Title: Things Best Left Unsaid
Author: Kassie
Email: ethros@go.com
Distribution: You don't want this
Disclaimer: Joss made it up, too bad he is an incompetent ninny. Mutant Enemy and others own the rights. No suing please.
Rating: R for themes
Notes: It only took me all summer to get around to this, but I couldn't find a hook. Then I did. Willow isn't the easiest character for me.
Dedication: To Lar who wrote a goodly portion of this but didn't want credit. To Fiona who pointed out where I went *really * wrong. To Yvette for the beta action.
Spoilers: The Gift, certain S1 eppies which will be clear.

Xander's spent the past few days mired in the cob-webs in his soul. Time spent in limbo, not ready to mourn yet, not ready to let go or move on. Still coming down from the desert, from the Last Battle, from seeing another broken body that five minutes before was his friend. Anya has all the books on grieving, she picked them up the last time, the Joyce time. He flipped through a couple earlier and saw the steps, words on paper describing other people's loss, black letters on white pages spelling out how this is done, what he's supposed to do. But no where did he read about The End of The World. Nothing about how to fight on when the main combatant is buried under mounds of earth and the chaos continues.

For the most part, he simply dwells. Offered to go with Willow and Tara to LA to escape the drag of his own thoughts but was rebuffed, gently, but still left at home with himself while other people do the important things. Not that he wanted to get caught up in the Angelness of the situation. But a break in the inexorable pill of regret and aching would have been welcome.

This isn't a new place for him. This is his third go at the utter bitterness that lingers after death. Jesse was different than the last two, however. Not so much fear, still too young and unaware to know what being dead meant. Just anguish over the ashes on his own hands, and the life so twined with his severed permanently. Joyce was a different flavor of horror. The wake-up that any of them really could be next. That Willow might not be on the other end of the phone an hour from now, that Buffy…and he's tallied more regrets than most people under fifty, so many, and they all want a turn with him this week.

He hears the key turn in the lock, the door pushed open and quietly closed again.

"Xander?" His head's hidden behind the arm of the couch so he extends his fingers over the edge and kind of wiggles his fingers. Shush shush on the carpet pile as she drags herself across the floor. He lifts one leg, and Willow sits with her back against his other, settles, and he drops the hanging leg onto her lap.

"Where's Tara?" Leaves his arm laying on his face, obscuring his eyes, doesn't think it's time to look on the world yet, still time for inside, Xandermind, the place he's been since he looked at the body that used to be something else, someone.

"She dropped me off." Three, short bursts of air, not sighs, not speech. "Anya still at church?" Willow is numb, way past raw. A few years ago, when Angelus was stalking them, she would lay in her bed at night and imagine Sunnydale as a war zone, Angelus as a particularly bad Nazi and killing him was the only way to survive. She's always had a hard time with the killing, her mental landscape encompasses the possibility that most demons are just trying to get by, to live the way they were taught to live, like her, like Xander, like Buffy. But tonight, the first sight of Angel prompted one word in her mind: Abomination.

"You guessed it. I think she might become a nun." Lifts his arm then, to see if that got any response. No, sees eyes maniacally bright, red- rimmed and cried out, and he wishes they knew someone who was unaffected, too much pain to go around and little comfort. Shifts to his elbows, and Willow leans forward so he can disengage both his legs, slide free and pull himself to a sitting position. She sinks back and rests her head on the couch, looks like a limp doll, a mass of bone-free rubbery skin and hair.

"Did he cry?" Doesn't look at her, misses her shrug. He's not really interested in Angel, not anymore, more worried about how Willow responded to Angel, to more grief that isn't her own.

"Are they ok? Wesley and Cordy were probably, something, who knows. "

She rolls her head and watches his profile. "I don't know. I guess I realize now that we don't keep in contact that much, would we get a call if Cordy died? Maybe now, but, a couple months ago? What if I did? Would someone call them? I…I was thinking about that, you know, on the ride back." He gives her the rapid head movement, twist toward her, and away again, like a bird. She knows she upset him but can't dredge up any feeling, figures he'll get over it, or not, a small damage this week. Talking about dying isn't really all that acceptable, but she can't come up with many other things to discuss.

"Don't talk about being dead." Terse, and she sits up, reaches for his hand. No resistance, and she cradles his fingers between both her hands, rubs the ridges of his nails with the pad of her thumb.

"I won't talk about it if you talk instead." Her stomach clenches and twists when he yanks his hand away and barks out a hollow laugh.

"You don't want that." Rakes his fingers through his recently cropped hair. She misses the curls on his forehead and around his ears; he seems oddly bare, naked, after several years of dopey, longish hair.

"Why…why wouldn't I want that? Xander, you've been so weird, not that I would know how you're…just quiet and rocky, I mean, stony. Talk to me. I feel, scattered. I need you." She toes off her shoes and folds her legs under her.

So many things he wants to say to that, to be honest and just spill out what's been on his mind since Joyce died, but she's shell-shocked and deserves her space. "No, you need Tara. She's better for you, understanding, honest." He hunches forward and rests his elbows on his knees, looks at the floor.

"Are you feeling insecure? I guess I can kind of get that." Reaches forward and pulls him so that she can wrap her arm around his shoulders.

"No, I'm don't know what I'm saying guy." He slides away and moves to the other side of the sofa, wedges himself into the corner formed by the arm and the back.

"It's ok, you don't have to talk, or say anything, but, you seem so, just not how you should be." Watching him, she wonders when she hit bottom so hard there's no more sorrow, just a kind of acceptance that Xander isn't ok, that he might never be ok, and that she might have to live with that. Tara's madness took so much out of her that she was stretched to dredge anything up at the end, shoulders the belief that she didn't fight hard enough, didn't think clear enough, if only Tara wouldn't have…a loop, in her heart, she doesn't think she could have saved Buffy, but that's mothered by all the recriminations that she might be very wrong about that.

"How am I supposed to be?" His head whips around, and he stares her in the eye. No redness, just flint and an echo of pain. She hasn't seen him cry, doesn't know if he has, and that lack of knowledge resounds with a twang in her chest. A Xandery thing she doesn't know, and there are piles of those now.

"Well…that's the part I'm not sure of, but not silent." Stretches her fingers out to stroke his hand laying next to her foot, and he flinches away before she can touch him.

"Silence seems the best route now." Face back towards the wall, voice low. Number two on his mistake list wants some more time with him, wants to wear itself further into that groove in his mind, and Willow's presence strains him, makes keeping it inside a struggle.

"Ok, if you need your time, need to be quiet, that's good too. Could I talk?" She knows him, if she just lets it all spill out, he'll have to comment, even at his worst, on the days over a decade ago when his lips would be swollen or his eye so black she worried he'd lose his sight, he'd still come around if she just babbled for a while.

"Of course." Semi-sarcastic, and she can tell that he knows what's she's doing, but she has her own needs, and she's lived with him in her life long enough to know that their needs usually end up meeting somewhere in the middle.

"When we were going down to LA, Tara was telling me about being, um, like she was. The Glory mind-suck. How she felt trapped and free at the same time. That she didn't feel all the everyday fears and anxiety, that all that was gone, that her mind was clear, just basic emotions, like if the world was all primary colors, no teal or mauve, just bright red and green and blue, no shadings. She told me it was so easy to just accept it and not even try to fight, that she thinks she'll miss it sometimes."

His head pivots while she's talking, and he watches her lips move, open close, open close, sometimes teeth showing, sometimes the tip of her tongue.

"That's a good explanation." Glances up to her eyes and sees she's looking past him, dwelling again in that place that's her fear that Tara won't get better, even though she's fine now, back to being the stalwart companion, knowing and compassionate and not even slightly insane.

Green eyes meet brown and hold them for as long as he allows it, until he skims up to her hairline, and she turns her head. "It was hers. I don't say it as well as she did."

"I think you put it perfectly." Both of them speak in muffled tones, almost whispering, both focused on more than what they're saying.

"So you can see how it was?" She toys with the hem of her sweater; Xander gets nervousness or distress from her, knows it's partially him, his weird-vibe, but he's can't suppress it, not now.

"I already knew." Swift twist to look back at him as he says it, and he knows she's just surprised, not suspicious.

"She told you before?" Brushing back her bangs, half-smile, and she's thinking that he and Tara found a moment to bond, a space in the last few days to talk and get to know each other better.

"I felt it myself."

"When you were soldier-guy?" Even more interested now, she moves to slide sideways on the couch, Indian-style facing him.

Her favorite, the Halloween debacle. "No, then I was just me, but without my memories, and other, fake memories." Explained that about fifty times, but they never seem to get it.

Scrunches her eyebrows together and gives him 'concentration' face. "What are you talking about then?"

It takes him a few beats to decide whether now is THE TIME. If he should let it all spill out, or if he should spare her, again. The gnawing in his stomach makes him sick, and he knows in that weird kind of clarity that happens in moments of high stress that his mouth's going to take over and let his ass catch up later. "You know."

"No, I…Xander, just tell me what you mean." Exasperation, she's had enough of him being so dense, wants to help or give in to her own thoughts. Be the one to spill out her loss and anxiety, stop being the sounding-board, be the fragile person for a while.

He keeps facing ahead, monotone, every muscle tensed, ready to jump away if he has to. "The hyena."

"You don't remember being the hyena!" Pulling back, leaning on the opposite couch arm, her face starts to pink up, and she feels it, the blood rising to her skin. Shock, a twist to the conversation she never saw coming.

"I lied." A tremor runs through him like an electrical shock from a low-voltage, live wire. His body hair stands on end, and the hair on his head is beginning to get the same idea. Willow's eyes follow the path of his fingers stroking the hair on his arm down, and the sensation abruptly halts.

"Why?" Cold voice of her temper under control, and Xander knows that accidental demonstration is hardly the least of what she'll do him now. But he's learned a lot about the cleansing effect of paying for what you've done, about how the punishment someone else gives tends to be much less than what he does to himself.

"Because I didn't want to have to deal. I couldn't…it seemed like the best option."

One hand in her hair and the other brushing against her face, swiping rapidly against her cheek. "All this time you lied about it? Why are you telling me now? I mean, bad timing!"

"Living with a secret is hard, living with one that keeps going on is almost impossible." Screams it out, turns his body to face her, and he doesn't know where the force came from, doesn't know why he's clenching his hands into fists, just feels the need to break something, kick whatever's at hand, scratch his face until it bleeds.

She quiets down at his outburst, folds her hands in her lap and watches him steadily. "How does it keep going on?"

Now that he's started this, Xander can't pull the words back into his mouth, he can't just say 'psyche!' and tickle her into submission. This's the chance he should've taken years ago, with both of them, and the regret weighs him down even as he tries to explain himself. "Because it never went away, not completely. Sometimes I wonder how much of my life is somehow controlled by the hyena impulses. How much of me is really Xander, and how much is the hyena. So much of who I am *could * be the hyena coming out, I don't know where Xander ends and the hyena begins. Plus the whole keeping up the lie part, not easy with the Hellmouth super-paranoia."

"What?" Some part of her always wondered about this, thought it was possible. She's read too much, seen too much not to. But for some reason, she shoved that out, never saw a spark of it in him, never marked a change that would announce in a way that she would have to face.

"Come on Willow, you had to have noticed how different I was after that, how focused on the group, how my life fell apart when I was separated from it. How I eat meat almost raw, that's not a bell- ringer?" Her hand in the air cuts off the rest of the examples he has on the tip of his tongue.

"Yeah, but people's tastes change, I just thought you moved on from charred to rare, whatever. Liking raw meat isn't that weird. People change Xander, life moves on."

He collapses back, deflated by the pent up emotions he's let pounce out and by her refusal to admit what she's had to have seen. "Does everyone resent people they love for not respecting their place in the hierarchy? Does everyone want to punch-out their best friends for bossing them around?"

"No, that's…" Resentment is her long-time companion, nothing she wants to lay out now, but also nothing more than human to her.

"Willow, it's not like I thought 'oh, they're really on my nerves now, I wish they would shut up'. I mean 'if Buffy doesn't stop telling me what to do, I'm going to rip her windpipe out with my teeth'."

Violent fantasies, in Psych, they learned that is one of the signs of various mental illnesses, but she's had more than one of her own. "We all have issues, the group dynamic thing can be hard, be confusing. Stop yelling at me. We don't do normal very much, so I don't know what 'normal' people are like, ok?. You didn't ever try to kill her, so you don't have to hate yourself for it"

"I didn't tell you the whole thing." Rubs his fingers across his forehead, smoothes his eyebrows, and she's well aware that this could be bad, that whatever else he may have done without telling her could be 'a police matter'. But she accepted that a long time ago, the hiding the bodies part of the job, and she owes him that much.

"I'm listening, but don't expect me to like whatever you're going to say."

"When I tried to force myself on Buffy, it wasn't because of…I don't know what, feeling. It was because I thought she had the best genes. I was the male version of Miss French. Buffy could have given me strong children, I knew that, could smell it."

Willow wants to hit him in the head with the lamp, wants to tell him what an asshole he is for making her cope with this now, jump up and down and lose complete control of her temper, but the drawn look on Xander's face, the acceptance that he's only getting what he's due, scares her. "Maybe you're imagining those things, that you're kind of just making it up, that you're looking for things to pin on the hyena, paranoia, there's a lot of it around."

And here she gives him an out, offers up a chance to get out of it after all, and he's tempted, but the promise of not having to live tomorrow with a lie is too welcoming. "No, I know I'm not. I don't think like other people, like you. Not for a long time."

"Why?" Snakes her leg out to hook over his knee, to just give him that, since he won't take anything else. Her instincts force her to try to comfort him; he's Xander, Xander who's a big, stupid liar, but Xander no matter what.

"I know you still aren't the biggest Anya fan, don't get why I'm with her even now, but when I first met her, when we went to the Prom, she called me an Alpha male. It might have been off-hand, just some stupid shit she read in a book, but for me, it was like she was admitting something no one else saw. She saw me as I saw myself. Then, when we were just interlocking parts, and she would leave at night, I would feel this urge, this scary, powerful urge, to grab her and force her to stay, to sleep with me, just to sleep. And after the first time she did, I felt this click, this rightness I can't explain. Sleeping alone wasn't ever right for me after the 'possession'. I just never understood why I couldn't sleep well, I thought it was being afraid of vampires."

"Lots of people feel that way."

He yanks on the end of the seam of her sock where the thread is starting to unravel. "Yeah, people like Oz."

"Oz? I never knew that about him, but I guess there were lots of things I never knew about him. You told him about this?" She yanks his shirt to get his attention, forces him to pay direct attention to her and not her foot.

A shrug. "I told him some things. A couple times when I was drunk, I talked to him about it. I knew he wouldn't say anything, and that he might come close to understanding."

"I get that. Fine, so you told someone else, and I'm really hurt by that, by the way, that you couldn't trust me, but why are you confessing it all now. It couldn't have waited until we had some time, had some sleep at least?" She relaxes again. As far as dirty secrets go, she's had her share. Kept things from Xander, from Buffy, that she wishes she'd never wanted to. She still has a few, just things that are for her, and that didn't used to be important to her, nothing was real until Xander knew. Somewhere along the way, real and unreal blended together until neither had much meaning.

Shadows from the floor lamp fall across her face, and Xander watches Willow draw back into herself, thinks that's a good place for her to go, because he's not done yet, and she'll need some mental padding for the rest. "No, it kind of spilled out, it's been on my mind non- stop since Joyce died. I *had *to tell you, because I never told Buffy, I never told her that I remember everything. She blew it all off, just forgave me and never said anything about it. I never told her I was sorry. That I hated myself for it. That she barely got away, even with the desk. And now there is no next time, there never will be a next time."

"You couldn't help yourself, she knew that." She watches him from her odd angle, with her head cocked in a painful position. His feelings were her feelings were Giles' feelings; they all had the same regrets, different reasons for it, but the same nonetheless. And she knows that just because it's universal, that doesn't make it any less important, any less horrible for Xander. But she's also weary down to her teeth, wants to click on the television and watch bad videos, curl up and forget he even mentioned this tonight. She rubs her eyes. Too tired for this, to get too pissed at him, to want to take any measure of vengeance. Too many years have passed, too much between them, and both of them wrecked in a way that they had no way to prepare for.

He twists so that his head turns in her direction again but doesn't look at her face, slouches down and starts to talk. "So, now I just have you to apologize to. I'm sorry Willow. I knew they would rip you to pieces. That you were going to be on the menu if you didn't get the hell away from me. I was together enough to get that, to know that Buffy could fight for herself, but you were just going to die. So, I tried to get you to leave me alone. You're too smart. Smart means a challenge to the pecking order and I couldn't have that."

"The way I remember it, you humiliated me in front of a group of people, and then tried to kill me. Now you're saying you knew what you were doing?" He's starting to really get on her nerves. She thought he would drop it, now he'd admitted it, but instead of letting that be enough, he's dredging up memories she's spent years repressing.

"I wasn't going to kill you, Wills. I figured out that you weren't going to leave me alone, so I was going to mark you, so the others wouldn't touch you." Very steady, as calm as possible.

Her body language unconsciously mimics his; she sits up straight and puckers her mouth. "Mark me how?"

"You know how."

"Rape me?" Her voice quivers on that first word and her heart thuds and races. Can't picture Xander hurting her that way, and forces her mind away from even trying to create the scenario, trying to envision Xander and pain and screams torn from her own throat.

"Would it have been?" His eyes lock on hers, one eyebrow raised, and he's really asking, which she can't believe.

"What in the hell is wrong with you? Are you possessed right now? Because you're not showing much of a self-preservation instinct!" Swallows down tears, and hopes the light is dim enough to hide the flush that she feels on her cheeks at the tone of his voice. Suppresses the urge to squeeze her thighs together, or cross her arms over her breasts. And doesn't answer the question, no, most definitely not answering it.

He sighs and plucks her hand from her lap, lays it palm to palm with his own. Not holding it, just placing it there, tracing a figure eight over the pale blue veins that are visible on the back of her hand. "I'm being honest, Wills, I'm telling you how it is, how it was. It's dirty and wrong to you, but to me, it's just something about myself, a part of me, hate me if you want, I understand."

From her point of view, the eight is tilted sideways, infinity, and she says, "I could never hate you, Xander, but why did you tell me? What do you expect me to say? What you told me doesn't sound like an apology, it sounds like you explaining your behaviour away. You don't sound sorry, it sounds like you miss being like that."

"I am apologizing to you. I'm sorry. I'm more sorry than you can ever know that it was you, that I said those things, that I thought what I did." His finger stops moving, but she can feel the pattern branded into her skin.

"You shouldn't have told me." It's too much, Xander admitting to hurting her on purpose, possessed but aware, then being a total asshole about it. She knows he has no idea that he *is * being an asshole, but that doesn't lessen the impact.

His voice breaks when he speaks. "You'd rather I turned into super- brood guy, just kept all of it pent up? You're my best friend, you'd rather I never told you something this important?"

She starts to pull her hand away, but he foils her attempt to make it look casual by lacing his fingers with hers. His fingers are very brown against her skin, and the tips of them are rough. "No, that's not what I mean. You should have told me a long time ago, or else waited until next month, just not now, not today. You really would have, you know, forced me?" Her breath catches on the pause, and she just barely managed to say 'forced' instead of the other word, the one that hurts her head to think about. It doesn't fit into anything in her Xander frame of reference, no matter what, and she's not looking for a way to push it in there.

"I didn't think I would have to." There's that pitch of his voice again, and she does shiver this time, lowers her head so her hair falls forward like a curtain she can hide behind.

"You knew how I felt back then?" Stalling now, because she's had herself a hundred painful deconstructions of just how much he knew and just how little he cared back then, and that's not exactly right because he *cared.* But he never *wanted* and she did, she did so much.

"You mean did I know you liked me then, or do you mean that you don't like me like that anymore, like past tense?" Typical Xander-speak and any other day she would have followed that complexity through every twist, but not now, not when there's deaths, plural, behind her and sledgehammer confessions in her path.

She blinks at him. "Uh, what? "

"Are you asking me if I knew that you felt like that even then, or that because you don't feel that way anymore, did I know you once felt that way?" His palm sweats lightly under her hand, and the pulse in his neck jumps like a tic.

She feels her forehead wrinkle when she looks back up. "Xander, are you asking me if I still *like * you like you?"

"Could be." There's the slightest bit of pressure being exerted on her arm as he begins to pull her hand towards him, making her rock forward like he's the magnet and she's one of those tiny, steel ball bearings they used to use in science class.

"Why?" She lets herself be drawn closer, lets him settle one arm over her shoulder, her head tucked in the hollow of his bicep.

"I just confessed my darkest secret, don't I get a free pass to ask a question?" She can't see his face anymore but his body is tense. She can tell he wants to relax, come across as the clown, but it's not quite getting the follow-through.

"You always have as many free-passes as you want, but is now the time to bring this up? It's a strange question to ask after everything else tonight." She sits up, half indignant that he won't let any of this go, that he keeps upping the stakes, bringing more to the table by the minute.

"Not really all that strange." His arm curves around behind her neck, hand on the other shoulder and for a second she feels trapped, like a bunny that wandered into a snare. She's caught fast, fight or flight reaction not quite kicked in yet.

"Because you want me to say yes." Now she's the tense one, her back ramrod straight and the impulse to relax into the familiarity of Xander's comfort beaten back by the way she can see so much more than that on the line here tonight.

"That didn't sound like a question."

"It wasn't."

His hand tightens on her shoulder, fingers disappearing into the nap of her fuzzy sweater. "Maybe I do want you to say yes. Maybe I want you to just give me something, something I can't figure out, anything to make all of this go away."

"To make time reverse?"

"Yeah, maybe, maybe I just want to know what would have been, fuck, I don't know. I'm scared to regret, to not say all those little Fritos under the couch cushion thoughts, because maybe tomorrow isn't there."

"I'm a Frito?" This is a scene that's played out in her head a thousand plus times. Xander suddenly realizing that, really, they were two pieces of the same puzzle, and they needed each other to be whole. But it never went like this; it never included two other lovers. In her mental theatre, everyone else disappears mysteriously, never to have to be dealt with. And it was always in an amorphous future where they both looked eighteen forever and were the uncomplicated good-guys.

One of the two tactics he expected, a blow to the head, or complete denial. "Are you avoiding this by saying as little as humanly possible?"

"No?" In her mind, Willow streams through other embraces, other arms that were not-Xander. Oz's compact body and serious nature, Tara's soft, round curves and shy stutter. Were they just placeholders for her, did she let herself be drawn in to people who would never - could never - replace the thing she was so sure she would have in the end?

"Just forget it." He flaps his hand at her like it's a magical warding, that he can just undo all the words between them tonight.

She leans forward, shoves her finger under his chin so that he's forced to make eye contact. "That's the thing, I mean, you offer me something I thought I wanted for most of my life, and I'm, I'm, frazzled! I'm not thinking straight already. I mean, Angel, and all that, and you know, and Tara was…you saw, and here you are saying 'Let's hop in bed, because we might be dead tomorrow, and by the way, I would have raped you to keep you safe, and I want to sleep with you after all, but only now that we're both with other people and Buffy's dead. You're Mr. I Don't Know What I Want Until It's GONE!" As the last words escape her mouth, she clamps her palm over it. The sob breaks out from behind her shaking fingers, and Xander's there, pulling her in, holding on to her when she tries to shimmy free.

Xander didn't think there could be more guilt to add to his list, but he just picked up a new item. All the time he let it go, and he picks now. "Like I said, forget it, I know it was wrong, I just had to tell you about that stuff, and the other part just came along with it."

"So, you don't really want to hop into bed with me, it was just some side benefit to confession?" She gets a modicum of satisfaction from wiping her snot on his collar, exerts enough force to get partially away, but allows him to keep one arm slung around her.

He works his fingers up from her back, along her neck and into her hair. Tears are popping out of his eyes one by one, tiny, transparent jewels, and she can't bring herself to fling him away. "No. No two times. I don't want you hop into bed with me. I want to be with you, because you're my grounding thing, my center, that place that I always come to when anything goes wrong, and I need that, but I need more than a pat on the head or a hug this time, and yeah, I have Anya, but she's not you, and something's always going to be missing when I come to her when I feel like this. Yeah, I lied to you, but did come clean, and there's this huge missing thing from my Willow file, and I had to at least try to get that thing, to know it all, because I know how you taste, but this week, that's just not enough."

"Are you saying that I'm your pack?" Wipes his tears with the sleeve of her sweater, feels the saline soak through the fabric onto her wrist, thinks of his newly conceded abilities, if she's marked by him now and has been time after time.

Half grin through a few late tears. "Kind of. We always were a pack of three. Jesse, you and me. Buffy, you and me. Who is there now? No third person, and I don't really even have you anymore." The last part plaintive, almost a whine and she knows he didn't mean it to come out that way, but old patterns are what she and he do in times of stress. He gets hurt, and she's supposed to fix it.

One of his hands finds its way to her thigh, just the top, but extremely present. "Xander, our lives are more complex than that, you love Anya, as much as I tried not to believe it, I know now, you love her. And…Tara. What you and I have, it's not that kind of thing. It's something different."

"It doesn't have to be." Back in her space fully, fingers wrapped around her wrist, pulling her palm to his face, to his mouth. Just one kiss there, but he doesn't set her free.

"It does now. You're confused, and scared, and hey, you just exposed yourself to me, secret and everything. I couldn't take advantage of that, of the black hole we're both in." She's only Willow, a just- woman kind of person, and her righteousness is tainted; she doesn't think she can resist him too much, and isn't that what he said he always knew about her?

"You're a better person than me then, because I could just drop right in it." He's holding her tighter now but not in a hurting way, not the way that leaves bruises anyway. His eyes are unfathomable, two echoing holes to the intangible one she's trying to scramble out of. She knows that look; she's seen it on his face before, and even though it wasn't recent, it's not something she'll ever erase from her memory. He *wants* her, and how many times has she dreamed of this, ached for it, even as she lay sleeping beside Tara?

As he leans in, takes her silence for acquiescence, she places her hand on his chest, not pushing but halting, and her heart bleeds to see his face fall. Somewhere inside, the what-ifs have started their cacophony - what if he's just freaking, what if he decides tomorrow that it was just a thing, just a stress-thing and never mind, Wills, we should forget all about it. What if she lets herself fall again, and there's no Buffy-net there to catch her? No Tara to take her back with sincere regret? No Xander to come to because her life is in tatters? What if she's just using him because she's so fragmented she doesn't even know what's happening here?

"Willow?" So many times she's almost told him how much she wishes it had been different, that he would have chosen a better time, given it another go after Oz. Here's her chance, just like he had his. To tell him that they can try again, after Tara, after Anya, if that time comes. To tell him that she's always loved him, that she's here for him, and she still believes that after all the bodies hit the floor, they'll always be together, one way or another. But she needs to do things her way, and this isn't it.

She breaks his embrace, pushes his hands off her arms. "Xander, I'm not going to be your consolation prize. I'm not going to sleep with you to make your grief any less, even if it might make me feel better too. If we were both single, if if if, then maybe, but not now, not when I don't even get half this conversation yet. Not when I have to reconsider who you are and what you mean to me, and I don't want to have to do that, but I do. You're not who I thought you were, but I'm also not who you think I am. I love you, but we have to deal with the Buffy thing first."

The door to the apartment bangs open. A flurry of movement, stomping, odd cursing. "Did you know that Safeway isn't open 24 anymore? Don't you think once you're open 24 hours a day, you shouldn't be able to not be? I had to go all the way across town to get groceries." She lugs three nylon shopping bags into the room, slams the door with her foot.

"An, people are asleep, don't slam the door." Xander settles back against the couch, tugs Willow with him.

"Were you guys crying? I have chocolate, and pineapple. Do you like pineapple?" The last addressed to Willow, she doesn't wait for an answer. "Father Jennings told me that there is a support group we can join. I think it would be a good idea. You know, to talk and cry in public. Would you want to go with me, Willow?"

"Is it Catholic? Because I don't feel comfo…" Anya tosses a pint of Ben and Jerry's to Xander.

"Oh, right, you're Jewish. It's cool, I was afraid of the church at first too, you know, thinking I was going to hell no matter what. You know, like Jews. See, we have something in common!"

"Yeah, going to hell anyway, that's me."