Just One Night: Talking to myself
by vogonguard
Not mine. Oh no.
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Outside the two Xanders walked along the road in silence for a while and then the elder spoke.
“To begin with the matter that is at the front of your mind….”
”You can read my mind?”
“In this one case, yes. To begin with your most obvious question, no I am not still a virgin.”
”Yeah, right. That was more or less what I was wondering…. So who?”
“I’ll get to that…”
”That’s getting to be kinda annoying, you know?”
”Sorry, but first I’ve got a question for you….
“For me? But you’ve gotta know everything that…”
”Not quite. Tell me, why exactly did I never notice that Willow had the crush of the ages on me? Hmm?”
”Willow?”
”Uh huh.”
”Willow wants to…”
”Willow would be deeply delighted if you would just take a simple look in her direction and actually see her. If you were to go so far as to actually kiss her… Well, there’s no knowing where that would lead. She’s pretty, she’s waaay smarter than I’ll ever be (and let me observe that I find that very sexy in a woman: which is just as well too now that I think about it) so why did I never notice until well, until we were both so mixed up with other people that the first time we kissed was a major disaster ‘cause both our significant others found us in flagrant delights? Hmm? Explain it to me, ‘cause it’s not exactly clear in my head right now.”
”The first time?”
”The second and last time was the morning of my wedding. Not to Willow. It was… enough to make me regret a few things. Which is why I’m bringing all this up first, before I get onto the actual achieving of non-virginity.”
The teenaged boy looked at the one eyed man and opened his mouth a couple of times to start to reply and then shut it again. Eventually he said: “Well, she’s just Willow, y’know?”
”Yeah, I know. My best friend since forever and apparently my brain is too tiny to think about her as both the girl I borrowed crayons off and a sexy woman. At least before I have it bashed into my head by having other people start noticing. Thought I would mention the possibility to you, just to give you a head start in that direction if you decide to take a road I never did.”
”Uh huh? Willow? Humm. But you and Willow never got beyond…”
”Nope. One thing… Got a pen? Thanks. Let me write this down…” He pulled out one of his now defunct business cards for Harris Construction and scribbled rapidly. “Uh, this is the name of a web site where Willow posted some stories and poems she wrote when she was still moping over me. You. Us. Umm. Fanfic and stuff. It might help you figure out what’s going on in her head. Here you go.”
The younger man took the card and they set off again side by side along the road.
”Did you and Buffy ever….?”
”Nah. She never thought of me that way any more than I ever really thought of Willow that way. And, I gotta say, on the whole I’m really quite glad it turned out that way ‘cause Buffy’s love life was even more of a disaster area than mine.”
”Hang on, back a second. Something just…. Marriage?”
The older man held out his hands. “Note the lack of rings. I… Oh, god this is horrible, this is why I wanted to do this in private. I… I chickened out. Stood her up at the altar. I ran. I… Oh God. And she’s dead. She’s gone now. And I…. I never…”
And at that the tears that he’d been holding back since Andrew told him why Anya wasn’t on the bus began to flow and he just sat down on the side of the road and let it pour out of him.
The highschooler Xander just stood there with his mouth open. It was weird enough that he was walking beside his older self from another universe but now this great welling up of emotion… All his life he’d done his best to keep things light because, well because there was so much pain in his life that it was the only way he could survive. To see that he could become so overwhelmed… He wasn’t sure he wanted that future if it could bring him to this. Also he was deeply embarrassed and didn’t want to give himself a hug for fear of looking gay. Or something.
After a while Xander looked up at himself and grinned through the tears.
”Sorry. Sorry. It’s just…. She died in the last battle. If they’d have given me the W-I-S-H I know what I’d have asked for and it wouldn’t have been to get my eye back. Just to see her crazy face again. Have her tell me I’m an idiot. Try to make it up to her…”
”What was her name?”
”Anyankha. But the thing is…. You’ll probably never even meet Anya. We’ll tell you some of the things to look out for in your future and she’ll never come to Sunnydale and never become human…”
”What?”
”OK. Yeah. Look…. Let me start the history of my love life from the beginning and we’ll go and get the pizza and I’ll do my best not to…lose it again. ‘Kay?”
”’Kay. I’ll listen.”
”Yeah, I know. I… We’re good at that.” He held out a hand and let himself be pulled to his feet. “Right. To begin at the beginning. Chapter One of the Saga of Alexander Lavelle Harris and Various Women. Which I will entitle: Making out with Cordelia Chase.”
”WHAT?”
Back in the library, Giles had already started on a second notebook as the future Scoobies talked about the upcoming year’s surprises. The attempt by the Anointed One to revive the Master (well on it’s way to becoming moot as his remains got reduce to powder: Giles resolved to try something more final than burial with what would be left), the incident of Joyce and Ted (Willow’s copious memory dug up the killer robot’s home address for future action), Daryl’s home science project (which brought a terrified ‘eeew’ from Cordelia even as she admitted the little geek was right to chose her to be part of his perfect woman) and Mr Whitmore’s secret devotion to Mother Beozar were all dealt with as side issues. The Order of Taraka and the arrival of Kendra. But the major part of their briefing was about Spike and Drusilla. They outlined the story of the Judge and how he was finally disassembled, the story of Billy Fordham and the Sunset Club (which reduced the younger Buffy to tears and the older one joined her in sympathy) and the assault on the school during Parent-Teacher Night. And then on to the discovery of Acathla and the attempt to end the world, Kendra’s death at the hands of Drusilla and Buffy going on the run for the summer.
After he scribbled a note about the last incident, the younger Giles put the cap back on his pen and frowned.
“Buffy… Umm, older Buffy… Sorry… Umm, I can’t help noticing that whenever the discussion turns to Spike, you tend to fade into the background a little. I’m hearing what I… my counterpart thinks of him and Willow too…. But not you. Is there a reason… I’m sorry if I tread on delicate ground…”
She shut her eyes and took a deep breath. She had indeed been ‘dancing around it’ as Xander would say. Time to pay the piper….
“You want to know what I think about Spike? Hmm, well. Complicated subject. Way complicated.” She started to pace. “He’s a monster, first of all. But he’s not the same sort of monster as Angelus. Spike thought Angelus was plain crazy trying to bring Hell to Earth. Said to me that he liked things pretty much as they were with humans walking around like Happy Meals on Legs for him to gobble up as he chose. He did get involved in that weird scheme to resurrect the Judge but that was to please Drusilla, I think. He’s a fighter: I’d say his biggest thrill is a good fight. He’s not subtle but he can be cunning. He’s not an intellectual when it comes to anything except maybe poetry. Oh, and despite not having a soul, I’d say he loves Drusilla very much and she loves him. Or will until she throws him over for a chaos demon.”
”What?” Angel was astonished. “A chaos demon? With the uhhh…”
”Antlers and slime and everything. Yeah. What can I say, there’s someone for everyone and it probably helps to see the inner beauty of a chaos demon if you’re a crazy vampire seer. Anyhoo, if you ask me what I think about Spike, what I think is you should kill him. Dust him quick and sudden and get Drusilla too at the same time because if one dies without the other, there’s no length to the horrors they will pull to avenge the loss. Kill him. Because, y’know, what happened with us, with Spike splitting from Dru and getting this mind control chip put in his head so he couldn’t attack humans and then… everything else that happened that lead up to him going and actually choosing to get his soul back and being there at the end to bring down the First Evil and seal the Hellmouth…. Well, that was just too unlikely to happen. A zillion to one chance and you shouldn’t rely on it repeating. Maybe it was fate or the Powers meddling to see that it happened and if that’s so they’ll see that it happens anyway. But for me… My advice is… Dust him. You’ll save yourself a lot of heartache.”
“Spike? Spike got his soul back?” Angel looked appalled.
“Uh huh. Never did tell us how he managed it. And it left him crazy and vulnerable to the First Evil for months afterwards. But he decided he didn’t want to be a monster any more. Or maybe not just a monster.”
Angel looked suspiciously at the elder Buffy. She did not seem to want to meet his gaze. “Spike was with you… A part of your…team.”
”Uhh, yeah,” the older Willow did her best to distract Angel from looking at Buffy. “Died bravely. Brought down the whole of Sunnydale into the Hellmouth. We couldn’t have done it without…”
But Angel wasn’t to be distracted.
“What was Spike to you? Buffy? Why aren’t you…”
”Oh boy…” Willow quickly got out of the way.
“He was… I died. I told you that. I was dead for about six months before Willow managed to cast a spell that brought me back. She thought my soul was trapped. In some hell dimension. And I don’t really blame her. Not any more. I can see how she might have thought that.”
”But she wasn’t. I was wrong. I did a really dumb, wicked thing… I brought Buffy back all right. But not from hell. From heaven.”
There was silence in the room and the younger Willow seemed to shrink away from the older.
”I was… I was hurting. Living in this world was bad enough when in the back of my mind I could just remember a little of what it was like. The peace. The joy. The completeness of it. But living on the Hellmouth. With Mom gone. With all the crap that being a Slayer drops on you… Spike wasn’t a good person. But he was there. He was real. He… He gave me something to anchor myself to, though it was just dark, dark passion. He hurt me in the end, because he could, the chip in his head didn’t stop him hurting me. Maybe because of the demon that’s bound inside the Slayer or maybe because I had come back from the dead. I don’t know. But when he hurt me, really hurt me, he knew he couldn’t go on being a monster. And he chose the right path. The path to redemption. And he paid the price. In full.”
She looked up and into Angel’s eyes.
“I’m sorry, love. That’s the truth.”
Angel didn’t speak. His mouth moved in a wordless, gnawing pattern and he suddenly vamped out, roaring his anger at the ceiling before turning and running out. The younger Buffy called after him but he kept on going. From where she was sitting Faith got up and ran to the doors.
“I’ll see what I can do. You stay here. Keep talking….”
She left.
After another pause and a furious glare at her older self from the younger Buffy, the elder Giles got up and took centre stage.
“Right. As it’s the time for revelations, I think it’s my turn to make a few confessions and probably make a total idiot of myself. Let’s see now. There’s the matter of the return of the demon Eyghon, of my old friend Ethan Rayne and finally to top them all, the way the Council decided we should all celebrate Buffy’s eighteenth birthday with a little event that you” he tilted his head at his younger self, ”won’t have heard of yet. It’s called the Crucamentem.”
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