Note: Came to me very randomly. It's dark, be warned. Spoilers, obviously.
Buffy jumps and bam, cue all sorts of pretty colors and then she's dead. Dead, dead, dead.
Xander is rooted to the spot, and he feels like his insides are exploding with nausea and grief, and then subsequentially collapsing in on itself. Like the world almost had. He doesn't really realize that Anya is clinging to his side until a few minutes later. Minutes that were cold and hollow and held nothing in them. Anya continues to lean on him, for once letting herself be the weaker one. It's a shame that it's in the only instance where Xander doesn't feel like he can keep himself together, let alone be the proverbial pillar of strength for her. So he just stays in position and tries not to collapse in on himself. He doesn't know how to do anything else right now. He can't remember anything else. Or rather, he doesn't want to.
The numbness that follows throughout the night feels infinite. Anya wants to deal with this in the best way she knows how -- lots and lots of sex. But Xander can't bring himself to deal at all. He had loved Buffy, generally in the platonic sense, but every once and a while during of her speeches or one of her cute or daring or sexy gestures would make him love her again in a way that felt reminiscent to years ago. For a brief moment, Buffy would be his whole world. And then he'd snap out of it. Anya was his whole world most of the time, displaced only during the brief moments where Buffy would cloud his head and vision and fuse herself to every vessel he had within him.
Still, he loves Anya, and that was a fact.
But right now, Anya could not be his whole world. He could not love Anya in a world where Buffy did not exist. Because right now, the thought of Buffy cuts him so deep and paralyzes him so fully that she has become more than just the world for the moment. She has become the universe, the underground, and every other feasible dimension that existed. Like one that she may be in right now.
Buffy is dead. Dead, dead, dead.
Since she jumped, Buffy is all he can think, all he can see and all he can feel. Once again, she has managed to infiltrate his system. She's pumping through his blood, and he's breathing her out. Even in death. And it's her death in question keeps him from feeling whole.
Anya doesn't understand, keeps sidling up beside him and asking why he won't talk, why he won't kiss her or fuck her or even look at her.
He doesn't answer.
Buffy died saving the world. Typical. Buffy was tough and hot and sassy, but above all, she was selfless.
But a world without Buffy is not a world he wants to live in. No matter how selfless her act was.
Buffy is dead. Dead, dead, dead. And he is here. Breathing in and breathing out and in and out and in.
But still, none of it matters.
"Xander, please" Anya pleads, and she's even crying, and it's so incredibly human that he'd commend her on it if he could summon anything resembling compassion. "Don't do this. I'm here. Let me be here for you. Xander. Please."
She's trying, using her words to attempt to reach him, and it's like a hand reaching forward for someone at the edge of a building, begging them to stay, begging them not to take the plunge.
Still, he can't bring himself to care.
Buffy is dead. Dead, dead, dead.
He turns away from Anya; he jumps.
And right now, for all intents and purposes, so is he.