Title: Lowest Common Denominator
Author: Eterniata
Email: eterniata@aol.com
Rating: PG-13
Improv #2: indigo, ice, tremble, faith
Disclaimer: He can come have a heart to heart with me whenever the angst gets too high...but he isn't mine.
Summary: Xander notes how things always pan out to the LCD.
Author's Notes: Unbeta'd Xanderfic that was supposed to be a PWP and went nowhere near that in any way, shape, or form. Majorly influenced by listening to "Loser" by Three Doors Down and having a vision of Xander in my head at all times. And that's nothing against the boy, because everyone who knows me, knows that I love me some Xander.

Xander had little faith in most things working out for the best. He knew from experience that the odds of badness happening were always higher than not. He could have made a serious amount of money if he had some way of actually betting on this shit. And that wasn't the point right now anyway.

The point was that he was relatively sure that Anya was a thing of the past, and that it was his fault in some way. He should have been able to love her, shouldn't he? He felt affection and desire; he felt the urge to be sweet with her and to smile when she was tender with him. The sex was plentiful and satisfying on almost every level.

And there was the problem.

After he finally reached a point when sex had become such a frequent occurrence that Xander no longer had a little voice in his head laughing gleefully and yelling 'we're having sex!', he found that he wanted something else. Something more. He knew, he absolutely knew, that there was that one level missing for him. He knew she got there - he saw it in her eyes when she was laying there afterwards, and her hands would tremble as she reached out to touch his face. Her smile would just cut him to the core.

Because he so wasn't there with her.

And tonight when he'd tried so diligently to find it, in her, in himself, and had failed miserably, he knew she saw. Her smile had faltered just a little, and her eyes had darkened to indigo shadows, and she had asked him to leave. There was a tremor in her voice but no anger, and that was what frightened him enough to make him leave his own apartment with her still in the bed. He was positive she was still there. He also knew beyond any doubt that when he went home the pillows would be damp from her tears, and the sheets would smell of her perfume, and nothing else of hers would be there anymore. She would have taken her toothbrush, and her comb, and the lipstick she kept in the bathroom. She would have taken the picture of them that he kept on the night table simply because she had placed it there.

And he hated the ice cold part of himself that was glad that it was all going to be over when he got back. Because wasn't that just the easy way out? Wasn't it so much less taxing on his god damn existence to walk away and not even stand there and let her yell at him and call him a prick, and a bastard, and other things in languages he wouldn't understand but would feel the sting of all the same? Didn't he always manage to somehow be the loser in any given equation? Even in the decision that his head told him was the right one to make, Xander found himself cast as the cretin.

There wasn't much comfort in knowing that it was better for both of them, that one day he would have made her hate him for taking her love and never returning it, if he didn't call a stop to it now before it was even further into too late. So he tried to tell himself that he was really being the upright guy in this whole mess. That it was nothing short of a miracle for a guy in his situation to take the high ground and walk away from unending, unbelievable, mind altering sex just because he wasn't feeling the Big L.

Xander had to admit it was a hard reach to get to the good part of all of this. He checked his watch, saw he'd been gone for about half an hour, and decided he really needed to go visit Giles and see how the Magic Box was coming along. Maybe he could build more shelves, and alphabetize the Demonology references, and stay there long enough so that Giles would ask him in annoyance if he didn't have someplace better to be. And maybe Xander would tell him that he didn't. Not for a while, anyway.

~end