Fanfiction: Five by Three
Sweet setup Michaels has here. There was a rambling, fancy-ass Tudor like this in Faith’s hometown, but it was the town library. He doesn’t live with a wife or family — Faith heard plenty of gossip from the orderlies and nurses who befriended her while Xander was the hospital — so what does he do with all that space? More to the point, how is she going to find what she’s looking for and get the hell out before it turns into a cluster-fuck? She doesn’t have all night to stand here thinking about it; this is one of those neighborhood watch sorts of enclaves. Her town had that, too. When some junkie broke your door down, the neighbors watched him haul your shit away.
She breaks from the shadows and strides across the street. It’s only a few seconds before she’s up and over the wall.
He must have fallen asleep in the library again. The whispery sound of book pages being turned is one he never regarded as comforting before, but it blends with murmuring voices into a familiar kind of music. Library smells different, though. Dank, faint tang of mildew. Weird. Giles is usually a maniac about the proper care of books, even worse than Xander is about his tools. The odor, now that he’s noticed it, sets up an unpleasant itch in his nostrils.
He decides it’s time he joined the land of the living, lent a little research help. Xander stretches but the motion is brought up brutally short by some kind of restraint, something biting into chafed wrists as if he were—
Chained.
Something has got him then.
When he opens his eyes it takes only a second to get his bearings. He hasn’t spent that much time in Buffy’s basement, but it’s burned into Xander’s memory. And now the rest of it comes back. “Jesus God.”
A book closes. The creak of a chair. He looks toward the sound, and finds Giles sitting where Spike had been. “Jesus,” he says again. He tugs on the chains. “Giles. I know you’ve never been my biggest fan, but I never thought you’d —”
A pained look crosses Giles’ face. “Xander, believe me.” He removes his glasses, polishes them. It’s always a betrayal of some inner state of mind, this habit. Paired with believe me, Xander’s sure it prefaces a lie. “We’re doing everything we can to find a way to help you.”
Right. Easy to see that one coming. “Go to hell.”
“Giles, let me talk to him.” Buffy rises from another chair, puts down a leather-bound book, no doubt Volume LVIII of The Big Book of Very Bad Things. “Why don’t you go upstairs, see if you can find something he might eat.”
“God, Buffy. I’m so glad to see you.” Xander reaches a hand toward her, as far as the chains will let him. It takes everything he has not to break down.
Giles regards him briefly, then turns to go upstairs. “Be careful.”
Buffy takes Xander’s hand, sits in the chair Giles has abandoned. “Ah, Xander. Look at your wrists.”
“Buff, you’ve got to help me. I don’t have a lot of time. Help me get this thing out of my leg.”
“I know you’re scared. We’re going to bring you through this.”
Something knots in his chest. “‘We’? You’re with them now?”
Buffy strokes his cheek. “I’m with you, Xander. We all are.”
He jerks away from her touch. “All of you. You keep lying and lying and lying. Why are you doing this to me?”
She closes both her hands around his left. “I know this is hard.”
“You said you’d help me. You said this thing would kill me if I didn’t get it out.”
“The First said that.”
“No.”
“Listen to me, Xander. It tells you what you want to hear because it wants you to destroy yourself. It tried that before, and you beat it.”
A bitter laugh escapes him. “What it said in the hospital — you think that’s what I wanted to hear, that I’m a worthless fuck-up?”
“No, no — that’s not what I meant.” She closes her eyes a moment. “The First has been around forever because it adapts. It couldn’t kill you that way, so now it’s trying to seduce you. Either way, it wants the same thing.”
His chest is so tight that he can barely breathe. “It was you. They got to you, made you change, just like Willow. But I know—”
“Xander. Did I touch you? When I said you would die, that you had to cut yourself open —” She raises their hands, hers clenched so tightly around his that it hurts. “Was I doing this?”
The last patch of firm ground he has to stand on crumbles away, and he feels himself falling. Buffy has abandoned him, or she was never with him. It no longer matters which. Xander pulls his hand out of her grasp, gives her what Faith called the cold black stare. “I let you kill him,” he says.
He watches his words settle in. She knows who him is — there’s never been any other him, not really, for almost as long as he’s known her.
“I knew Will was working on the spell to get his soul back. I was supposed to tell you to stall, give her time. Remember what I said?”
She can’t look at him now. “‘Kick his ass,’” she whispers. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Just saying I understand. Sometimes the hard decisions have to be made. Exterminate a vicious vampire before he has a chance to kill again. Chain one of your best friends in a moldy basement to die. It’s all about the greater good. You can’t let personal feelings cloud your vision, right?”
He watches her face as she struggles to maintain control.
“Just leave me alone,” Xander says.
But he knows he has been all along.
French doors — what a wicked frickin’ gift to the burglars of the world. Sure, these are wired into an expensive security system, but Willow has successfully hacked into it, so all Faith has to do is punch out a pane and let herself in.
She’s decided on a system. First, go in search of a display case, in the parlor, or some kind of den, something like that. If that doesn’t pan out, there might be a private collection upstairs or maybe a safe. If it’s in a safe, she’ll be well and truly fucked, but her money’s on a more public display. He enjoyed talking about “that bad boy,” as he called the blade. No point having something that shiny and exciting if you can’t show it off.
Too many damn rooms in this place — it takes three tries before she finds his toy collection in an office with leather chairs and a desk the size of a battleship. Oh, Michaels likes glittery sharp things, all right. There’s a whole case on one wall of what she assumes are scalpels and other medical instruments. Some of them are probably valuable, she supposes, but she’s cultivating the junkie mind, looking for a few highly fenceable objects to take along with the knife.
First things first. A couple of table-type display cases contain the good stuff. Knives, swords, daggers. Some look like museum pieces, etched, jeweled and inlaid with gold. Others — well, it’s amazing how some objects can give off their own stink of evil. The Bringer knife is one of those. It’s not about the pleasure of crafting something beautiful, but about joy in killing.
Faith punches a leather-clad elbow through the top of a case. Long time since she’s done this, but there’s still a thrill that charges through her blood at the sound of shattering glass. She snatches up the Bringer knife and zips it into one of the jacket pockets. She scoops up a couple more of the nasty-looking blades, but concentrates on the jewel-encrusted stuff, jams them into the canvas bag slung over her shoulder. The most spectacular piece is a sword, which she reluctantly leaves behind. Can’t fit it in the bag, can’t run with it or go over the wall. Even a junkie wouldn’t be that stupid.
Just for form’s sake she rifles the desk and pockets some cash, a gold lighter and a pistol. Nice fancy box stuffed with cigars; she takes a handful. She’s about to step back into the hall when she hears a voice from that direction.
“Who’s there?” Michaels. She’s heard him shout before, that time he was ripping Xander a new one. There’s fear mixed in this time, a lot of it. Dangerous. “I’ve got a gun. Come out with your hands up.”
Shit. She moves toward the hallway door. Then takes a running start and cannonballs herself through the office window. A shot rings out behind her, and then another as she clambers up the wall. Then she’s over and running full tilt.
She doesn’t know if he called the cops before he made his macho stand, but just in case she cuts through the cemetery. Just like there were parks back in her old neighborhood the cops would never enter after dark, no Sunnydale officer’s going to risk his ass walking into the boneyard at night. Behind a big mausoleum she opens the canvas bag and takes out the tee shirt she’d worn last night, now smeared with her and Xander’s blood. She rips it down the center and drops it onto the ground, and swings the bag by the strap and lets it fly. A few yards along the way, she pulls off the cap and flicks it into a bush. With any luck the evidence will either disappear or the cops will believe some poor junkie made a score he didn’t live long enough to celebrate.
By the time Faith makes Revello, she’s just a girl taking an ill-advised walk after dark.
When she lets herself in, she finds Willow curled up in the corner of the sofa, Giles’s old books still scattered around her. She’s abandoned them for a mug that’s giving off some unpleasantly herbal smell. Faith unzips her jacket pocket. “I got the knife,” she says, then notices as Willow looks up. Her eyes are rimmed with red.
“Aw, Jesus, no.” She lets the knife clatter to the floor and wheels blindly toward the kitchen.
Willow scrambles to her feet and goes after her. “Faith, no, wait.”
Wait? Wait for what? She bats at a lamp in the entry way, spins it shattering onto the floor. Willow makes a grab for her, catching her above the right elbow, where the arm is slashed. Faith yowls in pain, then sends Willow reeling into the wall.
“Faith, listen to me. He’s okay, he’s — well, not okay. But he’s alive.”
That throws off her stride, and she smashes her hipbone into the dining room credenza. She folds herself over, trying to breathe, trying to stop shaking. Then Willow is there with her, murmuring. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to make you think — He’s just so not himself that I couldn’t help crying. Maybe you should sit —”
“No. I’m going down there.” She straightens, steadies herself with a hand on the top of the credenza.
“I don’t think you should,” Willow says. “He’s slipping away, I think. What’s left — doesn’t seem to be much more than cruelty. I don’t know if there’s much Xander left in him anymore.”
Faith steels herself, pushing off from the wall. “Then maybe you should be getting that goddamn knife and finding out how to bring him back. When you’ve got it figured out, you know where to find me.”
At first she thinks they’ve left Xander down here alone, and anger courses through her trembling muscles. He lies so still, one arm thrown up to shield his eyes from the yellowing light cast by the bare bulb above. The sight of shackles circling his wrists squeezes her heart painfully. She doesn’t kid herself — they’re necessary, just as they were when she was bound in chains. But she knows deep in her bones the desperate sense of hopelessness they represent, the belief that the whole world is against you. She watches the rise and fall of his chest, grateful for this much.
Finally she notices another presence in the cellar. Buffy perches on the pile of exercise mats, her arms hugged tight around her own body. Xander’s at rest, so Faith walks over to Buffy, sits on the mats beside her. “I got the knife. Willow’s working on it. So how is he?”
Buffy shakes her head and it’s then that Faith sees the tears that track all the way to her jawline. “He’s so scared he’s dying that all he can do is lash out.” She palms the tears from her face and turns toward Faith. “I don’t think you should stay down here. You’ve got something with him that maybe you should protect.”
Surprise at Buffy’s acknowledgment of this flashes and then is gone, crowded out by a question — what’s left to protect if she runs from him now? “What, B., you think I can’t take it?”
Buffy bristles. “Does this have to be a competition too? Can’t we just knock this crap off for a second?”
“Yeah. Sure,” she says quietly.
“I’m not sure I can take it, so the pressure’s off.” She knots her fingers together, a gesture that reminds Faith of Dawn. Family resemblance. Funny thing. “He may say something to you that you can’t ever erase. Maybe you just want to go upstairs and help Willow.”
“As Spike puts it, I went fifteen rounds with the First when Xander was in the hospital. I don’t see how this could be worse.”
“It is worse,” Buffy says, so low Faith can barely hear. “Because it’s Xander.”
“What did he say to you, B.?”
“Leave it alone, Faith. You don’t want to know. Just go.”
“I’m supposed to turn away from him now, to protect my feelings? You know the things I’ve done. So does he, and he hasn’t turned away. Not till this thing got inside his head. How can I think about covering my own ass?”
“You love him,” Buffy says.
“Oh yeah. I’m a goner.”
“Christ Almighty,” Xander shouts, and Buffy and Faith both jump. “Can we just skip the mindless girl talk?”
Faith rises and goes to his side. “Is there anything I can get for you?”
He lowers his arm, blinking even in the dim light of the basement. “Yeah. You can get fucked. I’m done asking you for help.”
“All right.” As she sits next to the bed, she hears Buffy’s soft tread up the stairs. “I’m here if you change your mind.”
“I’ve had a whole parade of people drop by to watch me breathe my last. They keep going away, so I guess I’m not dying fast enough to suit them. What about you? You’ve had to wait longer than any of them. Years. Delayed gratification is a bitch, ain’t it?”
“Maybe they’re going because you’re being an asshole.” Her heart is hammering. She takes a breath and lets it out. “I brought the knife back and Willow’s doing what she can. We are trying to help, Xander. Just hang on a little longer.”
“Every goddamn one of you has said the same thing. ‘Lie here and die, Xander. Honest, we’re doing our best. Giles is looking through a book and Willow’s working on a spell —’”
“I know you’re scared.” Faith says. “Fuck, I’m scared too.” She puts a hand on his uninjured leg.
“Get out.” Xander jerks away from her touch, a movement that clearly carries a cost. His eyes squeeze shut and a ragged breath hisses through his teeth. When he finds his voice again it’s still rough with pain. “Get the hell away from me.”
She settles back in the chair. “I’m stayin’ right here. I’ll shut up if you want, but I’m not going anywhere.”
“You can stay here till hell freezes over, Faith, but you’re never gonna get it right.”
Something cold clutches in the pit of her stomach, but she covers. “What’s that, chief?”
“This ‘stand by your man’ shit. Give it up. Oh, I’ll give you mad props for trying to have some kind of normal relationship. But someone as damaged as you — I think you’d be better off if you just stopped pretending you could live like other people.”
The something in her stomach — a knife. Slitting her right up the middle now. Slicing into her heart. She forces a smile. “You’ve been watching you some Dr. Phil.” Faith does the Real Man leg spread number, left ankle crossed over the right knee. She brushes some dirt off her shoe. “Tell me more.”
He’s turned back toward the wall now, giving off bored. “Fuck off.”
“If you want to screw with my head, you’ve gotta do better than that. After the First, well, this is just like watching Carrot Top after you’ve already seen Gallagher.” But she can’t stop from wrapping her arms around herself — just like Buffy — and when she does she feels a lump in the inside jacket pocket. She reaches inside to check — oh yeah, they survived the climb over the wall. Delicately biting off the cap of one of Michaels’s cigars, Faith sticks it into her mouth, firing up his fancy-ass lighter. It takes her a moment to get the rhythm of puffing on the thing, but soon she gets it going.
The scent of smoke makes Xander turn from the wall to look at her. “What the hell is that?”
“That, Harris, is the smell of burning money.” She holds it out to him. “Take it. Everyone should smoke a Cuban before they die. Might as well now, just in case you’re right.” He stares at her as if she’s lost her mind. Well, at least he’s thinking of something besides dying, besides shredding her soul. “Go on. Don’t be shy, I got one for myself.” She produces it from her pocket, holds it up for his inspection.
Tentatively he takes it from her, the chain making a sharp metallic noise that grates on her nerves. As she busies herself with lighting her own, Xander puffs cautiously.
Once she’s gotten hers going, Faith says, “This is a great fuckin’ smoke.”
He’s picking up the rhythm now. “Whatever happened to the notion that you were going to shut up?”
“You can’t smoke a Cuban without talking about smoking the Cuban. It’d be like — I don’t know — having an orgasm without screaming. Knocks out 47 percent of the fun, right there.”
“Where’d these things come from?” Faith could see that he didn’t want to be talking to her at all, but he couldn’t stand not knowing.
“Dr. Michaels’s house, just like the knife.”
“That prick gave you a handful of Cuban cigars?”
“He didn’t give me anything, Xander. That’s what makes them taste so extra special.” She does fall silent then, and so does Xander. They sit in B.’s grubby basement, Xander shackled to the bed, smoking expensive monster cigars like a couple of fat cats. And though it’s not exactly doctor-recommended, savoring the smoke slows his breathing and seems to calm him down.
“You’re right,” he says after a while, as if the words have to be yanked out of him. “This is a sweet smoke.”
The door at the top of the stairs opens and Giles calls down. “Faith. Willow’s onto something. Could you come up— What in god’s name are you doing down there?”
“Cuban zen,” Faith says. Before she rises to go to Giles, she puts her hand on Xander’s shoulder, and this time he doesn’t fight her touch.
She’s still puffing the cigar as she joins the Scoobies in the kitchen and helps herself to a clean saucer to use as an ashtray.
“What is that thing you’re smoking?” Giles wants to know.
“A nice Havana cigar.” She reaches into the jacket, extracts another. “Don’t worry, Rupert, I budged one for you too.” He declines and she tucks it back in her pocket. Fine. Better spent on Xander. “So what’s the story?”
Willow places the Bringer blade on the kitchen counter. Every time Faith sees it she’s struck again by how evil it looks, how it makes something want to shrivel inside her. “Well, there is a spell on this thing,” Willow says. “It’s not designed to cause physical harm, I’m sure they count on the blade itself to take care of most of their enemies. The mojo on this thing puts up a psychic attack. That’s where this obsession Xander’s had about the knife doing something to him came from. It has been doing something to him, just by creating and amplifying the idea that it’s doing something to him. Pretty soon that idea is the only thing there is — that and the fear that it’s killing him. The good news is, it won’t.”
Anya pipes up with her sunny little view of the world. “Unless, of course, he dies because he thinks he’s going to die. It works all the time in voodoo, and I used that one a few times myself, in my vengeance days.”
“Thanks for the good word, Anya,” Faith says. “If you come up with any more, feel free to keep ‘em to yourself.”
“It’s worth taking into consideration,” Giles says. “It does point up the need to counteract this quickly, whether it’s his life or his sanity we’re trying to preserve.”
Faith puts out the cigar, suddenly feeling a little sickened. “You’re not saying this thing could drive him permanently crazy.”
“We don’t know,” Giles says.
“Let’s get on it, then. What do we need to do?”
Willow starts explaining, diagramming things out. Never been Faith’s strong suit, keeping her demons straight or the intricacies of spells. Just point her at something that needs killing, and let her go. Her mind keeps slipping off topic, worrying at the things Giles and Anya said. Was the Xander who was down there now the one she’d get back? Or would she get him back at all?
Now Willow is looking around at all of them, confirming that each knows his or her part in this. Shit.
She swallows her pride. “Tell me again, Willow. What you want me to do. And — if I’m gonna fuck things up, tell me to bow out. I’m not on my best game, I know.”
Instead of rolling her eyes, she turns her clear, calm gaze on Faith and smiles. “All you have to do is maintain the circle, no matter what. And keep loving him. If you lose the thread of what’s going on, just concentrate on that. You have no idea how powerful that is.” Hard to believe this is the same girl she held a knife to, so many lifetimes ago. Faith, a grudge-holder by nature, never expects to be forgiven of her own crimes, much less embraced as a friend.
They set up in the cellar, the waft of incense mingling with the layers of smoke from the Cubans. Buffy unchains Xander to allow him to stand in the center of their circle. Though Willow explained what they were about to do before he was freed, Xander’s sharp-tongued volubility has deserted him, and Faith realizes his fear has kicked up to a whole new level. She longs to touch him, reassure him, but she suspects it would only make him more afraid.
The thread of this ritual slips her grasp even faster than she’d expected. There are candles and what looks like colored sand poured in a ring around Xander. Herbs and incense and Buffy’s hand in her left, Spike’s in her right, strong grips on either side. Willow and Giles are chanting in Sumarian or Turkish or pig-Latin for all she knows, as Xander stands rigid facing Willow. From her position in the circle, she sees the side of his face, the muscle ticcing wildly at his jaw. She’s grateful it’s Willow, calm, almost distant, that his eyes are fixed on, not Faith, who would only spark his apprehension with hers. Keep loving him, she reminds herself, and kicks the fear out of the center of her thoughts.
The pitch and pace of the chants rise, and a clammy heat pervades the cellar. She feels the bones of her hands grinding together under the grip of Spike on the one side, Buffy on the other. Snap of ozone in the air, and an otherworldly blue flame engulfs Xander. His head jerks back and a howl shudders out of him, and only the strength of Spike and Buffy’s grasp stops her from breaking the circle and running into the fire for him.
Then the chanting stops and the eerie blue glow vanishes and their absence is palpable. Xander’s harsh gasps for breath rise above those of the Scoobies. He sways, then collapses onto the concrete floor.
Hands unclasp, and she and Willow are at his side. Faith places a palm on his forehead, fevered and damp. He reaches out blindly for her, and she takes his hand in hers, holding fast. “It’s all right, Xander, you’re all right, it’s over now,” she murmurs.
After a moment, she and Willow help him sit up. His breath is still ragged, his head hangs down.
“How do you feel?” Willow asks. “Your leg.”
“It’s fine.” His voice is low, unsteady. “I mean, well, it hurts. From what I did. But — that’s all. Otherwise, I’m a little shaky.”
“I’ve got some tea,” Willow says. “It’ll help a lot.”
He nods. Faith can feel the tension in his body, still racked with faint tremors. He touches his free hand briefly to hers, then withdraws the other from her grasp. Xander raises his head to look at the friends gathered in a knot around him. Faith herself. Anya. Buffy. Willow. Spike. Giles. Back again to Faith. His gaze meets theirs one by one, touching briefly and then sliding away, contact too painful to maintain.
“Jesus.” He drops his gaze to his hands, which he studies for a moment, then looks up at them again. “You’re all the best friends I have. The best people I know.”
“Exceptin’ me,” Spike says. Faith recognizes that brand of snark as a feeble attempt to cut the tension in the room.
His face serious, Xander regards Spike. “No. You too, I think.” Another moment of silence, which no one is willing to break into. “I can’t — I don’t know what to say.”
“You don’t have to say anything now,” Buffy says. He almost flinches at the sound of her voice. “You should rest.”
He nods again. “Maybe you’re right. I think I need to be alone for a little while. I’ll be upstairs.” As he rises, still unsteady, Faith stands to help him up the stairs, but Xander waves her off.
“I’ll bring the tea up when it’s ready,” she tells him.
It’s a slow, laborious climb up the cellar steps, and the Scoobies all seem to hold their breath until he reaches the top. He doesn’t turn to face them, but says, “Thanks, everyone. For bringing me back.” The door closes softly behind him.
They sit there in the gloom of the cellar, looking at each other.
“It worked,” Willow says. “He’ll be all right.”
They straggle upstairs in ones and twos, saying little, and Anya puts on water for tea.
When Willow’s herbal infusion is brewed, Faith carries a mug upstairs to the room they share. There’s no answer when she knocks. When she opens the door a crack to peer inside, he is gone, and so are his keys. By the time she gets downstairs to the porch, Xander’s truck has disappeared as well.
Xander lets himself into his old apartment. The air has a stale smell, how loneliness manifests itself in a place. He flicks on all the lights as he passes through the rooms, hoping it’ll help, but it doesn’t.
He knows just what he’s looking for, a metal lockbox pushed far to the back of the top closet shelf, zealously guarded against Anya’s occasional purges of his most morally objectionable belongings. He rarely opens the box, most of the time doesn’t even remember its existence, but he knows it’s there if he needs it. When things get bad.
It probably says something about him that he carries the key to this box with him all the time, on the ring with the ones to the house and the truck. He finds the lockbox stashed behind a cardboard carton of sex toys that got one tryout and were abandoned. (Guess there’s an Island of Misfit Sex Toys too.) The top shelf of the closet, he decides, is not a cheerful place.
Xander sits on the bed and unlocks the box. Lets out a breath of relief to discover Anya has not somehow jimmied the lock and sold its contents on eBay. It’s all here, small but precious: his country music cd collection.
It’s all ancient stuff — or at least the new stuff is all by the old hairbags who’ve been around forever. He sits on the floor by the stereo, fans the jewel cases out across the carpet. All of it falls into the Music of Pain category, but there are important subdivisions. Patsy: ruler of Heartbreak, General. Merle Haggard: the go-to guy for Why is my life so shitty? George Jones: master of Oh. Because I fucked it up, that’s why.
He picks out a George, Cold Hard Truth. Pretty recent — the one he’d just finished making when he nearly killed himself boozing and driving. Xander slides it into the tray and lies back on the rug, hands behind his head. He still feels the weight of the shackles on his wrists, like some phantom pain.
You don’t know who I am, but I know all about you…
Amazing, how a voice so smooth can sound so chilling.
I’ve come to set the record straight. I’ve come to shine the light on you. Let me introduce myself — I am the cold, hard truth.
Xander doesn’t need an introduction. It all set in the moment the spell fell away. Everything the obsession with the knife wound had unleashed in him. And it had all been in him; it was not part of the magic that gripped him. He knew in some dark place within how to wound the people he loved most. Some he slashed at with the truth — cold and hard as tempered steel, George, you got that right — others with whatever lie that would cut the deepest. Anything to spread a little of the suffering he was enduring.
Some eighteen years of being best friends with Willow has shown him exactly where to wield the scalpel to do the most damage. Easy to zero in on Anya’s weaknesses too. Same with Buffy, though he hasn’t known her as long or been as intimate. Just aim for her feelings about Angel. Giles, never quite knowable to Xander, came in for more of a berserker-style attack. Swing the old broadsword and hack at whatever you can reach.
There is a woman we both know, I think you know the one I mean…
And Faith. She made herself wide open to his attacks, practically handed him the knife, and she did it out of love. He saved some of his cruelest jabs for her. This time it wasn’t possession. Everything that came out of him was inside him all along, the shittiest part of himself that he usually kept locked down.
You’d best remember me, my friend — I am the cold, hard truth.
There’s no illusion that it wasn’t his fault, no pretense that he doesn’t remember things he said or did. He’s no longer a boy, and the easy way out is not a road he’ll travel now. But he doesn’t know how he’ll face them, now that they know who he is.
From beneath you it devours.
From deep within you it devours.
We have met the enemy, and he is us.
She gets a list of likely places he might go, and three offers to come along, but Faith insists she’ll go alone. The Bronze she crosses off immediately. Even if he felt like getting drunk, he was in no shape for a crowd scene when he left, she’s sure of that. He’d be more apt to stop off at a packie to buy something and then hole up. The likeliest place for that, she feels, is the apartment he shared with Anya. She sets off in that direction, preparing for another glimpse into a relationship she can’t even find space for in her imagination.
When she pulls up in Giles’s car she’s not sure she has the right building. It’s not the sort of swank place Michaels lives in, but it’s undeniably nice. Big picture windows curving around the rounded corners of the building, grounds groomed like a goddamn poodle. All the lights in one corner apartment blaze in the early glimmer of dawn. She wonders if she could possibly have hit the lottery on her first try — and then she spots Xander’s truck parked around the corner. Faith glides up behind it and parks, then lets herself into the building with the keys Anya gave her.
As she approaches number 2D, she considers whether to knock or just walk in without warning. Intuition shudders through her, and she fumbles the key into the lock with suddenly shaky hands.
The living room is awash in light, but unoccupied. Music plays softly from some source other than the big stereo in the corner, and Faith follows the sound. It takes her to the threshold of the bedroom, where she freezes at what she sees.
The closet door open, light blazing in there, too, and a step stool planted in front of a high shelf, recently ransacked. On the bed a smallish metal lockbox, open and emptied. Behind the bed —
I don’t know how long I can survive, but one thing that I know is —
Behind the bed on the floor —
Come springtime the roses will return, but you never will.
A pair of legs, splayed on the carpet, visible to her only from the knees down.
She forces herself to move, rushing toward the bed, her motion fueled by the fluent string of curse words she howls. As she rounds the corner of the bed, steeling herself for more blood —
Xander sits up — alive, whole, just a little wild-eyed.
Faith falls to her knees.
“Jesus God,” Xander says, panting, “you scared the shit out of me.”
She starts to laugh and finds she can’t stop.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing,” she says, when she can finally speak. “God, nothing.” She reaches out to touch his leg, reassuring herself he’s really there. “We all kind of freaked when you disappeared.”
“Yeah. I kind of freaked before. Which was pretty much the point behind disappearing.” He picks up one of the jewel cases on the floor, flips it over to the back without really looking at it, pitches it back onto the carpet. “Faith, I don’t think I can do this right now.”
Her stomach lurches. This is it. The real Xander’s returned and kicked out his hateful double, and he still doesn’t want her. “Do what?” she whispers.
“I just — can’t talk about this yet. Not even to you. Especially not to you.”
She shifts, sitting on the floor with her back against the side of the bed. “There’s nothing you have to say right now. Just — c’mere. Lean back.”
He hesitates, then moves where she indicated, settling in to lean against her, the two of them nestled like spoons. “You’re all right?” he asks, and she assures him she is, threading her arms beneath his, enfolding him. She lays her cheek against his shoulder. They sit like this for a while, not speaking, and after some time Xander stretches out his foot and clicks the stereo off with his toe. Faith bides her time.
A long period passes with no sound but their breathing. Gradually, his breath changes, and she can tell by its harsh quality and broken rhythm that there are tears coursing down his face. She says nothing, just snugs her arms closer around his body.
Faith waits this out, too. Offers him the connection of their bodies. Not exactly skin-to-skin, but it means something. The steady in and out of her breath, which he slowly matches with his own.
“If our team needs a master bridge-burner for the apocalypse,” he finally says, “I guess I’m the guy. I don’t just burn ‘em, I blow ‘em up real good.”
“You missed one,” she says quietly.
“I can’t figure out how.”
“I’ve been where you were.” Faith lifts a hand and begins stroking his dark hair, gently dragging her fingers through its thickness. “Scared beyond belief. Feeling totally alone, knowing in that knee-jerk primitive part of my brain that everyone was against me, that they’d throw me to the dogs in a heartbeat. I was trapped out there on that shitty little rocky island, and somebody built a bridge out to me. I blew that sucker to hell and gone, didn’t I?”
He says nothing, but he tips his head back slightly, surrendering to her touch.
After a while he speaks again. “I deliberately savaged everyone I care about. Maybe you can put a spin on it that lets you understand it, but the others —”
“Xander, they all know where it was coming from.”
“No, they don’t,” he whispers. She waits out another long pause. “It wasn’t the spell. I said those things, not that fucking knife. Those things I said — whether they were true or not — they lived somewhere in me all along. That knife just cut them loose.”
“Those things live in everyone, Xander.”
“No, they don’t. In people like us, maybe. We grew up with them, but other people —”
“Other people too,” she says. “You’d be surprised.”
Another silence. Then: “What I said to you. None of it is true. I took the easiest path to hurt you, but it was all lies. Tell me you know that.” She hesitates, and he says it again. “Tell me you never believed it.”
She lies and tells him what he wants to hear.
Faith resumes moving her fingers through Xander’s hair and softly says,
You do not have to be good.
These words have lived in her heart for nearly three years, but she has never spoken them aloud. It hurts her chest to let them out now.
You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Xander turns to look at her, amazement written on his face.
“It’s a poem.” Her chest is still tight with a fierce ache, but Faith refuses to let fear stop her from telling Xander who she is, offering her trust again. “‘Wild Geese,’ it’s called. By Mary Oliver. It saved my life when I was in the joint. A lot of her poems did.” Funny how they’d come to her. Faith had found the prison library early in her sentence. Some leftover belief from her time in Sunnydale that the library was where she’d find people who cared about her. She’d been lucky — her intuition had been right. After a few conversations, the librarian had loaned Faith her own poetry books, and she’d copied them over into notebooks and memorized them. “I rode those poems out into the world,” Faith says. “Slept on the ground wrapped inside them. Put my hands in cold pondwater and drank them. They kept me alive.” She longs, when they’ve beaten the First — if they do — to head out into the landscape and see everything in these poems. “Do you want to hear the rest of it?”
“Yeah,” he says. “I do.” He shifts, moving behind her so that she is now leaning against him, wrapped in his arms.
She starts from the beginning and recites the whole poem, the ache in her chest slowly giving itself over to warmth. When she finishes Xander asks if she knows any more, and as the world outside begins to move into day, Faith sits nestled against him, reciting every love poem to the earth that she can remember.
Eventually it occurs to Faith to call the Scoobies and let them know Xander’s been found and he’s safe. As he rattles around the kitchen making coffee, she tells Willow not to worry if they’re a while in coming back. “He’s still trying to deal with everything he said and did.” She smiles at Willow’s immediate declaration that they all love him and know what he’s been though, and tells her she’ll pass along the message.
Xander has been struck by a completely different thought as he’s been rummaging through the half-empty cabinets. “I realized something. This is the first time we’ve had away from Camp Scooby since I got out of the hospital. We’ve got all this space, nobody in it but us.” He sniffs at a carton of milk he’s pulled out of the fridge, then makes a face. “There’s the occasional down side — I hope you like your coffee black.” He pours a mug for her. “I’m thinking we don’t know when we’ll have the luxury of this kind of privacy again. I’m thinking — three-day-long shower.”
Faith laughs. She can’t recall when she last had real reason for laughter.
“I’m serious. It’s not just the time and the hot water. The bathroom here is actually clean. I mean, I’m a guy and that tub disgusts me. I don’t know how you women are dealing.”
“I hate to rain on your parade — or to refuse to rain on it — but you need to keep that knife wound dry.”
Xander puts up his hand in a not-another-word gesture and disappears for a moment, rummaging through the hall closet. When he returns he slaps a roll of silver duct tape on the counter. “The answer to everything.”
She laughs again, and he reaches across the breakfast bar to touch her face. “You have a great laugh. I want to hear a lot more of it over the years.”
“—‘if we don’t all die later this week’?”
He rubs a thumb along one of her dimples. “I don’t know, I’m not so much with the apocalyptic gloom anymore. That’s so five-minutes-ago.” His hand moves to her hair, brushing it back from her face. Suddenly Xander freezes, pain shadowing his face. “Oh god. I did this, didn’t I?” His finger traces the outer edge of the bruise at her temple, so lightly she can barely feel the contact. “I remember everything else, but not this.”
“Things had gotten kind of wild when it happened.”
“How can you even look at me? Much less—”
“I jumped you to get the knife. You were crazy scared and we were thrashing around. It wasn’t like you beat me down.”
He’s not even hearing her. “Jesus. Faith, I’m so sorry. I can never make it up—”
“I made a choice when I tackled you. I knew the risks, Xander — I took care of myself in prison for three years.”
He shakes his head. “I left Anya because I was afraid of this. Turning into my old man. Nothing I do will ever take him out of me.”
“Listen to me. No, listen.” She rounds the breakfast bar to take him by the arm. “This is not about you deciding to clip me. That’s not what happened. It was panic.”
“Don’t make excuses for me.”
“Look. You owned up to the shit you said, okay, I’m fine with that. But hitting me — that was blind terror. It was the spell. Because if you’d hit me with intent, I’d have put you in the hospital.”
“Promise?”
“Now and forever, if it makes you feel better.” She touches his face. “Don’t let this get between us. If this breaks us apart after all we’ve gone through, those eyeless fucks win.”
Xander says nothing, but she senses him gathering more arguments against himself. “Jesus, enough yak.” She slips out of the leather jacket, slings it onto the counter. “I want my three-day shower.”
“No fair,” he says. “I called it first.” His heart’s clearly not in the argument, but at least he’s making it.
Faith glides her hands beneath his tee-shirt, her fingers feathering, teasing. “I never said you couldn’t come too.” She pulls the tee over his head, drops it on the floor.
He starts to engage a little, but her black turtleneck throws him off. “This is a new look for you.” His hands hover near her waist, as if he’s uncertain how to unpeel her.
“It’s a whole burglary thing,” she says. She eases the sweater over her head and lets it fall, shakes out her hair.
“You really broke into Dr. Michaels’s house last night?” He slips around behind her, wrapping one arm around her waist, planting soft kisses along her neck. “Damn, that’s wicked sexy.”
Faith grins to hear him echoing the slang of her hometown. “Wicked frickin’ sexy,” she agrees. Even getting shot at gave her that sweet down-low tickle that actually throbbed as she was scrambling over Michaels’s wall. It awakens again now, even as Xander fumbles open the buttons of her jeans. By the time he slides his hand into her Levis, she’s halfway gone.
“So this was a commando raid,” he murmurs.
She would laugh, but her breath is already hitching, her soft cries growing louder, sharper as he uses his hands and his voice to take her to the edge, suspending her there for what seems an agonizing eternity until he finally brings her to shuddering release.
After, legs shaking, she stumbles back into him. He holds her upright, his arms wrapped tight around her. Xander breathes in the scent of her hair. “I love you, Faith. Never doubt that.”
She draws a breath to say she loves him too, but it all jams up in her throat before she can even finish inhaling. This shit is getting old, she thinks.
“I heard you tell Buffy,” he whispers into her hair. “‘Oh yeah. I’m a goner.’ Means as much to me as any flowery talk.”
She slips around in his embrace, facing him, placing a hand on his cheek. “Never doubt it,” she echoes.
After the shower, they go on a treasure hunt for their clothing. There are garments strewn over three rooms and a walk-in closet, everywhere he and Faith performed some variation of the wild thing. It feels weird to be here, where he and Anya made a life, with another woman. Though Faith is not another woman in the casual oh, by the way, I’m dating again sense. She’s like Anya was — oxygen. Necessary. He’s going to make a life with Faith, too, though he’s not exactly sure what its shape will be. It’s already begun.
He’s glad that they’re driving back to Revello separately. He’s too apprehensive to talk about the conversations he needs to have once they get back to Buffy’s house, or make distracting chitchat about anything else. Faith told him what Willow said, but it doesn’t make what’s next any easier.
Xander pulls up behind Faith, who waits for him at the curb. She grasps his hand as they walk toward the house, her grip imparting strength. At the top of the steps she lets go, lets him walk in alone. Not a word has passed between them.
As he enters, Dawn looks up from the iBook she’s working over at the dining room table. “Xander!” She leaps up and starts toward him, then reins herself in. He’s not quite sure if she’s afraid of bowling him over, or if she’s heard too much about the last day or so. Xander opens his arms, hoping it doesn’t turn into one of those embarrassing uncompleted gestures. But it’s all right — she comes and enfolds him in a careful hug.
“Are you okay? I kept trying to come down and see you, but they wouldn’t let me.”
“I’m working on okay. And I’m glad you didn’t. I would have hurt you.”
She releases him and steps back, and he knows from her face that she’s heard something. Probably not the worst of it. “You’re walking without the cane,” she says.
“Yeah. Not so steady, but not bad.”
“I must sound like a broken record, but I was so scared when you hurt yourself like that.”
“I know, sweetie. I’m sorry.” Two words that are going to get a workout today.
Anya bustles into the dining room carrying one of Giles’s old books, marking her place with her finger. “Dawn, see if this makes — Xander. Are you finished being crazy now?”
This teases a rueful smile from him. “Back to my usual level of crazy, anyway.”
“Oh,” she says. “That’s too bad. Still, I guess it’s an improvement.” She opens the book and lays it on the table by the laptop. “Dawn, could you try cross-referencing this spell? As far as Giles and I can make out, it’s only about half there.”
“Sure.” Dawn gives Xander a quick kiss on the cheek and returns to her place behind the iBook.
“Anya.”
She looks up at him as if she’s surprised he’s still there.
“Thanks. You didn’t have to be that gentle with me.”
“For crissakes, Xander. I’m a pathetic sap sometimes. Don’t turn it into a virtue.” She points out a passage in the book to Dawn. “This is where we lose the thread, you see? Something’s garbled or missing.”
Xander drops the apology he was working up to. Maybe another time. He goes in search of Willow and Buffy. Willow he finds in the kitchen, brewing some of her evil health tea. She’s lost in thought, head bent to her task, her face curtained by long red hair. “Hey,” he says softly.
She looks up and smiles, but it doesn’t light her face to maximum wattage, the way it usually does. “You’re back.”
“I’m back,” he says, but he means something else entirely. He wants to fold her in his arms, but he doesn’t have the right. “Thanks.” She busies herself with the tea, and he shifts his feet, leans against the counter. “You okay? Seemed like pretty big mojo. I could feel a lot of energy moving, and you know what an unobservant clod I am.”
“I’m a little wrung out, is all.”
She looks worse than wrung out, and Xander finds himself wishing Tara were here. She’d have known what to do. She’d have made a bridge between them. Suddenly he’s crying. “God, Willow, I’d give anything if I could take it back. I was desperate for you to hurt the way I did, so I said — None of it was true.”
“Xander.” That’s all she says as she comes toward him. What else can she say? He’s forgiven? He can’t even bring himself to ask for it. Everything will be all right? Fat fucking chance. Get out of her sight? That would make the most sense. “Oh, Xander,” she whispers, and draws him into an embrace. He’s not sure how long they stand that way, both in tears, arms wrapped around each other, but it’s a while. Distantly he hears the thunder of feet coming up the porch steps from the back yard, but the sharp ring of Amanda’s voice brings them all to a halt before the door gets opened. Then: shuffling noises that fall away to silence.
Even under the haze of incense and cigar smoke, Xander can smell the sour reek of old fear-sweat. His heart triphammers as that scent curls into his brain, which obligingly makes more wiggins-producing chemicals. Only one thing in the world could induce him to enter this basement again, especially this soon. One person.
She’s down here training with Spike. The soft slaps and grunts of their sparring cease as he reaches the bottom step. She reaches for a couple of towels, hands one off to Spike, who heads for the stairs. Xander offers his hand out to the side for the casual slap-and-shake guy ritual, and they execute it perfectly as if they’ve been friends doing it forever. “I’ll talk to you later, man,” Xander says. Then it’s just him and Buffy.
“How are you doing?” she asks.
“Little shaky, just now.”
She gestures to the narrow bed. “Want to sit?”
“I’d, uh, rather die, actually.” Waving an arm toward the stack of exercise mats: “How about here?”
They sit. He looks at his hands. “This is where I’m supposed to say I’d die before I’d hurt you. But we both know that’s bullshit. Maybe I should have. Instead I calculated the one thing I could say to you to do maximum damage. Buffy, that’s something I’m always going to know about myself, and I’ll always be sorry.” He braves a look at her then. There are tears streaming down her face, but no hate or disgust. Yet. “I need to tell you something else.”
She looks at her own hands now, and he follows her gaze. Her manicure’s shot to shit; apocalypses are hell on the personal grooming. “What is it?”
He takes a breath. “Faith and Willow. I lashed out at them, too. Told them things that weren’t true. Whatever I could say that would hurt the most. I want things straight between us, Buffy, whatever that does to our friendship. Five years I’ve been too chickenshit to let you see who I am. It takes some evil fucking spell for that.” He has to close his eyes before he can say it. “What I told you. It was true. I did that.”
The breath gusts out of her, as if she’s been kicked.
“I had all sorts of great motives. Righteous as hell, that was me. But really? The ones that counted most? The pettiest possible reasons, from the shittiest part of myself. So there’s your good pal Xander. I was jealous and—”
She throws up a hand. “Stop.”
He blinks in surprise, stumbling to a halt.
“I know you want to pile the shit on yourself as high as you can. But you’re burying me under it too, and I just can’t listen to any more.”
She’s right. Jesus Christ, even his trying to make amends is all about the selfishness. “I’m sorry.”
After a long silence she says, “I think I knew. We had that fight about Anya, and Willow let something slip. I didn’t let it sink in for a long time, but it raised a lot of questions.”
“Well. Now they’re settled. I caused you a lot of suffering. Even more for Angel.” He pushes his hands through his hair. “I think I should go away. For a while, at least.”
“Xander—”
“I’ll stick around till we’ve dealt with the First. But you need some space to deal with all this — without me in your face all the time. I need to not see my worst self reflected in my best friends’ eyes every day.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“You don’t need to say anything just now. I’ll be here until we kick the ass of this apocalypse.” He puts a hand on hers, and is gratified when she turns her palm up and laces her fingers with his. “It’s something I have to do,” he tells her.
“What about Faith?”
“She wants to come. Get out in the wide open for the first time in years. And hell, once the First is put down, it might be good to spread the slayage around a little.”
They sit for a long time, hands linked, neither speaking. Everything has changed — yet nothing has. Who he is and what he’s done remain the same. But the veil has been ripped away, and now Buffy knows who he is. She can’t bring herself to insist that he stay, but she’s able to sit here with her hand in his, which is more than he’d envisioned when he walked down here.
Xander looks at the bandages Faith wrapped around his wrists. Beneath, the skin is raw and just beginning to scab over. For a time the wounds will look even worse than they do now, then eventually pink, tender skin will emerge. A long time after that, there will be nothing left at all to mark these injuries.
He hopes that’s how it will be with the wounds he’s laid open between him and his friends. It’s hard to imagine now, with everything so raw and painful. But he hopes.
End