Fanfiction: Five by Three
Xander returns to consciousness like Bruce Willis kicking in a door in some third-sequel action movie. Considering the rambling, rocky path he took to sleep the night before (more like three hours ago), he hoped for a couple more hours of cottony-brained drifting. Smell of coffee, close by. Soft click of the door latch. A presence. Some part of his mind registers these and rockets him out of the weirdass Windsor McCay rarebit-fiend dreamland he dropped into sometime around dawn.
Faith seats herself on the bed as his eyes fly open. A mug of coffee is cradled in her hands. “I thought I’d have more of a struggle than this, getting you up,” she says.
“Time is it?”
“Nine. I let you have an extra hour.”
“Extra? I don’t have to be anywhere, why—”
“You need to get on track, or you’ll never have your nights back.”
Xander shoves himself upright and reaches for the coffee. “Thanks, Faith.”
She pulls the mug back. “The fuck you think I am, your servant? This is mine.”
He blinks. “Shit. Sorry. Got used to people waiting on me hand and foot in the hospital.”
Right answer, apparently. She proffers the mug again.
“No, you.”
“I brought it for you, loosah, take it.” She reaches for a matching mug on the bedside table. “Look, I know you’ve been living the domestic life for, what, a couple of years? I don’t know what your deal was with Anya, but you don’t want to be taking me for granted.”
“Sorry again. It’s hard to think. Not much sleep last night.” He works on the coffee, made exactly as he likes it, like some entirely different category of beverage from the hospital coffee.
“I know. Xander, about last night.” Faith pins him in her gaze, pauses to let this sink in. “You touch me like that again — without seeing me, without it having anything to do with me — and your next time is your last time.”
His heart seems to do a fast freefall into the pit of his stomach. Xander opens his mouth for his third apology of the morning, then closes it.
“It’s no worse than what I did to you that first time we screwed,” she says, and he knows he flinches. “Didn’t particularly care to see who you were. You were there, which was pretty much my only requirement. So last night I owed you one. But I didn’t think that’s what we were doing anymore.”
Xander rubs a hand over his face, then lets them drop into his lap. “I’ve already used up ‘sorry’ this morning. I know. I — It was a shitty thing to do.” Other words back up behind those: I was tired, I was scared, some dark worries I can’t even name crouching back there in my head. No way he is letting any of them out — nothing but lame excuses. He reaches for her hand, but she keeps them both cupped around her coffee mug. Xander nearly pulls back, but instead he puts his hand on her forearm. “I am sorry. Come on — sit up here with me for a minute.”
Faith hesitates, then lets him draw her to the head of the bed. He doesn’t speak, though, or try to justify himself, as she expected. Xander just looks at her. It’s more than that: he sees her, takes her in. Time seems to stretch itself out and he shows no sign of tiring of her; it’s hard for Faith to bear. She puts her coffee cup on the nightstand and leans toward him for a kiss. He raises his hand to her face, feathers his fingertips across her lips.
“Not yet,” he says. “Let me look.” His touch now accompanying his gaze. His fingers find the places that dimple when she gets that extra-wicked grin, and he smiles.
She squelches the urge to jump to her feet with a curse or a joking insult, and suddenly, she is on the other side. Her terror of being seen for who she is passes, and she relaxes into his attention. It’s then that they melt toward each other, exchange one slow, lazy kiss.
When they part, Faith’s heart is galloping. “How’s the leg this morning?” she asks.
“It aches,” he tells her. “It’s worse at night, but I’m still feeling it.”
“You keeping up with your pain meds?”
“I’ve been spacing it out some. Don’t want to end up in all the gossip columns when I skulk into the Betty Ford.”
“Talk to Dr. Michaels about all that. I called and he’s working you in today, 2:30.” God, this sounds so domestic. Was this the kind of talk that filled his and Anya’s life together? How’d you sleep, here’s today’s schedule, don’t forget to stop by the packie on the way home from work. Abruptly she stands. “Anything you need before I head back downstairs?”
“About six more hours of sleep. Failing that, a clean towel and a potential-free bathroom.”
“That’s one dream I think I can make come true.” She swats his good leg. “C’mon. Up.” Faith collects the empty mugs and leaves Xander to rise as she heads down the hall to hammer on the bathroom door.
Xander’s appointment with Michaels is just full of good news. Xander is officially one of his quickest healers ever, and he can start returning to his usual activities if he takes it slow. Certain amount of pain: normal. Take the meds as directed, it won’t turn him into Fuckhead in Jesus’ Son. (Not a direct quote, but the basic idea.) And Michaels is certain he left nothing behind when he removed the knife in surgery, no fragments.
“I kept that bad boy for my collection,” he tells Xander and Faith. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Anyway, the blade’s perfect, not even a nick.” He goes on to explain the healing process, pain and unusual sensations. Again, Xander is Normal Guy.
“Do an X-Ray,” Faith says. Michaels seems the slightest bit less enchanted with her than he was in the hospital. “Humor us, put our minds at ease.”
Michaels relents, orders the X-Ray. The result, shockingly enough: normal.
As they leave his office, Xander now graduated to a cane, Faith says, “Did that help settle your mind?”
“Yeah,” he says. Sounds like a lie to him. He watches her for a reaction, but there’s nothing out of the ordinary. His response must have struck her as, well, normal.
His mind seems like it’s elsewhere as Faith aims the car back toward Revello. She’s been trying to figure out this mood, which hasn’t lifted with the good word from Dr. Michaels. “So this collection of Michaels’ — what do you think it is?”
“What?”
“He said he kept the knife for his collection. You think he has a hard-on for bright, shiny blades, being a surgeon and all? Or maybe he keeps all the weird stuff he’s removed from people over the years. Y’know, lost sex toys, shivs, bezoars….” She suddenly realizes she’s the Xander — the motor-mouth seventeen-year-old version she remembers, anyway. Yammering away in hopes of some kind of response, even if it’s shut the fuck up.
“Oh.” A pause until he senses she’s waiting. “I don’t know.”
Way to encourage the unaccustomed prattle for the sake of cheering you up, chief. She falls silent for the rest of the drive home, and he seems to like it just fine.
There’s an unfamiliar car outside Buffy’s house when she turns onto Revello. “Company,” she says.
“No,” Xander says in a reckless burst of chatter. “That’s Giles’ car.”
She hits the gas and bangs a left at the next cross street.
“Hey, what’s the deal?”
“Why rush back? We’ve got an excuse to be out of the Summers Youth Hostel for a while. It’d be criminal to waste it. Why don’t we head up to the local park ‘n’ pet, do a little scoopin’?”
“Scooping? Do you mind translating?” Something, anyway. At least he’s talking to her instead of beaming faint messages from Planet Distracto.
“Christ, Xander, what do couples do at makeout spots?”
“Nothing, in broad daylight.”
“Fine. Don’t think outside the box. Let’s go tank up on espressos then.”
“Faith, why don’t you want to see Giles?”
“You really have to ask me that? How about this? He’s the biggest reminder of the fuck-up I was. In the The Watchers’ Council Book of Disappointing Slayers, I’m probably Top 10 material. Clue up, Xander. I’m scared.”
“Running away from a confrontation isn’t like you.”
“You ever stop and think maybe my big life ambition is to be not like me?” She finds an empty space two doors down from the espresso place and whips into it. “It’s the only goal I’ve ever had that everybody I know can get behind.” Faith propels herself from the car and waits on the sidewalk, turning to face the other way. Though it’s less of a production getting out with a cane than with the crutches, it still takes Xander a minute.
“I’d be disappointed if you succeeded,” he says quietly.
Her eyes sting and blur, which pisses her off. Faith walks ahead of him; she tells herself it’s so she can catch the door for him. “I’m buyin’.” Her voice sounds huskier than usual.
After she brings their coffee drinks to the table in the corner where Xander waits, he says, “What’s wrong with your shoulder?”
“What makes you think there’s anything?”
“The way you carry yourself,” he says. “And that hard left turn you made. You winced a little.” He stabs his straw into the ice in his drink a few times. “That from last night?”
“Yeah, but not how you’re thinking. It’s from a fight.”
Xander hooks his finger into the neck of her jacket, gives a light tug. “Let me see.”
She leans forward and lets the jacket slide down her arms. The bruises are mostly hidden under the wifebeater she wears, but she knows there’s enough showing to give him a good idea. He pulls at the back of the shirt, peeps down inside for good measure.
“Holy shit, Faith. You should have — I don’t know, iced this.”
“I got busy,” she says. “It was better than sittin’ with a bag of ice.”
He gently lays a hand on her other shoulder, presses a soft kiss right at the base of her skull.
While she’s still facing away from him she says, “I almost got killed last night.”
Faith feels more than hears his sharp intake of breath. “What happened?”
“Me not knowing when to quit, like always.” She pulls the jacket up. Before she can reach back to lift her hair out from under, his hands are there to attend her, and she is almost undone. Faith leans her head back into his hands. “Buffy went home, I stayed. I got two vamps to come after me in an alley. Kinda miscalculated.”
“Jesus.”
She sits up straight, shifts in her chair to face him once more. “‘All’s well’ and that shit.”
Xander takes her face in his hands, leans in to kiss her. When he pulls back, he says, “I’m not going to harp on this. I know better than almost anybody what being the Slayer is. But I have to say it once. I don’t want to lose you. You’re my date for the apocalypse.”
Faith laughs. “And it’s always so hard to get another at the last minute.”
They kiss again, which leads to a series of long, unhurried kisses in the midst of the lone coffee drinkers hunched over laptops and pairs of pseudo-beatniks working at important conversations. Faith has never before given herself to exploring the slow pleasures of kissing. She always was about getting down to it, and stopping for something like this (if she’d ever met a man who wanted it) would have felt like being stuck out on the L.A. freeway five miles from where she wanted to be. This, though, is like a Sunday drive, meandering, unrushed, undertaken solely for its own sake. And Xander is a talented driver, taking time to show her all the points of interest. There are a lot of them.
The manager, who knows Xander, comes over. He engages them in chat instead of saying “get a room,” but the intent and effect are the same. They finish their drinks, then Xander touches her arm. “Are you ready for Giles?”
“Why not? After all, he’s just a minor apocalypse.”