources (apparently it was Giles' and Xander's brainchild, though Angel was all in favour of it). She'd known that the legwork for that was some of the 'business' Angel had come to L.A. to do. Buffy had thought Angel would stay based in Sunnydale, and make business trips to other places. She had even speculated about coming with him on said trips sometimes, and he hadn't said anything against it at the time.
Meeting Doyle, and losing Kendra, had changed that. Oh, and there was some 'Balance demon' called Whistler mixed up in there too. But the important thing was that Angel's mission had moved on. Now he was planning to shift to L.A. and work from there. Tentative plans about becoming a private eye for the supernatural had been mentioned, which would help with the good fight. Promises to visit…ahem, investigate Sunnydale as often as he could had been made. It would almost be like he'd never left, given that Angel had never really been round that much to begin with.
Thinking about it like that helped a little, until he went back to L.A..
And Angel was gone. And Daddy was gone. To Los Angeles and Madrid respectively, but still gone.
Add that to the whole Kendra thing? Yeah, that just flat-out sucked. Big time.
Later, Buffy would half-heartedly try to tack justifications onto the facts (mainly for Willow's benefit – though she might as well not have bothered, since Willow wasn't in the mood to listen to them). Giles wouldn't understand, and he was tied up with Ms. Calender a lot of the time anyway. Oz wouldn't care too much one way or the other, what with it having nothing to do with Willow. Mom was…well, she tried to help, but in some ways she didn't understand either – and, like Ms. Calender would have, had a hard time not being visibly relieved about Angel putting more distance between them. Cordelia was on vacation, and wouldn't care anyway. Jonathan might have been read in after the Swim Team thing (at Xander's insistence – more of the 'intelligence gathering' kick, only with an occasional bonus to research that had surprisingly helped a lot with that demon-statue just a few weeks later), but she wasn't going anywhere near there on something this personal. Amy too was someone Buffy had trust issues with, not just for the Love Spell gone wrong but also for doing something bad enough for Xander to blackmail her into doing the Love Spell in the first place.
(It was a couple months later that Amy herself told Buffy what she'd actually done to get blackmailed. Buffy had been disapproving, but privately conceded that she'd have been tempted to do the same if she could.)
And Willow… Willow's focus was elsewhere right now – as it should be, what with her increasingly serious relationship and trying to get Xander back to normal. It wasn't that she didn't try helping too – and on the 'Dad in Spain' issue it was much appreciated, because Willow did have the absentee parents and was thus a certified specialist on the subject. But her encouragement about how it would all turn out all right with Angel in the end… For some reason, it rang hollow in her ears now that he'd moved away. Like Willow didn't really have any reason to believe it would all be okay, and she was just saying it because it was what she thought Buffy wanted to hear… or maybe, considering what her approach on the new Xander looked like, because she'd decided that It Had To Be So no matter what evidence there was against it.
Maybe that was why, she thought later. Willow was great at encouragement. But she wasn't so great at saying what just needed to be said, especially when other people didn't want to hear it.
Or maybe it was because Buffy felt the need to talk to someone who'd also finally had to drop their delusions about everything being all right one day. L.A. had been great, just the getaway she'd needed, but the reality was that Buffy and Angel had never really left that 'holding pattern' relationship they'd been in since his return. It was an awkward dance, where every move they made had to hover in the gap between too close for comfort and too far for satisfaction, each of them battling to balance two opposing sets of instincts. And if L.A. was a step forward, and Angel spending lots of time in L.A. meant a step back, then Angel staying there was two steps back. And it wasn't a measured step either, it was the two of them holding onto each other by the tips of their fingers and trying not to fall over and/or fly off. She didn't intend to let go, but as Buffy was reluctantly coming to realise even then, that didn't mean it wouldn't eventually happen anyway no matter how she tried to delay the inevitable.
Or maybe after (at least kinda) losing three people in some way close to her, some masochistic, missing tooth-prodding part of her wanted to see once and for all if it was actually four people she'd lost.
Or maybe misery just loved company, and Xander was the closest logical thing to like-minded misery that she could identify at the time. That was the one she went with in the end, the one for more-or-less-public consumption.
—ox-oxo-xo—
Whatever the reason, one late evening in mid-August found Buffy and Xander sitting in the Summers' basement, him on his bed in the trackpants and tee he slept in despite the summer heat, her on a chair in the outfit she'd patrolled in. He had work in the morning, and looked as tired as she felt. Though these days, he always looked tired. Mom really was pushing him hard.
They sat, her trying not to fidget as she searched for the courage to speak, him staring blandly in her general direction, looking like he could do this all night. But strangely, it was Xander who first spoke.
"I do miss them, sometimes. A lot of it wasn't great… But, they were there. They tried, most of the time. Didn't work out much – mighta been better off if they separated like yours did." He frowned a little in thought, regarding Buffy levelly. "Half the time, I was the only thing keeping them together. The other half, I was the thing that wrecked their lives. Either way… I was there, and they were there. It was a…constant. A fact of life…" Xander trailed off with a slight shrug, "you know, till it wasn't."
Buffy stared at him, wide-eyed. Not because he'd already known what was going on in her life, Mom would have filled him in on what she knew. No, because that was quite possibly the most personal thing he'd ever actually said about himself to her in the history of…ever, if you didn't count that Face monologue she'd managed to catch maybe half of through all the slurring and the stream-of-consciousness rambling. Actually, that was pretty much the most he'd said to her in one go about anything since…
Since she'd started avoiding him, to be totally honest.
Oh, it wasn't blatant or anything. Blatant being Cordelia, who had rigorously stuck to her original plan of erasing his presence from her mind outside of absolute emergencies after a single false start. Basically, as far as Cordelia was concerned they were 'not talking', taken to the logical Marcie-style conclusion; for his part Xander seemed to take that as her prerogative without any fuss other than the odd sad look that faded in the blink of an eye.
For Buffy it was just, they never really talked about anything that wasn't slaying, or occasionally school. He'd sound like the old Xander, sometimes, in the turn of phrase. But there were no funny anecdotes, no gratuitous innuendos, no debating over which movie was better, nothing normal. That strange, silent figure wasn't her Xander, wasn't the annoying goof she remembered. Jokes fell flat, cajoling went without response beyond the odd smirk or eye-roll. The ways she talked to him, the ways she related to him just didn't work any more. And honestly, it creeped her the hell out!
And the creepiest thing? That little glint of understanding in his eyes when she made her excuses and retreated, the sorrow that flashed past and was gone in the space of a second.
Xander knew she was avoiding him. Knew, and understood, and…
Buffy blinked.
Somehow, that had never really sunk in before.
It wasn't so obvious any more, but… He cared. He still cared.
Enough to go digging through the Watchers' diaries, searching for ideas to make her patrols easier, or give her and the other patrol-goers better tools to use. (Spritzer bottles, for example – not so much her thing, but surprisingly useful for the others when vamps charged at them.) Enough to bring sweet baked goods to research sessions, often out of his own pocket, and with an almost uncanny knack for picking everyone's current cravings with only minimal cues. Enough to spend spare minutes between projects in shop class crafting wooden crosses, or spend a spare afternoon machining four dozen stakes – followed by another afternoon machining a dozen screwdriver-style pencil-handles after she found out that a good-quality #2 was actually pretty effective on vampires if you didn't hit bone. Enough to sit down with Mom, the washer's instruction manual and her ruined clothes to find out what could actually be salvaged. (MSG powder for blood, grass-stains and most types of demonic goo – who knew?)
He cared. Just, not enough to reassure his friends by 'putting on a happy face' to deal with them.
Only… Was that really a bad thing? Half the point of him living here was to see him get better – how would they know he was better if was constantly pretending to be happy for everyone's peace of mind? Besides, after everything he'd gone through, how could he expect that to work anyway—?
…Oh. Now she felt a little stupid.
He wasn't doing it because no-one would buy it if he tried – including Buffy. Acting like he was the Xander she thought she knew was never going to work – and getting the wiggins when she failed after trying it anyway was…yeah, pretty much her own fault. Like trying to reason with Ford when he was simply out of his mind. Or treating Angelus like he was still Angel. Her memory of who they were just didn't match the reality any more, and that was that. (Stupid 20-20 hindsight…) So now the trick was working out how to deal with this new, strange Xander.
Xander stared off past her, once more doing his statue impersonation as she furiously thought through the turns.
Well… 6th-Grade Ford was not really someone she'd actually known that much about. When he'd come to Sunnydale, she could admit now that he'd more been a symbol of normal, meaningless times of innocence than anything else. But she liked to think 6th-Grade Ford wouldn't have tried feeding a roomful of goth kids to a pack of vampires, let alone betray a girl with a silly crush a year below him to one of them in exchange for being turned. Lesson: Brain-Tumour Ford was different to 6th-Grade Ford. Likewise, Angel would not have teamed up with the Judge, turned Theresa or tainted her memory of her first time like Angelus had – Soulless Angelus was different to Souled Angel. Both were different to what they were, and their actions proved it. Now apply that to Xander…
Face-Xander hadn't walked into a big vampire lair and snatched the master vamp Angelus. But he had snatched Angel and got him to lead the way to The Master's lair. (Yes, Buffy had eventually got the full story out of Angel… and forgiven him after the obligatory round of grovelling and gifts. Water under the bridge, and he'd been doing better since then – though that really did not make her feel better about using Xander to make Angel jealous. She was seriously going to make that up to him one of these days…)
He'd staked Jesse, attached himself to her night-time hunts and dragged Willow with him, pulled ridiculous heroics to try saving people he didn't even like (Cordelia, for instance), broke into an army barracks to steal her Best Birthday Present Ever, not only rejected every last love-spelled woman who'd come onto him but tried to let them down gently when he could, did his level best to keep his friends cheerful and happy in their fight with jokes and 'duh' moments and mood-breaking… Add all that up, even with the low-grade obsession and the annoyance-value and the odd act of true brain-dead stupidity, and what it added up to was a guy who was well worth knowing.
Faceless-Xander… still attached himself to her night-life (if not most of her hunts any more, at everyone's insistence) and had now dragged Jonathan in with him. He still went to great lengths to try saving people he didn't like (the Swim Team). He still kept up the effort to find better weapons for them all to use. He…really, as far as actions went – this Xander wasn't all that different. He goofed off and screwed up less, was more remote and less warm and funny now – but he still cared, and would still do almost anything for his people.
So it boiled down to here and now. If this was Face-Xander, he'd be trying to cheer Buffy up, cracking a joke or two to take out the sting of getting serious, possibly giving her a pep-talk of some kind. But this was Faceless-Xander, so that wasn't what he did.
No, she finally realised. Instead, having figured that it was going to be uncomfortably personal – he went first.
Tit-for-tat, quid pro quo, show him hers because he showed his. Trust in truth. Trust given for trust received. Even if he had to sit there for…yeesh, ten minutes? waiting for her to work out what he was getting at.
This…was promising. This, she might be able to work with.
So, they talked. Or possibly Talked.
Buffy started with how she was the apple of her dad's eye, until the Vampire Slayer thing happened and he pretty much dumped her in the loony bin – only to pretend nothing had changed once she was out. (That one was surprisingly easy to tell, maybe because Mom had already spilled on that one – and then, typically for both versions of Xander, he'd sat on that knowledge and said not a peep.) Then Xander confessed that there really had been feelings for Cordelia – and not just for the obvious lusty reasons, but because she had the bravery and the mental honesty to admit to herself that there was something wrong with Sunnydale's night-life and confront it when she had to…and also, because they'd liked arguing with each other as a form of venting and to keep their tongues sharp.
Heartened and hoping Xander would react the right way, Buffy veered into darker waters and responded by admitting to a sense of deep-seated shame in being unable, in her heart of hearts, to truly separate Angelus from Angel and treat him like the inhuman monster he was.
Xander chewed that over for a couple minutes, gaze distant and preoccupied as she tried her very best not to hurry him up. And then wonder of wonders: he reminded her that Angelus had all of Angel's memories, as well as over a century in luring and playing with his victims. The way he put it, Angelus basically had the cheat-sheet on all things Buffy from the get-go, and used it to the fullest to keep her off-balance, unable to respond, and driving wedges between her and those close to her. Xander had been all kinds of not-happy to see him get away from her in the mall with nothing but bruises and sore gonads, but at least he understood that she'd been played by a master of the mindscrew. And he reassured her that while it could've gone on much longer and got much worse, the fact was: it hadn't.
It was at that point that she went over and hugged the stuffing out of him. The pep-talk might not have been delivered in the traditional Xander style – if anything, it was more like Giles' style – but the Xander effectiveness was still right there and she'd never been more thankful for that.
For his next go, he admitted that he remembered everything from the hyena possession. She wasn't exactly surprised to hear it – there'd been enough clues left after all, especially during the whole Werewolf thing; it had just gone unremarked because…well. The reason he gave was only a bit of a surprise when she thought about it: because the Hyena had spilled with Xander knowing about Willow's long-standing crush on him. 'Forgetting' had let her repress the harsh words, and repress the fact that he was less ignorant about her feelings than he'd let on. Buffy was surprised to not be listed as another reason, but decided to come back to that later.
Instead, she told him about one Oliver Pike and how Xander reminded her a lot of him sometimes. Then he told her about how Jesse had been bumped from behind onto the stake Xander had been holding to his chest – and didn't know to this day whether he could have gone through with the deed and staked him deliberately. Then they compared feelings between him 'accidentally' staking Jesse and her deliberately staking Ford, going on to trade trivia about their departed friends for nearly another hour before Mom poked her head in and told them to go to bed.
That night, as an exhausted Xander slept in the basement (and was almost late to work the next morning), a stunned Buffy stared at the ceiling in her room, marvelling over what had just come to pass.
"So that's what a 'Deep and Meaningful' is…" She'd known about them, she'd even thought she had them before, but… "Wow."
In the space of less than two hours, Buffy felt like they'd gone from bare acquaintances in all but name, to…
Not best friends, not yet. It'd take a few more D&M's like that one. But there was going to be at least another one if she had anything to say about it, and she was actually looking forward to it.
After maybe half an hour the library was cleaned up enough to cover their asses, so everyone split. Oz was retrieved, chained up and tossed in his van, which Amy drove as Willow watched over her boytoy; that trio would be staying at Willow's tonight. Giles and Calender headed back for Giles' apartment. Angel and Doyle climbed back in Angel's car…read: hearse (snerk) for the drive back to L.A. – Angel driving back this time, given that he'd been shut away in the coffin for the daytime trip to Sunnydale, with his seer guy driving them down despite the vision-headache.
Normally Faith would have just headed back for her flop. But Buffy was still talking, so she tagged along with her and Xander in his car as he drove them toward the Summers' place. She noticed Buffy sometimes glanced over at him, like she was waiting for him to give some signal that she was getting too personal – and seriously he woulda been justified, it was starting to get pretty damn personal here even if B was still kinda skirting round the gratuitously embarrassing shit.
But nope, the guy just kept his eyes on the road and let his friend spill his secrets.
Seriously, that was weird.
Ending A/N: Quick break here – nothing like a 20K-chapter to kill off brain-cells, so a good place to leave it. Next one will be up in a day…or two. Definitely not weeks or months.