The End of 'Us'.
Xander sighed, and pulled Cordelia to a private booth. Despite her verbal protests she didn't try to stop him.
"Cordelia, This isn't exactly the right day for break-ups." He began. "It'd been better yesterday, not as bad but still bad tomorrow, but today?"
"Whatever dweeb."
"Cor, Please. Serious discussion here. I want to know where we'll stand tomorrow." He gave her a very serious look.
"No Jokes, Xander?" She asked, although her heart wasn't in making it an insult.
Xander looked around, at the various happy couples, then back at her.
"I like to think that we've tended to enjoy trading insults. That we only get hurt by them when the other said them in anger. You're certainly the only person in the school who can match, or even surpass, my wit and skill in that area."
She nodded, a small smile on her face at that. "Yeah, I enjoyed them... at times. Don't go telling anyone." She waved a finger at him to make her point.
"I won't. But we've enjoyed our time together, right? I certainly have. Seeing them, cut you out of their group just for dating me, though... That I don't enjoy. If I could do something, anything, that would mean they'd stop that but we'd still be together, great, I'd do it in less than a heartbeat.
"I like you, Cordy. A lot. And I'd like to say that with everything that's happened in the last year, if we can't be together romantically, then at least, we could be friends, right?"
Cordelia looked away. For a minute she was silent, before she spoke. "I... miss being 'Queen C'. Being the popular girl. That everyone listens to."
"It made you happy?"
She shrugged, "I guess."
"Did I make you happy?"
She was quick to reply then, "Yes."
"Bit quick to answer there Cordy."
"It's the truth though. You did... do..." She looked away for another minute, and Xander could tell she was having some serious thinkage going on.
"Then why go for the uncertainty, that you may be happy with, them..." Xander waved his hand at the crowd. "When you know you'll still be happy with me? I'm trying to understand Cor, really I am."
Cordelia sighed, as she fought with her emotions. A few months ago, it wouldn't have even been a contest. She'd have picked her clique, her popularity. But A few months ago, when they got together, they had kept it secret.
Now, It was out in the open, and she had to make the choice. But she was different, both Xander and being part of the scoobs had changed her enough that it was a difficult decision.
She looked at the faces of her group, Harmony and the rest on the dancefloor. Her eyes found their way to look at someone who was dressed worse than Xander was, Hawaiian shirt more eyeblindingly painful than what Xander used to wear. He was looking at her, and he gave her a smile and nod. She knew he was nodding at Xander.
Then someone walked passed him, hiding him for a second, and he was gone.
She looked at Xander, and she asked, "Do you think there is a way? For me to be with you and still be..."
"Popular?" Xander asked. "Not really, no. Unless the others knew the truth, but..."
Cordy sighed again, and put her head in her hands. She thought about everything that had happened.
And she looked up at him, and smiled. Then she shifted close to him on the bench, and lifting his arm, moved herself under it and cuddled him.
"I guess you don't want to break up?"
"You make me happy Xand. Just be warned, you blow this, and I'll make sure everyone knows just what it was you did, and make your life a misery, understood?"
Xander nodded with a grin. Seconds later they were kissing.
-
Whistler nodded to his old friend, Anyanka. "Told you he's smart."
"Hey, You tricked me!"
Anyanka pulled the balance demon out of the club, and started in on him. "She was going to call me next year, he was going to hurt her. A lot. Now he's not! You said you were making sure that happened, not that he'd fix the mistake here!"
Whistler rolled his eyes and innocently claimed, "How was I to know? I'm a balance demon. All's my bosses said was that he needed to know what would happen if he hurt her. You provided that speech perfectly. How was I to know he'd try the mature route tonight and for the foreseeable future completely negate it?"
Anyanka was fooled, sort of. "Well don't do that again. Ever. Or your bosses will be looking for someone else."
She frowned a moment later. "Hey, I'm going to be called quite a lot over the next century. I need to start saving power. Why wasn't I gonna be before?"
A roll of the eyes and whistler was gone, followed moments later by the vengeance demon.
A year later, and Cordelia, who had become quite popular (and Xander's popularity grew with hers, after some incident saving the football team) celebrated their second valentines together without a breakup-makeup.
The summer after that, Xander and Cordelia left on a roadtrip, stopping off in LA to drop off Angel and pick up long-term supplies.
The pair made a living hopping towns, Xander doing some freelance temp carpentry work, which he started when Cordelia remarked to a woodworker who was in need of extra help that Xander was remarkably well skilled with his hands.
Xander was smiling at the dreamy look on her face at the time, just from the memories she had brought up.
Cordelia on the other hand, was quite the thief. She wouldn't tell Xander how she learned to do what she did, but there was no doubt in his mind that Faith had taught her how to fight Vampires and steal from 'em before staking 'em. No evidence no foul, as she once said to Buff and Xander after witnessing the devilish slayer get a few thousand dollars in one night.
And so they travelled through the country, affording everything they got quite well. On the return trip from east coast, they got a large campervan with their car on a trailer behind it, to save paying for and having to find another hotel with vacancies in the middle of the night because the previous one kicked em out either due to noise or getting the place dirty. (Sex and getting rid of demons that sought the pair out.)
A few times they came across Wesley Wyndam-Price, the former Watcher who had taken care of Faith quite well, until the council tried to do the Cruciamentum on her (not knowing her date of birth) and Wes not only quit, but sent the wetworks team that had tried to force it despite his defiance, back to England via Angel Express.
Buffy never did learn that Wes ensured the council didn't send anyone else or send those back, via permanent methods that would have had her quite squeamish.
Cordy and Xand did know, though. They helped.
And so the trio every so often had met up, trading knowledge and 'intel'.
Through the pair, Wes stayed in contact with Giles and the others. After awhile, they learned that Faith had tracked him down, as she wanted to rejoin the watcher she could trust so much. She was tired of Giles' preference for Buffy, as despite his own attempts at curtailing that preferential treatment, it still occurred without his realising.
A few weeks before arriving back in Sunnyhell, the pair encountered Tara Maclay, and her male relatives. Suffice to say, Tara joined them for the trip to Sunnydale, having already applied to UC Sunnydale. Cordy didn't find out that Xander used his soldierguy stuff to sort out Tara's family in a ruthless manner. A Week after those three left to continue the road-trip, Wes and Faith turned up, and finished the job. Neither were strangers to inflicting severe physical pain to make a point, and thanks to Wes' further training her, Faith knew how to restrict herself from killing with a simple punch, and knew the entire thing was indeed necessary.
When Cordy and Xand returned to the hellmouth, they heard from the pair that they were going to join Angel in LA, in his 'Angel Investigations' thing.
Tara was introduced to Willow and Oz, and strangely enough, After some hassle with a she-wolf, she convinced Oz to stay, and willow to accept Oz' mistake as not oz's mistake but the wolfs', and helped him learn some magic stuff.
A year later and they had finally admitted to the rest of the scoobs that they were in a three-way. Xander was very shocked at that his willow was bisexual. Neither were surprised about Tara, as both he and Cordy had... already known that. After the truth came out about those three, Willow wouldn't speak to the couple for a week, and Tara admitted it was because she told Willow that She, Cordy and Xander were her first, girl and guy, respectively. Seperately and Together.
Cordy kept insisting she wasn't bi or gay, just that she had been experimenting. Xander backed her up on this, but no one believed them.
Before the three were revealed to be in the three-way relationship however, there was trouble with a group called the 'initiative' and some bigbad named 'Adam'.
The day Cordy got hurt by the thing, Xander disappeared. A week later he returned, battered and bloody, unconscious and carried by Angel and Wes. Both said they had nothing to do with what he did, but wouldn't say what it was. That Adam wasn't heard from since hurting Cordy however, gave them a big idea of what happened.
This got Xander on the scope of the Initiative, and eventually, they tried to make a move, but they quickly learned that Xander had not just been idle working carpentry and fighting demons and vampires on the roadtrip. He had been honing his soldierguy stuff since even before then, thanks to Cordy's insistence he improve his physical conditioning and fighting skills.
Around three years of constantly using the knowledge in his head from the possession had the remarkable effect that when they tried to take Xander, Not only did he kill the team sent, but Riley backed him up in the counter-offensive.
Xander had stayed at Fort Bragg for a week, thanks to a call from Wills getting him in for certain training and listed on a Classified program. (which didn't actually exist).
And so as far as the Army were concerned, Xander was a Lieutenant with certain things that allowed him to order captains around. Riley confirmed his file through the military network before he supported the counter-offensive.
He accepted the story that Xander was recruited by a group in the Army who didn't know about the initiative, gave him the training (He never learned about the Halloween) and unofficial backing. Riley also learned it was his connection that allowed Xander onto the army base to get what he needed to fight Adam, and he was surprised that the choice of weaponry worked. 'Under orders', from Xander, he didn't share what he learned with buffy about that either.
But the others did find out that Xander (with the help of Willow) was now military. All but Riley knew it was sort of fake but true. Buffy was thankful when she heard that as a "co-worker" of Xanders', she was on army payrole and didn't need to worry about the bills when her mom got sick.
After all that, Cordelia and Xander married, after a false-stop when some demon tried to trick Xander into breaking it off. But Whistler arrived in time and told Xander that the demon was making it up.
A visit from Angel, who kind of tricked him, and the wedding was back on.
And then they found out Cordy was pregnant. They chose the name 'Dawn.'
-
A/N: I am not working on making this a big fic. Seriously. I just got one idea and felt the need to epilogue it out. I stopped where I did because the epilogue itself was running too long, and I don't know much beyond the willow-resurrects-buffy part.