Who Do People Say That I Am?: 1
by Mediancat
Part One

You would have thought from looking at Obsidia that the demon would be no challenge for a girl scout, much less a well-armed Slayer and her companions. Obsidia was 3 feet tall and basically looked like a giant bowling ball with feet and a beard.

Unfortunately, he also had a powerful innate magical ability; he could make people see who they really were, into the deepest, darkest corners of their psyche. He fed on the anguish they felt afterwards.

And right now he was doing a pretty damn good job of making the Slayer and her friends feel immense pain and self-loathing. With one exception, they were all stumbling blindly around the room where Obsidia had been hiding, too caught up in their own misery to be able to do anything about the demon. Buffy was weeping on the sofa, Willow was hanging out the window, he'd had to deck dead-boy to stop him from staking himself, and Giles had run into the wall and knocked himself silly. That left Xander alone in the mansion with the demon.

Now Obsidia wasn't bloodthirsty, so everyone would probably live out the night, but that didn't mean that they could just let him waltz away without at least making a token attempt to stop him from skipping town.

Xander knew he could take the little demon physically, but emotionally was another matter. He had enough mental baggage to open his own luggage store. So--Obsidia having apparently lost track of him during the earlier part of the struggle--Xander hefted the fireplace poker in his hand and crept around the edges of the room. God help Obsidia if he caught up to him, because nobody--NOBODY--treated his friends like that.

"Come here, boy," the demon rasped, mouth showing an icy-black tongue. "I can't promise it won't hurt, but I can promise the hurt won't last...for more than a few days or so. Now doesn't that seem like a fair trade to you?"

As Obsidia passed by, Xander took a deep breath and swung the poker downwards, knocking the demon to the floor. When Xander moved in to strike again, though, Obsidia rolled over and suddenly their gazes locked.

And Xander knew himself. All of the guilt, all of his jealousy, his petty insecurities, came flooding into his brain uncontrollably. He began taking short, deep breaths as...

something happened. A flash of mental light pierced the darkness and guilt overwhelming him, and his breathing slowed down to normal, and he straightened up.

He knew who he was. He REALLY knew who he was. And he wished like hell he'd still been ignorant.

Time enough to deal with that later. Right now, there was an annoying little demon nearby whose RIP date was long overdue.

Obsidia looked upwards in shock. "What happened?" he demanded. "How did you break free?" Nervously, the demon began skittering backwards as fast as his stubby legs would carry him.

Not nearly fast enough. Poker in hand, Xander stode up to the demon and swung downwards savagely, several times.

After three blows Obsidia stopped screaming.

After ten, he stopped doing so much as twitching.

Then, numbly, Xander dropped the poker on the demon's corpse and walked away. The first thing he did was check on everyone. Giles and Angel were still unconscious, and Buffy appeared to be in the middle of crying herself to sleep on the sofa. So he let her, and walked over and pulled Willow into the room. She was staring blankly, breathing and apparently conscious, but not responding to anything. Gently, he guided her over to the end of the couch where Buffy was sleeping and sat her down. And if he didn't want Angel to keep trying to wake up and ram a stake through his heart, he'd have to find a way of stopping him. The chains would do nicely, and after a bit of work he had the vampire securely fastened.

Then he prepared himself for a long wait.

Slowly, Buffy's internal defenses began to reassert themselves and Obsidia's effects wore off. She took a couple of deep breaths and hoisted herself to her feet.

Willow was sitting there next to her, breathing shallowly, staring straight forward and seeing nothing. Giles was stretched out on a rug, apparently sleeping, and Angel was chained up to the wall, his face an equal mix of fury and desperation. "Buffy," he begged. "Let me go."

A tired voice from the far side of the room said, "No. All he wants to do right now is kill himself." Buffy turned and saw Xander sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall, not ten feet from a very dead demon.

"Your work?" she said, pointing to Obsidia's remains. He nodded. "Well, then, go Xander. How'd you do it?"

"Caught him by surprise," he said. "Never saw me coming."

There was a tone in Xander's voice that Buffy definitely didn't like. He definitely sounded exhausted, but there was something more there, too. "How long have you been here?" she asked. Angel kept pleading for release behind him. Mentally, she tuned him out.

"You've been out fourteen hours," Xander said. "About six hours ago I went out, found a phone, and called your mom and Oz. They're covering for the rest of us." He stood up. "Look, I've been up for the last thirty straight hours or so...would you mind if I took a pass on the rest of the suicide watch?"

It was an unusually grim joke for Xander, and in fact as Buffy looked into her friend's eyes she could find no trace of humor at all. "Sure," she said. "I can handle it. You okay?"

Smiling almost coldly, Xander said, "When am I ever not?" Then he left the mansion.

Part Two

It took a couple of days before everyone was completely free of Obsidia's effects. Angel was bothered the longest; a full ten hours after Xander had exited the mansion, he'd still been begging for a stake or some sunlight to end his worthless existence. Giles gave Xander a tremendous amount of credit; he'd put his own well-known personal feelings for Angel aside and, at some personal risk, stopped the vampire from committing suicide.

Since then, though...Xander had been absent from school for a couple of days. essentially holing up in his room and talking to no one. Phone calls had gone unanswered; knocks at his bedroom door, from Willow, Buffy, and even once Giles himself had been met by a curt "go away." Even more oddly, Buffy had twice tried subtly to force her way into the room and failed.

And what was worse, Giles thought as he shelved some books, was that no one knew precisely the cause of Xander's distress. Buffy had told him that he seemed a bit off when she recovered from Obsidia's insidious effects, but she couldn't give him anything more definitive than that...and Willow, against the librarian's better judgment, had tried a spell to see if perhaps Obsidia had managed to affect Xander after all. But once Angel broke free there were no traces of the demon's powers remaining anywhere in Sunnydale.

Unfortunately, this still left up in the air the question of what was disturbing Xander. As Giles reached up to put a volume on Ancient Greek history away, the book slipped from his hands and crashed to the floor. But before he could climb down to retrieve it, he heard Xander's voice saying, "Hold on a second, Giles. I got it." He turned and saw the young man walking across the room. To put it charitably, Xander looked like hell, and hell on a day when Satan was elsewhere and the maintenance crew had decided to take the day off. His clothes were dirty, his hair appeared as though he'd been sleeping on it the better part of a week, and his walk was that of a man being led off to the electric chair.

"Xander?" Giles asked. "Are you--"

"Hold on a second..." he said as he reached down to pick up the book. Distractedly, Giles shoved it back into place and jumped down onto the floor. "Can we talk, Giles? In private?"

"Certainly. Is this in--"

"In private, Giles," Xander repeated, and walked off towards the office. Giles followed him in there, concerned and curious all at once. "Sit down," Xander said. Seeing no reason why not, Giles did so. "Now close your eyes and promise not to open them until I'm done speaking." Giles hesitated at this part of the request. "Please?" Puzzled, Giles closed his eyes and gave Xander his word.

"Okay, now," Xander began, "Obsidia DID get to me. I'd hit the little bastard once with the poker when he caught my eyes the same as he did everyone else. And I started to feel the effects. You know, I've done some pretty crummy things in the last year and a half...and Obsidia was stripping down my defense mechanisms one by one. The nasty things I'd done to Angel, my betraying Cordelia...and then I found out the truth: I'm not the person I thought I was." Xander's voice deepened as he spoke.

"That sounds like the same thing that happened to the rest of us," Giles said.

A booming sigh echoed throughout the tiny office. "No. I mean, I'm LITERALLY not the person I thought I was. You can open your eyes now."

Giles did so, and had there not been a wall behind him he would certainly have jumped backwards. For what stood before him was Xander-shaped...

but it was most definitely not Xander. It was a pale gray in color, and largely featureless, which gave off a truly odd effect considering that it was still wearing Xander's clothing.

"See what I mean?" it said almost sheepishly.

"Yes..." I began. "Then, well...I mean, if you're not Xander..."

"Who am I?" The question was spat out. "Good question. I don't even remember my name. I mean, I know I'm a kind of shapechanger, but I couldn't tell you what kind. I can take--" and then, slowly, over the course of fifteen seconds, he slowly changed his form to match Giles'--"the shape of anyone or--" again, slowly, he changed into a large gray wolf--"anything I want to. I can't change my weight, though." Seeing the disconcerted look in Giles' eyes, he once again became Xander Harris...though in the shift to wolf form, the shirt and pants had both been ripped, leaving him standing there in socks, shoes, and a peculiarly ugly pair of pea-green boxer shorts.

"How long...how long have you been Xander?" Giles asked. "Or do you not remember that either?"

"No...that much I remember, even if all the details aren't clear in my head. I've been playing at being--no, I've actually BEEN--Xander Harris for eighteen months. That's why I have difficulty calling up details from before--I've never stayed in one form this long before. I wasn't supposed to..."

Good lord...that long? Giles could barely bring himself to ask the next question. "If you've been Xander, then, then where is the real...?"

"Dead." The word hung in the air there between us. "I had nothing to do with it--I don't think I did, no, I was only brought into the room after it was all over. I'm sure of that." The Xander thing took a deep breath and repeated, sounding a lot more sure of himself, "Yes. I'm sure of that."

Stunned, Giles said, "Xander...is dead?" A fury greater than he would have imagined surged through him and he sprang to his feet, slamming the shapeshifter up against the far wall of his office. "Tell me what happened. Tell me how Xander died, and who's responsible, and tell me now."

"I like the idea of revenge myself," the creature replied. "Believe me. But it's not going to happen." A pause. "If you'll sit back down I'll tell you the story...what I remember of it, that is."

Satisfying as it would be to pound the shapechanger senseless, he knew that it would get him nowhere. And besides, it seemed willing to tell everything anyway. Giles returned to his chair.

"There was this kid vampire--the Anointed One, I'm guessing. He had me brought somewhere and basically we made a deal--if this spell he was working to bring the Master back didn't work--and it didn't, and thank God for that--then I'd take Xander's place, learn what I could about all of you, and wait for further instructions." The pain shone on the shapechanger's face as he went on. "We made the switch in the library, that night when the vampires came to take you and Willow. As they were dragging your bodies out, I was escorted in and placed next to the dying Xander. I absorbed his memories as he lay there--otherwise you would have figured me out inside a day. Then one of the vampires laid some kind of amnesia spell on me...and when Buffy came into the library a bit later, as far as I was concerned--and as far as she was concerned--I WAS Xander Harris. And then the Anointed essentially dropped off the map after Spike and company showed, and I never got the counterspell or whatever laid on me."

"And--you didn't recall that you were a shapeshifter until Obsidia forced you to stare at your true self."

"Got it in one, G-Man." A bitter laugh. "Look at that. I've been the Xandman for so long I can't not be him."

Confused, Giles asked, "Then, since you had your life back--such as it was--why did you not just leave town? You've had ample opportunity--"

"Because that's not the way Xander Harris operates--operated. He doesn't abandon his friends--DIDN'T. See how hard it is for me?"

"So, again, why did you come to me?"

"Isn't it obvious? Before Obsidia showed up, I was happy. Well, at least I was Xander. And I want that back." Unexpectedly, he threw himself on his knees--Giles noticed that he was back to thinking of this Xander thing as a him, and not an it--"Help me get it back. Please. All these books in here, you have to have access to some kind of amnesia spell."

"What you are asking," Giles said cautiously, "is my complicity in a great act of deception. To restore you to your prior state--or more accurately, states--of ignorance, and then tell no one about it...to willfully cover for someone who at the very least is an accomplice in Xander's death..."

Again the shapechanger begged. "Please, Giles. Will you do it?"

Part Three

Giles took a deep breath. "I don't know."

The shapechanger blinked. "I had been hoping for something a little more decisive..."

"Look," the Watcher answered irritably. "This is a tremendous favor you're asking me. It's not an easily made decision." No reaction from the Xander thing. "You're asking me to put aside personal feelings--and my knowledge of a tremendous crime that has been committed--in order to save you pain."

"No! that's not--well, okay, it is. What I remember of my earlier life--see, a shapechanger doesn't really have a true identity. We're defined by the circumstances, by what we need to be, or what others need us to be. Let's just say that telling a shapechanger to be yourself wouldn't mean much. And now that I realize that's who I was--I don't ever want to go back there."

Suddenly, unaccountably, Giles was reminded of a Bible verse. Though he was not himself Christian, he knew the book as thoroughly as he did many other mystical and religious texts, and could recite great chunks by memory:

"Jesus and his disciples went on to the villages around Caesarea Philippi. On the way he asked them, "Who do people say that I am?" They replied, "Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets." "But what about you?" He asked. "Who do you say I am?" Peter answered, "You are the Christ." Jesus warned them not to tell anyone about him."

It was from the gospel of Mark--a major transition point in the book, in fact, where Jesus ceased being seen as others wanted to see him, and started to be seen as who HE wished to be seen as.

A very neat parallel to the current situation. The Xander thing wished to begin defining himself.

"But it's not just me I want to save pain," the shapechanger continued. "It's Buffy, and Willow, and Oz...and even Cordelia and Angel!" A feeble laugh. "See, deadboy's supposed to have a nose for these things, and I'd like to spare him the embarrassment of having missed out on blowing the lid off the lie that is my life." Another pause. "No, think about, Giles. How would they feel if they found out? Or, another way, how did you and Buffy and I react when we all thought Willow had been envamped?"

"Enough," Giles said. "You have done all you can towards convincing me. I still need some time to think it over...and research the appropriate ritual." Truth be told, he was definitely inclined to do it. But he was...too emotionally involved. He really wasn't the one who should be making this decision.

But who else was there who should?

The shapechanger didn't seem completely discouraged. Perhaps he already knew Giles' inclinations. "Guess that's the best I can hope for at the moment," he said, though his voice gave the lie to that statement. Not that Giles blamed him, given the circumstances. "But you have to promise me something, G-Man--don't tell anyone about this."

"I wouldn't dream of it," the librarian answered. "I swear I shall not discuss your problems with another living soul." He looked at the clock. "Shall we say two hours, then?"

The Xander thing agreed and left the library. First Giles watched him go. Then, as soon as he was sure the shapechanger was out of the immediate vicinity, he casually picked up the phone and called Buffy.

"Buffy? No, no, nothing so urgent. But I need you to do me a favor..."

The two hours were the hardest of Xander's life--whichever life you care to think about. He tried to slip back to his house--and dammit, it WAS his house--unnoticed, but didn't even make it so far as the edge of the school grounds before he was spotted, by Willow and Oz.

It was agony, having to try to explain his absence so it made a kind of sense--without coming anywhere near the truth. Unfortunately, Willow wouldn't take generalities for an answer, and honestly Xander couldn't blame her. Him holing up in his room when emotionally hurt wasn't such an odd occurrence, but for two days straight?

But the times he remembered--like when Buffy'd rejected him for a date to the spring fling--weren't really his memories. Did he have the right to try to live up to the legacy of the real Xander Harris? It's not like he'd been doing such a stellar job of it so far. He'd been been petty, and insecure, and he'd betrayed Buffy--for a greater good, and Cordy--for revenge, and Oz--for no real good reason at all, not to mention screwing both of the latter two with his little fling with Willow. Why did he want to be Xander Harris?

And the answer came to him: because being Xander Harris was a lot better than being a nameless, faceless shapechanger. And on the balance, Xander Harris was a pretty heroic guy. Along the way he'd done a lot of good, as well. Saved the world a few times, stopped the school from getting blown up, faced off against Angel when he was bad, and put his own non-superpowered (well, at least as far as he knew at the time) butt on the line several times to help Buffy. Yeah, he'd done a whole hell of a lot wrong, but he'd also done a whole hell of a lot right.

And now the question was, would he be allowed to do it?

There was a more immediate concern: How to get away from Willow without hurting her feelings. Help came from an entirely unexpected direction.

"Xander," Willow was pleading, "You know it's not good to keep this stuff inside..."

"Actually, maybe it is," Oz said. "People deal with emotional trauma in different ways. I'm not exactly the talkative type myself."

"But Xander--"

"He's always talked to you in the past. But no matter how much it hurts you--" and he gave Xander the evil eye as he said that--"this may be something he needs to deal with on his own."

"Thanks, Oz," he said, and meant it. "I'm sorry, Will, I really am--but I need to get going." Xander managed to hide out for the remaining time, then slowly strolled back to the library. When he got there he thought he saw someone vanish into the stacks, but as he walked into the room there was no one in sight. Paranoia run rampant, he supposed.

Giles looked up as Xander walked towards him. "I'll do it," the Watcher said.

Xander almost sagged to the floor in relief. "Thanks, Giles. I wish there was something I could do to pay you back--"

"There isn't--and I wouldn't accept payment even if there were. I'm not doing this for you."

"Then, on Buffy's behalf--"

"I'm not doing it for her either. Or Willow, or Oz, or anyone else. I'm doing this for Xander."

"But I'm Xander..." Now he was confused.

"No, you're not. Not yet. I'm doing this for the Xander I knew. He doesn't deserve to die--at least not like this. But that YOU are as concerned with how it will affect others as how it affects you--that played a large role in my decision." He closed the book in front of him. "Now, the actual spell itself is fairly simple. It involves a few simple herbs..." he saw the look on Xander's face. "And, of course, you don't care about the details at all." He pulled out something that looked like an icepack. "Here. Hold this against your head..."

Xander was happy. For the rest of his life...no more wondering about who he was. No more searching for identity. From here on out, he would be Xander Harris...

for better, or worse.

He reached for the icepack and pressed it against his forehead. "Hello darkness, my old friend..."

After a couple of minutes, Xander blinked. What was going on? He looked across the table. "Giles...why do I have this icepack on my head? I don't remember being hit there or anything...was I?"

"Probably dropped on it several times when you were a child," Giles muttered. "It turns out Obsidia had a power we didn't suspect...a kind of death curse, actually. As you were killing him he planted a part of his mind in you to torture you. That's why you've been acting so strangely recently."

"It is?" For some, reason, Xander really wanted to believe Giles right now.

"It is," the Watcher confirmed. "Nothing for you to worry about anymore--it's all been taken care of. You won't be tortured by those memories any more. I'll explain what happened to everyone else." He stood up. "But right now, best you get home and get some rest and try to forget about the last couple of days."

"Will do, G-Man." Xander nodded and walked out, heading home. As he looked around, things seemed...different, somehow. Like a great burden had been lifted, even if he was no longer sure exactly what burden that had been.

And for the first time in a long time, he was content.

Giles called back into the stacks. "You can come out now," he said.

Cautiously, Angel walked out into the main area of the library. "I heard it all...did he seem alright to you?"

"The spell apparently worked. With any luck, he will never again recall that he was ever anything or anyone except Xander Harris." He turned to the vampire and with only a trace of reluctance extended his hand. "Thank you very much for your assistance. I don't know if I would have been able to find the right spell in time without your aid."

Angel shook the offered hand. "You're welcome...but, still, why did you get in touch with me? Why ME, specifically?"

"I needed someone who would have a clear head about Xander...who would be able to look at the situation with more objectivity than I would."

There was something else there. "And..." he prompted.

"And," Giles said, blowing air out through clenched teeth, "I wanted you because this is the kind of heavy emotional burden you're used to carrying. In many ways, Xander is more like you than he is me. Neither of you has a great deal of success repressing emotions.. and I wanted to know if NOT having the spell cast would be something he could handle."

Angel shook his head. "No. It's not something he'd be able to handle." Then, without warning, he struck Giles in the back of the head, knocking him out. Angel caught the Watcher before he hit the floor, and, as he reached for the compress--the magic stayed good for a while--and placed it on Giles' head, he said, "And it's not something you should have to handle either."

After all, Angel had so many emotional burdens to carry around already...what was one more?

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