DR2: The Cross of Changes, book II

by Nick Midian

The Sequel and Prequel to 'Dark Reflection' continues. In 1999, Xander becomes a vampire and in 2002, the game against the Archangels and the Slayerettes starts... with a bang.

1. Part 1 of 8

DR2 - The Cross of Changes by Nick Midian, Book II, part 1 of 8

Written by Nick Midian

Content beta-reading and storyline suggestions by Duncan
English grammar, spelling, slang, Highlander continuity and general corrections
by Theo
French slang, content beta-reading and storyline suggestions by Mash
French slang by Alan


EMAIL: jcaballero@euskalnet.net

WEBSITE: http://www.angelfire.com/tv2/thedarkages

SPOILERS: For Buffy the Vampire Slayer: 3rd season, BUT no Xander/Willow kissing
and no Lover's Walk (welcome to the wonderful State of Denial, Land of
'Shippiness). Hmmm, I've messed with the third season's timeline to accommodate
it to my necessities. Let's just say that 'Band Candy' happened a lot later than
it did, around the first days of February, OK?
For Highlander: None really, the characters of the TV series and films are only
tangentially mentioned. You just need to know the basics of Highlander-style
immortality, BUT I've always thought that whole 'Immortals have no parents and
are found in a little basket' is a... um, the Spanish word for it is 'chorrada',
so let's just ignore it, OK?
KEYWORDS: Romance, Angst, Action-adventure, Violence, Alternate Universe,
Crossover.
RATING: PG-13 with some mild R parts for violence and sexual innuendo.
DISCLAIMER: This story has been written with no intention of profit, merely for
the pleasure of writing and sharing it.
The concept and characters of BTVS (Buffy, Angel, Cordelia, Xander, Willow, Oz,
Giles, Joyce, Spike, Drusilla, Snyder, Faith, Harmony, Lyle Gorch, Quentin
Travers and the rest) are intellectual and legal property of Joss Whedon, Warner
Brothers, Mutant Enemy, etc. Also, the concept of Highlander and the characters
mentioned here (Duncan MacLeod, Amanda Darieux, Richie Ryan, Joe Dawson and the
Society of Watchers) are the property of Panzer-Davis and Rysher Entertainment.
Michael Deveraux, Rachel Curran, Crystal Parker, Kyle White Owl, Robert
Coltrane, Elvis the Dog, Broderick Egoyan, Damon Frost, Mr. Smith, the World
Committee for Civil Defense and the rest are my own creation.
All the songs and lyrics here are used without permission, they are copyright of
their respective rights owners.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: Please, understand that English is not my native language, so
any grammatical or spelling errors are my fault, not of any one of my wonderful
beta-readers. If you're thinking of sending any flames, please be kind with me.
I'm a grown man, but I still can cry like a child, believe me.
Additional Author's Note: The songs performed by Oz's band are 'Loli Jackson'
and 'Serenade' by Dover. It appears courtesy of Subterfuge records. All rights
reserved, yadda, yadda, yadda...
SUMMARY: After the events in 'Dark Reflection' a new threat menaces both the
Slayerettes and the Archangels as new and old enemies come to Sunnydale, merging
past and present. This time, it's something personal - ta-da-da-dam!!! (sorry,
but I just had to say that)

And now, on with the show. Fasten your seat belts ladies and gentlemen, because
it's going to be a long, hard and jumpy ride...

~~~~~~

The cast for Book II


Nicholas Brendon as Xander Harris
Charisma Carpenter as Cordelia Chase

Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy Summers
David Boreanaz as Angel
Alyson Hannigan as Willow Rosenberg
Seth Green as Daniel 'Oz' Osborne
Anthony Stewart Head as Rupert Giles
Kristine Sutherland as Joyce Summers

Matthew Perry as Michael Deveraux
Paula Trickey as Rachel Curran
James Marsters as Spike
Nikki Cox as Crystal Parker
David James Elliott as Kyle White Owl
Elvis the Dog as Himself

Eliza Dushku as Faith Adams
Donald Sutherland as The Old Chess Player, Broderick Egoyan
Sebastian Spence as Damon Frost
Avery Brooks as Mr. Smith

Mercedes MacNab as Harmony Kendall
Armin Shimerman as Principal Snyder
Amy Chance as Aphrodesia
Persia White as Aura

Alan Rickman as Conrad Swann
Wesley Snipes as Talon Pantera
Dennis Rodman as Rush Pantera
Tom Berenger as Colonel Cabbot Ashe
Michael Ironside as the Sergeant
Trevor Goddard as Backlash
Shaquille O'Neal as Beast
Jet Li as Bushido

with

Kevin Spacey as Robert Coltrane
Nicholas Lea as Jonah Whalls
and
Catherine Zeta-Jones as the Lady in Red

~~~~~~

BOOK II: Games People Play


All warfare is based on deception.

--"The Art of War", Sun Tzu

~~~~~~

INTERLUDE II: For whom the bell tolls
Sunnydale, California. February 13, 1999. 6:56 a.m.

Take a look to the sky just before you die
It is the last time you will
Blackened roar, massive roar fills the crumbling sky
Shattered goal fills his soul with a ruthless cry

Stranger now, are his eyes, to this mystery
He hears the silence so loud
Crack of dawn, all is gone except the will to be
Now he will see what will be, blinded eyes to see

"For whom the bell tolls", Metallica


Imagine that you die.

And imagine that death is like being back in your mother's womb, your inner
being bathed in the amniotic fluid of eternity.

No self-consciousness. No measure of time. No present, past or future.

No physical awareness of your own body. No sight. No hearing. No taste. No
touch. No smell.

Just a feeling of rightness, that can't be expressed with words.

Absolute peace, and total calm.

There's no cold. No heat. No light. No darkness.

Nothing. Just you, and the void of the after-life.

No worries. No sorrows. No fear.

Just imagine how it would be.

And now imagine that, just when you thought that you could even enjoy it, that
somehow this is the Paradise you were promised when you were alive (a time so
long ago, that you almost can't remember it anymore), something rips you away
from it.

Something.

And unexpectedly, in the space of a nanosecond, everything changes. You're
falling at the speed of light. You still can't feel your body, you can't explain
it, but you can feel it.

And then your being, your consciousness, your soul for lack of a better term, is
suddenly assaulted by a thousand combined sensations that pierce it like sharp,
pointed needles.

And your mind, that little piece of self-awareness that still manages to
remember who you are, spins around at such speed that everything becomes
confused and miasmatic.

The heat freezes. The cold burns. The darkness blinds. And the light...

The light dies.

And then pain. Pain as you couldn't possibly have imagined before.

If you had flesh it would be burning, melting away from your bones, leaving them
white and clean.

If you had bones.

If you had lungs, you would be screaming until your throat bled from the effort.

If you had a throat.

If you had a heart, you'd feel it beating at such speed that you'd think it
would be about to explode, as it pumps your blood inside your veins, the red and
vital liquid boiling inside them.

If you had blood.

And then, as everything changes, you feel yourself changing too.

You die a thousand deaths in the blink of an eye. You are reborn from them all a
little different.

Then something worms its way inside you. Like a parasite, like the larva of some
hideous prehistoric insect, it nestles inside you and imprints your being with
its preternatural and vicious mark.

As its poison fuels your change, you can feel the creature's black and green
slime oozing into your innermost core, covering everything, trying to corrupt
and finally banish – destroy – your soul, the little nook inside your being
where you keep safe the contents that make you you.

Imagine that, as the pain reaches new peaks of intensity, you're given the gift
of feeling your body again and that, at least, you can voice your suffering. And
you cry. And you scream. And you weep and you beg.

But nobody's there to hear you.

There's only you, the pain... and the demon.

~~~~~~

As she turned around under the covers of her bed for what seemed like the
one-thousandth time, Cordelia sighed with something that was a curious mix of
desperation, exasperation and resignation. Something with too many 'ations', for
her liking.

Desperation because, even when the night sky outside her window was already
beginning to be lit up by the first rays of sunlight on that Saturday morning,
she still hadn't managed to get a wink of sleep. Her eyes were reddened, and a
little swollen by the lack of slumber.

Exasperation because she couldn't believe what were the real reasons behind her
insomnia, because she couldn't get the image of certain dark-haired boy out of
her mind. Because it was very hard to accept, that the King of Cretins was the
reason why she was feeling like a piece of absolute and total crap.

And resignation because, as had been more and more usual lately, she had no
other option but to face the fact that she had fallen for Xander Harris, Master
of Lameness. And that she had fallen hard.

The previous night, when he had stormed out of the library in fury, leaving a
group of surprised and bewildered friends behind him and a little trail of steam
coming out of his ears, she had realized something very important.

She had hurt him badly and deeply, in a way she hadn't even thought it possible
she could.

It was strange even to think about it. She had hurt Xander. She had said and
done something that, after years of verbal matches and pointless childish
fights, had pierced through his carefully self-constructed walls of sarcasm and
acid humor and drawn blood.

She had hurt him.

She wasn't very sure how, when or even why. All she knew was that one moment
they were making jokes because he had messed up, as usual. And a second later
she was looking at his brown eyes, usually so warm, so deep, as he said the
b-word with more venom and hate than what she had ever believed possible.

Of course, it all had gone to hell right then.

It didn't matter about the demon they were supposed to be researching. It didn't
matter about the people staring at them in uncomfortable and embarrassed
surprise. There was only the two of them and that horrible, vicious need to hurt
each other as deeply and painfully as possible.

And God knew they had given each other a run for their money.

His last words were still carved into her memory, almost with fire.

'So you want to have a perfect boyfriend? You want somebody to worship and adore
you as if you were the goddamn center of the entire universe? That's fine with
me!! You can go out and search for one, because we're finished!! Do you hear me,
Princess Cordelia?!? We're damn well over!!'

He had then stormed off, taking his jacket from the back of the chair from where
it was hanging with so much rage that the chair had practically flown back and
fallen to the floor, with a deafening clatter of wood against floorboard.

He had left her suddenly numb and cold, looking at his retreating back as he
stalked away along the hallways of the high school. Running away from her.

Her feelings right then were what had stopped her from running after him.
Curiously, it hadn't been her foolish pride or some stupid sense of superiority
over him. It had been the fact that, suddenly, she had felt as if there was
something lost to her. As if something was missing, gone forever.

Xander had broken up with her.

They would not be together anymore.

No more sweet kisses in the closet. No more smiles in the sun-filled parks and
beaches, when he looked at her as if she was the most important thing in the
world. No more exchanged looks, as if they were sharing a secret that nobody
else in the world knew. No more... them.

It was weird. It was ridiculous. It was odd.

As she'd let herself fall onto the nearest chair, because her legs couldn't hold
her up on her feet anymore, a thousand voices had spoken their unasked opinion
inside her mind.

Her mother told her not to worry, that it had been painfully obvious to
everybody that this was the way it would end eventually. They were just too
different, coming from such extremely different worlds, with vastly different
hopes and goals. In the end, she would be better off without him.

She'd wanted to tell her that they weren't so different. That, in the depths of
their souls, they had discovered that they shared the things that mattered the
most.

But, of course, her mother wasn't here now. She would probably be lying on her
bed, with a cold gauze over her eyes and a large number of sorrow-erasing
capsules dissolving inside her stomach.

In her mind, her father had just patted her on the top of the head as if she
were some kind of expensive dog and offered her his credit card. 'Here you go,
little princess, buy yourself something pretty.'

She had wanted to tell him that this wasn't one of those situations that could
be fixed with an expensive gift. That even she, who was so spoiled and
conceited, was getting tired of that.

That, for once, she would like him to offer her some real comfort and love.

But, of course, he wasn't here now either. He was rarely around, anyway .

Harmony, of course, was laughing. "I can't believe it, he broke up with you.
That's what happens when you begin to waste your time with a bunch of losers –
you become one of them."

She had wanted to tell her that things weren't as she or the other sheep thought
they were. That the world was larger and more frightening that they believed it
could be, and that the people around her weren't losers.

They were brave, and funny, and loyal, and they were heroes. And they were the
only people that had really accepted her. That they were her friends, and that
she was proud of calling them that.

But, of course, even Harmony wasn't here now. And Cordelia was glad she wasn't,
because she would've probably slapped her if she tried to put one of them down
again.

The feeling of a pair of delicate hands on her shoulders had then brought the
cheerleader out of her reverie, and she'd raised her eyes from the double door
of the library to find Willow's worried sea-green stare looking down at her.

"Are you alright, Cordelia?" she had asked her, with real concern in her voice.

=Life flows through very weird channels, and that's an understatement,= was the
thought that had run through her mind. =If somebody had told me only one year
ago there would come a day when I'd consider Willow Rosenberg one of my closest
friends, and that I'd seek and find comfort from her, I'd have laughed right in
his face.=

But here it was, as true as the fact that she was feeling her heart breaking in
two, crumbling into pieces by the same man that had managed to melt it for the
first time.

"What just happened?" she had asked the red-haired girl in a low tone, still not
very sure of what had happened barely moments ago.

Sharing a quick look with Giles and after receiving a silent nod of agreement
from the British librarian, Willow had helped her to her feet, gently but
unmistakably taking her to the privacy of Giles' office, leaving the rest of the
gang in peace to continue with their work.

Helping her to the couch and kneeling down beside her, Willow had looked
straight into her hazel eyes. "You and Xander have just had a fight...again.
Don't worry, Cordy, I'm sure that he didn't really mean any of that. He was
simply furious, and you know that he just doesn't think straight when he's this
way."

She had looked at the redhead in silence for a moment. "Are you sure? 'Cause
I've never seen him like that."

Willow's silence had told her more than what any words could have done. She
hadn't ever seen him like that, either. "What have I done, Willow?"

She hadn't seemed to have an answer for that, either.

So she had just lain on Giles' couch for a while, trying to fight the tears that
were coming to her eyes. Wondering what she had done, what he had done, what
they had done – if there was still time to fix it, if it would be worth the pain
to fight for whatever it was they'd had together.

Curiously, this was the only question she had an answer to.

Yes, it was worth it.

The time had passed slowly, while she'd listened to the gang's soft whispers in
the library. They had finally gotten a clue, the demon would be probably hiding
in the town's rubbish dump and Buffy was going to go there to have a look, after
calling Angel for help.

Buffy hadn't seemed very eager to go out on this particular mission, but
Cordelia couldn't blame her. If there was one thing you could say about being a
Slayer, it was that it was hell on a girl's wardrobe.

As she'd heard how they softly gathered what the blonde Slayer was going to
need, Cordelia had felt sympathetic towards Buffy. Her life had been far from
easy in the last few years; first the whole Angelus thing, her running away from
Sunnydale and the pain of her return, then Angel's own (and literal) comeback
from Hell, and Faith...

As she lay there on the couch thinking about the fallen brunette Slayer, she had
felt a strange sensation of uneasiness engulf her whole being. Something was
wrong, and it was going to get worse.

What, she didn't know, but she was sure of it.

And now, almost the next day, as the light of morning slowly filtered into her
room through the curtains of her bedroom, that sensation came back with a
vengeance.

Propping herself up on her elbow, Cordelia looked at the glowing red numbers of
her digital alarm clock. A few minutes past seven in the morning. Too early to
get up from bed on a Saturday. Too early to call anybody. Too early to do
anything, other than stay in bed and keep on worrying.

She was going to drive herself crazy if she did that.

She took her cordless phone from its cradle and looked at the glowing green
numbers of its keyboard, in the semidarkness of the bedroom. She could call
Xander. She could talk to him. Tell him... what?

That she loved him, for example. That would be a good opening line.

That she was sorry. That they could fix it.

But, what if he didn't love her back? What if he wasn't sorry? What if he didn't
want to fix it?

What if it had all been just a meaningless relationship, based on some hormones
and tawdry teen lust? What if he was glad that he was finally free from the
burden that he was supposed to bear, with her capricious and self-absorbed
behavior? What if all this was a comfortable way out for him?

She swallowed a knot that had formed in her throat with difficulty. She couldn't
believe this. When had Cordelia Chase turned into this parody of herself? When
had she become a doubtful shadow of her strong personality?

Feeling a little spark of anger growing inside her, Cordelia placed the phone on
its cradle, a little more forcefully than what she intended at first and turned
around, covering herself with the blankets.

If Xander Harris thought that she was going to dance to the tune that he was
playing, then he was just plain wrong.

He wasn't that special.

Even when he had the warmest, kindest eyes she had ever seen in a man. Even when
he had those charming goofy ears and that perfect, sexy and generous mouth. Even
when he had lips that could set her on fire, and fingers that were able to trace
burning paths on her skin just with their mere touch...

Turning around once more, she took the phone in her hands. 555-32...

She hung up and turned around, sighing almost in desperation. Strong, she had to
be strong. =Only the weak ones beg,= she told herself, remembering one of her
father's favorite sentences.

She wasn't weak. She was strong, independent. She didn't need him.

But she wanted him.

And that added a new dimension to her problem, because she hadn't ever felt like
that before. She had cared, she had liked, she even had desired. She could even
say that she had been in love.

But she had never loved like this before. And never, ever, had she wanted
someone with so much intensity.

~~~~~~

When the chirping sound of the alarm clock began to stab her tired brain at ten
o'clock in the morning, Cordelia had been thinking of the irony that tomorrow
was Saint Valentine's. They had missed out on lasting for a year, by just two
days.

Trying to put that depressing thought aside, the brunette practically smashed
the off button of her clock, effectively muting it. She got out of her bed with
a tired grunt.

She had a headache, and generally felt like something the cat had just spat out.

"I hate you, Xander Harris," she muttered, slipping her bare feet into her fuzzy
slippers. Teeny Toons slippers. The same ones he had given her, so that she
'never had cold feet'.

Groaning in a very unladylike way, she got up and decided that it would be
better to take a long and warm shower, that it would help her to recover from
the long sleepless night and take her mind off him.

Taking clean clothes from her drawers, humming a nameless song under her breath,
she thought on how wonderful the hot water was going to feel caressing her bare
skin, how relaxing it would be.

After that, she would go out. Go to the mall. Buy some new clothes. She could do
it. She was strong. She was resolute. She was...

The phone began ringing the moment she was walking out of her bedroom and, in
her haste to get it, her clothes flew off in a cloud of falling silk and cotton.
The phone practically slipped out from her nervous grasp, as she grabbed it.

"Xander?" she asked, her voice full of hope and anxiety.

"Sorry, no time for losers today!" Harmony's voice came out the phone, as
chipper and devoid of any real deepness as always. "What, Cordelia, you're
missing your Prince Charmless? Tell me something, when you kiss him, does he
turn into a toad or-?"

"Harmony," Cordelia harshly cut her off, not in the mood for that kind of
conversation. "What do you want?"

"Uh-oh, are we snappish this morning or what?"

"'Or what' would be a good way to put it," Cordelia said, letting herself fall
onto her bed and her eyes roam the high ceiling of her room. "I'm going to
repeat this one more time and then I'm going to hang up, so answer me: what...
do... you... want?" she asked, spacing the words as if the sheep at the other
end of the line was a slow-learning kid.

"Well, tomorrow being Valentine's Day I thought that you'd like to go to the
mall and pick a new outfit... I don't know, something that doesn't clash with
baggy pants and Hawaiian shirts?"

Even when the deep sarcasm was patent in Harmony's voice, Cordelia preferred to
ignore it, closing her eyes and trying to make the best decision.

"OK," she finally said, surprising both Harmony and herself. "When do you want
me to pick you up?"

Not really expecting her to agree, Harmony needed some seconds to compose
herself. "Well, uh, ah, in an hour?"

"Make it forty-five minutes," Cordelia told her, placing the phone on its cradle
without saying goodbye or waiting for one.

For an endless second, the brunette girl looked at the offending piece of
plastic on her bedside table in silence and then she got up, gathered her
clothes and went to take her shower.

~~~~~~

Exactly thirty-seven minutes had passed since Harmony's call, when Cordelia was
finally ready to go out. Looking at her expensive wristwatch, she calculated
that she could make it on time even driving at a moderate speed.

So, taking a deep breath, she took her purse, checked her keys and wallet and
went out of her room, closing the door behind herself.

For five long seconds, Cordelia's room remained empty, quiet and silent.

Then the door opened violently and she stormed back into the bedroom, turned
into a brunette hurricane.

"Damn you, Xander Harris!" she practically shouted, throwing her purse
carelessly onto her still-unmade bed and grabbing the phone, violently punching
Xander's number.

Pacing around, fuming angrily, looking at her watch and seeing the spare time
she still had disappearing, she waited for the phone to be picked at the other
end of the line. He was going to hear her out. Nobody made Cordelia Chase feel
this way, and then backpedal like some kind of-

"Yeah?" a muffled voice came through the phone, barely recognizable as female
and quickly followed by an endless series of smoke-filled coughs.

=Great, Xander's mom. Well,= Cordy thought while waiting for her to finish, =at
least it's better than his father.= "Hi, uh, is Xander there?"

"Who wants to know?" Xander's mother asked after a short pause, obviously to
take a drag from a cigarette.

Closing her eyes, Cordelia sat down on the edge of her bed. "I'm Cor... I'm his
girlfriend," she told her, suddenly feeling the need to state it.

At the other end of the line, Marisa Harris practically choked with laughter.
"Who?"

The brunette girl frowned at this. Hadn't Xander told them? She knew that he
hadn't the best of relationships with his parents, but it was hard to believe
that he hadn't told them that they had been dating for almost a year.

"Cordelia," she said, still a little puzzled. "I'm Cordelia Chase."

For a moment there was silence on the line, and then Xander's mother whistled in
admiration.

"Well, well, well, it seems that the little asshole isn't so dumb after all,"
she chuckled. "Shagging a little rich brat like you...who woulda believed it?"

Taking the phone away from her ear, Cordelia stared at it with incredulity, not
believing what she had just heard. It was beginning to be painfully obvious why
Xander hadn't told Mr. and Mrs. Harris anything about the two of them.

Biting her tongue not to scream a very rude comeback to the woman at the other
end of the line, the brunette girl just tried to stay calm.

"Well," Cordelia harshly asked again, "is he there or not?"

"Nah," Marisa Harris told her after a new pause for a cigarette. "The kid hasn't
spent the night here, he'll probably be with that bunch of losers he hangs out
with."

"So, you don't know where he is or where he spent the night?" Cordelia asked
with incredulity.

"Are you deaf or what? I'm not the police officer in charge of his parole."

=No, you're supposed to be his mother, you bitch,= Cordelia thought, barely
keeping her cool.

Mrs. Harris continued, "Why don't you try that Jew friend of his, that...
Willow?"

"Yeah, that's what I'll do," she said tightly, wishing to be able to tell her
what she really was thinking about her right then, "thank you very much."

Without waiting for a goodbye that she knew wouldn't come, Cordelia hung up,
taking a new look at her wristwatch. It probably wasn't anything. Xander would
have spent the night at Willow's, talking to his best friend.

That was even good, because it meant that he'd had some feelings to sort out –
it meant that not everything was as over as he'd claimed it to be last night. He
would be with Willow, having breakfast with her.

She would just call her place, check that he was all right and then go to pick
up Harmony. She would have to speed a little, but she would make it almost on
time.

Everything was going to be alright.

Right?

He would be alright. He had to be alright.

But then they were living in Sunnydale, on top of the damn Hellmouth.
Vampireland and Demonworld, wrapped up together with a nice red bow on top.

And they had let him go out at night. Alone. Unprotected.

How could they have been so stupid?

Almost fumbling with the buttons in her haste to dial the redhead's phone
number, Cordelia brought the phone to her ear, impatiently waiting for the young
hacker to answer her. She was breathing so quickly, that she was almost
hyperventilating.

"Hello?" Willow finally picked up, her voice coming out the phone with the
muffled traces of sleep. "Who's there?"

"Willow?" Cordelia breathed in relief. "It's me."

"Who?" the redhead asked with a yawn.

"Cordelia," she clarified coldly. "Is Xander there?"

"Xander?" Willow's mind seemed as dense as her voice that morning.

Cordelia sighed in resignation, getting up from her bed and beginning to pace
nervously around her room. "Yes, Willow, Xander. My boyfriend, your best friend,
tall, dark hair, wears clothes from a garage sale... do you remember him now?"

"Xander?" the redhead repeated, eliciting a growl from Cordelia. "Oh, yeah,
yeah. Yesterday, and all that. So, what's going on with him?"

Exasperated, Cordelia practically snarled at the phone. "He's not around!" she
exclaimed. "That's what's going on! He's not at his house, he didn't go home
last night. And now you tell me that he's not there, either!! Can't you put two
and two together?!?"

For a short moment, the telephone line was submerged in a deep silence as
Willow's half-asleep brain absorbed what Cordelia had just told her. "He's not
at home?"

Before the brunette could verbally rip her guts out, the redhead managed to
continue. "Well, uh, I'm sure he'll be alright. He seemed very pissed off
yesterday, and he'll probably want to cool off a little before speaking to
anybody."

At that very moment, Cordelia surprised herself with the intensity of her rage
towards the little redhead. "Willow?" she managed to say with a sugar-dripping
tone.

"Yeah?" Willow answered innocently.

"Are you completely nuts, or what?!?" Cordelia screamed, making the hacker jump
in surprise. "This is Sunnydale, Willow, do I have to remind you about the
vampires and all the nasty things that go bump in the night? Are you trying to
tell me that Xander has spent the night on the streets, and you are not the
least bit worried about him?"

She didn't know what was startling her the most; her anger, her worry or the
fact that she could almost feel Willow blushing at the other end of the line and
she wasn't feeling guilty at all.

"Why don't you c-come here?" Willow finally told her. "We'll look around in the
places where he hangs out, OK?"

"I'll be there in ten minutes," Cordelia told her harshly, angrily smashing the
phone down on its cradle. Then, taking her purse, she practically flew out of
her room.

Her shopping date with Harmony didn't even cross her mind.

~~~~~~

Modern man doesn't have a clear understanding about the real meaning of the
concept of 'eternity'. For a human being of the 20th century, or the 21st for
that matter, 'eternity' is just a very long measure of time.

A billion years. A trillion centuries. A zillion eons.

But that's not what eternity is.

Eternity is forever.

Just try to imagine a ball of cast iron the size of planet Earth. And now
imagine that a woodpecker flies over it every thousand years, lands and sharpens
its beak on its surface only once. Only once. And then it just flaps its wings
and flies away, for the next thousand years.

The time that little bird would need to reduce that giant ball of iron to the
size of a grain of sand with only that action, that time, would just be the
first day of the beginning of eternity.

Knowing this, that which had been Xander Harris could honestly say that he had
been submerged in that ocean of pain, forgotten in that pit of the damned, for
an entire eternity.

But something weird had happened at the last moment when he had thought it was
all over, when the pain had become so unbearable that he had believed that the
nothingness of the lack of existence was better than this endless torture.

When his will had been about to surrender, and allow the worming intruder to
finally claim victory. When he had been about to give up.

Something had changed. Inside him. Around him. Everywhere.

He couldn't describe it, and he couldn't explain it. But it was as if a light
had been born, a tiny spark of hope shining inside him as something stepped into
the path of the parasite creature, stopping its advance, giving him time and
space to gather his weapons, to fortify himself. To recover.

He was only going to have that one chance, and he knew it – just as he also knew
that if he missed it, that it would be the end of everything.

~~~~~~

"This had better be good," Buffy said while entering the library, "because I
have like a century of sleep to catch up on, after last night."

Dropping herself onto the nearest available chair, the Slayer blew an errant
golden lock away from her face, supporting her head with her arm on the table.
"So, what's going on, Giles? Demon? Vampire? Nasty green thing vomiting
corrosive green slime over my best leather jacket?"

She arched her brow, mocking surprised realization. "Wait! That was yesterday!"

The British Watcher just sent her one of his silent and patented looks over the
book he was reading. Then he shook his head softly, carefully placing the book
on the stacks and walking down the stairs.

"Not this time," he said, while taking off his spectacles to clean them with an
absent-minded gesture. "In fact, it wasn't my idea to gather here today. It, uh,
it seems that Cordelia can't locate Xander after yesterday's little...uh,
disagreement and she's worried."

Buffy just raised and eyebrow. "Cordelia? Worried? Wouldn't be real feelings be
needed for that to occur?"

Giles pushed his small glasses on his nose up with the point of his finger, and
stared at his young protégé in silent recrimination. Buffy at least had the
grace to look aside, a little ashamed.

"Buffy, you know Cordelia...has changed a lot during the last few years. E-even
though I'm obviously not her greatest admirer, even I can tell that she really
cares about Xander. If she says she's worried, the least we could do is listen
to her."

"OK, OK," the Slayer excused herself. "Geez, don't be so cranky, Giles. You
sound like it was you who had to spend the night swimming in an ocean of sticky
trash, chasing a creature from the Twilight Zone."

"Which reminds me, you still haven't informed me of the developments of said
situation," he patiently told her, crossing his arms over his tweed-clad chest.

She shrugged. "Not really very much to tell. Picked Angel up at the mansion.
Went to the dump. Crawled in the dirt for almost the whole night. Found the
creature feasting on the corpse of a security guard, fought it and slayed.
Swoosh," she mimicked, letting her arm fall as an axe, "chopped off its head
like a pro. Quick and clean."

She blinked a few times. "Well, not clean as in clean-clean, because it was
quite messy with the gore, y'know – with all that green slime, and all the waste
and the..."

"I-I think I get the point," Giles cut her off before she managed to make him
regret having breakfast. "Uh, then I gather you are alright."

"Yeah, apart from this smell," she observed, sniffing her wrist. "I've showered
five times, and I still haven't gotten rid of it. Yikes, I shouldn't have tried
to hide it with that cheap perfume. Now the smells have mixed, and it's even
worse. Smell," she commanded, offering her wrist to Giles.

With a grimace, the British Watcher backpedaled from her, raising one hand
between them as a makeshift barrier. "Mmm, no thank you, I-I trust in your word.
And, ah, Angel? How is he?"

Noticing Giles' uncomfortable tone, she looked at her Watcher sideways. To say
that he still had some serious issues with the souled vampire, would be a big
understatement. But she couldn't blame him, not after all that had happened.

"He's OK," Buffy said simply, avoiding the gaze of Giles' green eyes, "He's
still not 100%, but he was a great help. He grabbed the green-thingy while my
axe got familiar with its neck. Don't you think it's really weird, for a teenage
girl to be so good at cutting off heads?"

The Watcher just smiled at her obvious attempt at changing the subject, and
nodded slowly. He was about to say something else when the double doors of the
library burst open and a furious Cordelia came in, followed by a low-headed
Willow.

She was walking a pair of steps behind the angry brunette, looking at her with
the fear and respect one would have for a very pissed-off Valkyrie.

"So you're here at last!" she exclaimed, walking to where Buffy was. "Very nice
for you to honor us with your presence, Buffy!"

The Slayer blinked in surprise, and looked back at the cheerleader with
wide-open eyes. "Hey, hey, hey!" she exclaimed in annoyance. "Do you have a
stone in your shoe or what?"

Stepping between them before the two girls jumped at each other's throats,
Willow quickly raised her hands in a calming gesture. "Uh, wait, before either
of you do anything you'll regret later, you should remember why we're here."

"Which is?" Buffy asked, still a little confused about the whole matter.

"Xander's missing!!" Cordelia shouted her. "He's not at his house, he's not
anywhere!!"

Frowning, Buffy looked at Willow, who answered her before she could even voice
the question. "We've been searching," she told the Slayer. "Xander doesn't
exactly have many places he likes to go to be alone, and he's not at any of
them."

Taking a deep breath, Buffy covered her mouth with her hand and looked at her
Watcher in search of some advice and support.

"Well," Giles said, adjusting his glasses over the bridge of his nose, "I'm sure
he'll be alright, but," he added, cutting off Cordelia's coming tirade, "we'll
search again just to be certain. After all, you had a quite strong... dispute
yesterday, so i-it would be natural for him to want to be alone for a while.
Willow, don't you remember any other place he could be?"

Sadly shaking her head, the redhead looked at him with a worried expression.
"No, Xander's never been much on loneliness. I'm beginning to get worried too."

Cordelia practically snorted, beginning to walk back and front with a nervous
pace. "Something bad has happened to him," she said quietly, almost speaking to
herself.

"We don't have any reason to believe that, Cordelia," Giles tried to calm her
down.

"We haven't?" she asked, with a deep note of sarcasm in her voice. "Why, Giles?
The Hellmouth's suddenly closed up and you've forgotten to mention it? There's
no more vampires out there? We can walk the streets safe at night?"

Giles looked back at her, blinking in surprise at her anger. "Well, no, but-"

"Then but nothing! Don't tell me that we haven't any reasons to worry, because
we've got tons of them, Giles! Millions! Last night we were so stupid and
self-centered that we let him walk out of here alone, and now he could be in
some kind of horrible and hideous nightmare!"

"I think you're taking things a little far," Buffy observed, crossing her arms
over her chest. "Just because you feel guilty about yesterday's quarrel, you
don't have to drag us along into your hysterics."

Cordelia practically eviscerated her with her eyes, which had turned a
surprising darker shade that morning. "The day you start noticing the real
feelings of people around you, then you'll have the right to overlook the rest
of us. But until then, I advise you to shut up and do your job!"

Looking at her with wide-open eyes, amazed and angered at her comments, Buffy
rose from her chair, nearing the brunette. "What's that supposed to mean?"

Cordelia crossed her arms over her chest and looked down hard at the Slayer,
using her superior height to her advantage. "That Xander can think that you're
perfect and flawless, Buffy, but I don't have any reason to do so."

Cutting off her response even before the Slayer could begin to voice it, the
cheerleader continued her assault. "He's done every imaginable thing to get your
attention, he's been there every time you've needed him, whether you wanted it
or not. He's been hurt and he's suffered for you, Buffy, and now that it's him
who's in danger, now that it's him who needs your help, you tell me that I'm
taking things a little too far?" she finished with sarcastic incredulity.

She continued, "And you think I'm the self-absorbed one? Get your eyes off your
navel and take a good look around yourself!"

That was more than what the blonde Slayer was disposed to bear and, pointing at
Cordelia with her finger, she let out a dry and sarcastic laugh. "Ha! Since when
are you the keeper of selfless generosity, Ms.
'First-show-me-your-wallet-and-then-we-talk'? When did you begin to look out for
others as if you really cared about them?!?"

She continued, "Or do you expect me to believe that you really love Xander –
because you'd have to be something more than a cold, heartless bitch to do so,
which frankly, I don't think you could ever be!"

For a second a thick silence fell in the library as all those present waited for
the brunette cheerleader to explode at Buffy's mean recrimination but,
surprisingly, that never came.

Instead, Cordelia just leaned over towards the blonde Slayer very slowly and,
with an icy tone, calmly spoke to her.

"God knows I'm not the most perfect person in the world, Buffy. Yeah, I can be
cold, I can be self-absorbed and sometimes I can be a real bitch. But I know who
I am, I know who I love, and I know that I'm not going to waste any other second
here talking with you."

Retrieving her purse from where she had left it on the table, Cordelia turned
around to give one last, hard look at the Slayer. Nevertheless, she wasn't able
to hold back a single tear that slowly rolled down her cheek, leaving a wet path
on her tanned skin. "You should ask yourself what kind of person you really are,
Buffy, if you can't even look past other people's façades and see what's really
inside them."

Then, turning around, she quickly went out the library without looking back.

"Can you believe that? Now she wants to make me think that she's Mother
Theresa!" she said while turning towards Willow, searching for her friend's
usually unconditional support. But, much to her own surprise, the expression on
the redhead's face was far from amicable.

Willow just shook her head sadly at her. "She wasn't talking about herself," the
hacker told her, before turning around to follow Cordelia's path.

Watching in mute astonishment as the red-haired girl disappeared through the
library's double door, Buffy let herself fall back onto her chair, letting out a
long sigh.

"Now I've done it good, haven't I?" she asked, without turning around to face
Giles. "Do you think she really loves him?"

Passing a hand through his hair, the British Watcher took a seat next to her.
"There's nothing more human than stereotypes, Buffy," he calmly told her, with
that deep and comforting tone that his voice had in moments like this.

"W-we feel safe and comfortable placing... filing people inside them, so we know
how to act and react to them. The empty-headed cheerleader, the charming but not
very clever clown, the mousy bookworm... we don't like to be surprised, we don't
like to be taken with our guard down."

He continued, "But people, both as a group and as individuals, have the annoying
tendency of always being much more than what meets the eye. People grow up,
people mature... people change, Buffy. We don't like it, but that's how things
are."

"You haven't answered my question," Buffy said, tilting her head slightly to one
side.

Giles looked at her through half-closed eyes for a long moment, then he took off
his spectacles and, not for the first time, the Slayer surprised at how intense
his green gaze could be. "Yes, Buffy, I do."

Licking her lips a little self-consciously, the blonde girl stood up and
gathered her things. "I better search for him, too. I'll go to Willy's and shake
the tree a little, see what falls out."

At the last possible moment, just when she was about to cross through the
library doors, she looked back at her Watcher and frowned with real, heartfelt
worry. "He will be alright, won't he?"

Giles nodded softly. "I'm sure of that, but Cordelia had an excellent point.
This is still the Hellmouth."

Letting out a long, almost painful, sigh, the Slayer nodded and went away,
leaving just a pair of wooden doors softly rocking behind her.

Passing a hand over his lips, feeling his mouth suddenly dry, Giles put on his
glasses and stood up. He walked to his office almost absent-mindedly, his gaze
lost at an indeterminate point in front of him, all the time caressing his chin
and stubble.

When he finally entered his small room, he reached for the phone on his table
and noticed, with great surprise, that his hand was trembling.

Closing his eyes, the British man turned his hand into a fist and pressed it
tightly shut, until he was able to control the shakes. Then, licking his dry
lips, he took the phone and quickly dialed a number.

"Sunnydale Police Department," an impersonal voice said in his ear, "how can we
help you?"

~~~~~~

It was as if there were two different forces yanking at him, both of them with
so much strength, with such intensity that he was afraid that they would end up
ripping his whole being into two bloody halves.

One of them was dark and dangerous, it offered him the luxuriant and addictive
power of a demon. Power without the boundaries and ties of a human conscience.
With the ability to separate actions from consequences, the joy of being one
with the mother night – to be a true child of darkness.

The second power was as strong as the first, as promising and addictive; but,
contrary to the other's inherent darkness and evil, this one seemed to swim in
more ambiguous waters – to be perpetually immersed in a thick haze, that didn't
allow him to see its true intentions.

Both of them wanted him, and neither of them seemed willing to let him go.

Which one should he choose?

The perverse freedom promised by the demon?

The troubled but clearer immortality of the other power?

The truth was, that he wanted neither of them. He just wanted things back the
way they were before.

He wanted his humanity back, he wanted to be whole again; far away from that
sticky void that seemed to filter inside him through every pore of his dead
skin, worming into his soul.

Covering it like a thick blanket, killing not just who but what he was, what
defined him as a special and unique human individual, different from the rest.

But in the end, after so long that the concept of time itself had lost all
meaning, after so much pain that it wasn't humanly or divinely possible to
suffer more, the final choice was taken out of his hands.

As if they had their own agendas, the two powers trying to claim control of his
being just stopped their fight against each other.

For one wonderful instant, the young soul was conceded the gift of peace and
calm.

And then they attacked again, with renewed strength, making him understand that
he had been wrong.

It was, after all, possible to suffer more.

This time, however, he was able to notice the change in their strategy. This
time, instead of fighting against each other, they had decided to collaborate.
It was as if they'd thought, =Why divide the prize when both of us can have all
of it?=

They merged together, the dark tendrils of the demon melting and mixing with the
ambiguous and incorporeal mist of the Immortal, two separate beings becoming
one. Stronger. Deeper. With a power and a will that couldn't be tamed or
defeated.

For a second, the dark void around him vanished, and that which had been
Alexander Lavelle Harris was able to see the real form of that ancient enemy
that wanted his body, mind and soul.

A dragon.

That was what his brain identified what his dead eyes saw, because his disperse
mind couldn't express that creature with any other words or images. The powerful
body covered by thick and shiny scales; not the ones of a reptile, but made of
the same hard and harsh material as an insect's casing.

The ember-red and golden eyes, flaring fire and rage, boring into him with the
curiosity of a predator about to jump on its prey. The slightly-open jaws,
showing him the ivory-white fangs, oozing sticky foam as a growl that could be
felt more in his bones than in his ears escaped from them.

And then a sudden movement, as fast as the one of an attacking cobra, as nimble
of a panther, and those same jaws closed onto him. The pointed teeth ripped his
flesh, the molars smashed his bones and its bifurcated tongue licked the broken
remains of his body, lapping up his blood as it flowed from his open wounds.

He screamed.

He growled.

The surreal nightmare turned upside-down, folded into itself until he wasn't
able to separate what was real from what wasn't. Briefly, he wondered if he had
ever really been able to do so.

Suddenly, he was inside the beast and the beast was inside him. The fangs ripped
his flesh and he felt his prey struggling inside the grip of his jaws, tasting
his own lifeblood. He was the prey. He was the predator.

And he himself, the last independent identity that still remained in that
twisted fantasy, melted and mixed with the beast, merging with it. He became the
beast. The beast became him.

And he knew, with that absolute certainty that's shared by fools, the
enlightened and those in agony, that that exact moment meant the end of his old
existence and the beginning of a new one.

Then, if he'd been able to cry, he would have done so.

But he didn't, because only human beings can cry, and that was something he
wasn't anymore.

That part of his existence, now, was as dead as the rest of his body.

~~~~~~

Cordelia looked at her own reflection in the vanity mirror of her bedroom, and
had to make a real effort to recognize herself. Was this the same girl that had
always prided herself on having the best physical appearance possible?

Was this the same young woman that had always been more worried about her
make-up or the clothes she wore than the people around her, those who claimed to
love her and wanted to be loved back by her?

She couldn't say so.

If the truth were told, at that precise moment on that Monday morning, that
February the 15th of the year 1999, that was when she understood that the old
Cordelia Chase was dead and buried, and that Xander Harris was the man to be
blamed for it.

Or maybe to be thanked for it, she wasn't sure.

Anyway, as she looked at the god-awful bags under her eyes, the product of three
nights without sleep, at her long brown hair – usually so bright and carefully
arranged – falling around her face in limp, almost dirty strands and her tanned
face, now tinted with a sick pale tone of tiredness and worry, she couldn't but
think with deep sarcasm that love was supposed to make you look radiant, not
like absolute crap.

She felt as if something was dying inside of her.

Because he wasn't there. Because something bad and horrible had happened to him,
and there wasn't anything she could do about it. Because she feared she was
going to lose him without telling him how much she loved him, how much he meant
to her, to the point that he had turned her entire world upside-down.

If Friday night and Saturday had been full of worry and nervousness as the rest
of the Scooby Gang and herself searched for their lost friend, Saturday night
and Sunday had been pure hell as their suspicions and worries had slowly turned
into certainties.

It was as if Xander had just vanished off the face of the earth.

He wasn't at home, he wasn't at the Bronze, and he wasn't at the beach where he
had often sought refuge – looking at the vast deep ocean with lost dark eyes,
when his parents' shouts and quarrels became too loud for him to stand them
anymore.

He wasn't at the library, he wasn't at school, he wasn't at the mall or anywhere
else... he simply wasn't.

And nobody seemed to know anything. Even Willy the snitch didn't know squat,
when Buffy had been about to turn him into a bloody pulp. His parents didn't
know anything, and worst of all, they didn't seem to care much either.

She had been calling his house every hour until they'd told her to stop calling,
with not-exactly-good manners. Then she'd begun to call every half-hour, so they
just disconnected the phone.

Oz had quickly joined the search, providing another set of wheels and Angel had
done the same when darkness finally fell. She had lost count of how many times
she had visited the same places, asked the same people, driven along the same
streets.

"Have you seen Xander?"

The same results. The same answers. The same dead-ends.

"No, I haven't. Who's Xander?"

She was slowly going mad. As the hours passed, sometimes too quickly to even
notice them, sometimes so slowly that looking at the face of her watch had been
a subtle form of torture, she had felt herself slowly falling apart.

She closed herself off to any external reference, she ignored the looks of the
others as they wondered what they should do with her, what they should tell her,
how they should feel about her.

After their first harsh words, Buffy had finally gotten into Slayer mode and
begun to do her job. Then, when the initial suspicions had turned into real
worries, she had taken the next natural step and begun to beat herself up about
it. =It's my fault, I should have been there to protect him, I'm the Slayer,
it's my responsibility, blah, blah, blah...=

Cordelia didn't blame her but, the truth was, she couldn't feel very much
compassion for her, either. She didn't care about her, she hadn't enough energy
to do so.

=Where are you, Xander =

Willow had tried to be supportive, but she had fallen under the weight of her
own fears, worries and still-confused feelings towards Xander. By Sunday
morning, she was practically in tears the whole time.

Cordelia, maybe for the first time in her whole life, felt sympathetic towards
her – at least she was really worried about him.

=Why aren't you here with me?=

For the guys' part, there hadn't been any surprises there either. Giles had been
his usual closed and introverted self, covering himself under his books and
too-long words not to show his fears and inner turmoil.

Now and then, she had observed him walking quietly into his office, trying to
pass unnoticed while he made a phone call. Every time, she had tried not to
think about what she knew he was doing.

And each time, waiting for him to come out of his small office so she could see
the tell-tale expression on his face – grief or relief – she couldn't help but
think about what she would do, if he came out with bad news.

Because she knew that he had been calling the morgue, asking if they had a young
boy with dark hair in one of those perpetually cold chambers where they stored
the dead bodies, as if they were some kind of merchandise. Asking if her Xander
was a corpse.

=Are you dead, Xander?=

There was no reply.

=Is that the reason why I feel this emptiness inside me, as if something I
didn't even know I had has been ripped away from me?=

Still nothing.

=Am I going to see you again, Xander?=

Oz, of course, had been too busy trying to console his dear girlfriend and
Angel... well, he had barely been visible at all, wanting to help in the search
but trying to stay away from the whole gang in general, and Giles in particular.

So, nobody had really been there for her. And she was falling apart. She was
breaking from the inside, being torn in two.

But, curiously, she still hadn't openly cried. She resisted believing what
everybody was fearing.

She just couldn't accept it.

She looked again at the stranger in the mirror, and her reflected self sent a
look of exasperation towards her. 'You're not going to accomplish anything
sitting here,' she seemed to say. 'So get your lazy butt off that chair and move
on!'

Sighing, she took her hairbrush and began to carefully comb her hair, loosening
the knots formed in her long dark mane.

After five minutes, seeing that it still had the brightness, color and general
appearance of a dead cat's, she – contrary to what would usually expected from
her – just let it go and gathered her hair in a tight ponytail.

For the first time in her life, she couldn't have cared less about her looks.

Everything inside was a haze. As she moved around her bedroom, gathering her
clothes and almost carelessly putting them on, all she was able to think about
was the night of the Homecoming Dance.

Everything had been horrible that night too – with all the confusion, the
vampires, and, to top it all off, the crown of Homecoming Queen falling on a
head that wasn't hers.

Even while it seemed ridiculous, childish, at that moment it had meant a
terrible betrayal that had made her look for her so-called boyfriend – she'd
searched for a shoulder to cry on, only to find that he had already gone.

Fuming, she had driven back home on the verge of tears, not wanting to believe
the turn her life was taking. Suddenly, the biggest bunch of losers in the
entire school were her best friends, and her boyfriend was the king of them all.

And he hadn't even been there when she needed him. She'd gotten all dressed up
just for him...well, not just for him, but she had been thinking about him when
she had chosen that dress, asking herself if it would please him.

She had been ready – they would have danced, they would have enjoyed their time
together and, in the end, she'd have taken that last step. She was ready, she
felt herself ready. Everything would have been so perfect...

But he hadn't been there. He hadn't waited for her.

She had arrived home thinking about what she would tell him, when they met
again. =I'm going to kick his self-absorbed ass. I'm gonna make him pay, I'm
gonna...=

But she had found him sitting on the steps of her house's front door, his
bow-tie loosened, its two ends hanging on his chest, framing the well-built
parts of his neck and upper chest next to the unbuttoned collar of his white
shirt.

The black tuxedo had looked so great on him that he appeared good enough to eat,
and all her reproaches and recriminations had flown out of her mind as if they
had never existed.

He had smiled warmly at her and she had found herself returning that roguish,
beautiful and heart-breaking smile of his, losing all of her anger and resolve.

"What are you doing here?" she had asked him, not without a lot of surprise.

"Waiting for you," he had told her, raising his hands and showing her the two
champagne glasses he carried in his left one and the bottle in his right.

As she'd walked closer to him, her expert eyes had noticed that the glasses were
fake, made of cheap plastic instead of expensive crystal and that the bottle was
one of peach juice, her favorite.

Noticing the slight raising of her eyebrow, Xander had looked at her sheepishly.

"I would've loved to bring real glasses and a bottle of Bollinger RD, but my
budget doesn't exactly let me do that sorta thing," he had explained, pouring
the juice into the two cups as if it was a valuable liquor indeed.

Taking the glass he offered her, caressing his fingers as her hand passed by,
she'd smiled softly at him. "It's OK, a girl can get tired of luxury and
diamonds now and then."

Smiling once again and looking at her sideways, making her want to take his face
into her hands and kiss him senseless, he had shaken his head. "Liar, but thanks
anyway."

"You're welcome." They had clinked their glasses together, cringing at the deaf
sound of plastic against plastic, and then taken a sip of the juice.

It had been cold, slightly dense and completely delicious, just as she liked it.
"You still haven't told me what you're doing here."

Looking at her as if he knew a secret she was dying to know, he had broken away
slightly from her and reached behind the bushes that adorned the front of the
Chase Manor, as he used to call her house. "I talked to Buffy on the phone, and
she told me about the Queen thing. I just thought you'd like someone to cheer
you up."

She'd looked at him with suspicion. "You weren't there," she had just told him.
She hadn't intended to make it sound like a recrimination, but that was how it
sounded.

Stopping his search, he had looked back at her in silence for an endless moment,
with an expression that she hadn't been able to decipher.

There had been some guilt there, but something else too. Realization.
Acceptation. Eagerness. Fear. Hope... so many things in the blink of an eye,
that she wasn't able to get them all.

"I know, and I'm sorry, but something happened tonight," he had told her,
resuming his search.

"Something bad?"

He'd shrugged softly. "Not exactly, I guess that it kinda depends on your point
of view. I almost did something that I... I think I would've regretted for the
rest of my life – something that made me realize that..."

He had grunted and, finally, he had taken out a boom-box from behind the bushes,
placing it over the marble balustrade of the stairs. Pressing the play button,
he let Sarah McLachlan's sweet chords and voice echo in the darkness of the
night.

"I have a smile
Stretched from ear to ear
To see you walking down the road

We meet at the lights
I stare for a while
The world around disappears

It's just you and me
In this island of hope
A breath between us could be miles"

"Realize what?" she had asked him, not being able to hide a smile at seeing his
antics.

When he had turned around, he had a single red rose in his hand. Tilting his
head slightly to one side, Xander had smiled almost shyly at her. "That I would
love to dance with you."

"Let me surround you
My sea to your shore
Let me be the calm you seek

Oh, and every time I'm close to you
There's too much I can't say
And you just walk away

And I forgot to tell you I love you
And the night's too long
And cold here without you"

Smiling, surprised by his unusual gentleness and behavior, she had let him take
her in his arms and bring her into the rhythm of the soft music. Cordelia had
felt her body swaying along with his as if moving of its own volition, flowing
together in a way that felt both natural and right.

She hadn't said anything about the fact that his clumsiness and usual awkward
style of dancing, had suddenly turned into this elegant suaveness. This was a
whole new side of Xander Harris, and she had been enjoying it too much to spoil
it with needless talking.

"I grieve in my condition
For I cannot find the words
To say I need you so

Oh, and every time I'm close to you
There's too much I can't say
And you just walk away

And I forgot to tell you I love you
And the night's too long
And cold here without you"

She had always thought that all those things about soulmates she used to read
about in her cheesy romance novels, all those girly fantasies about finding your
other half, that part of yourself that was separated from you and placed inside
somebody else at the dawn of time, all that crap was nothing more than some
sweet dreams and faked illusions forged by some romance authors to increase
their sales.

But at that moment, dancing under the moon and the stars – tightly pressed
against Xander's chest, feeling his heart beating strong and sure against her
own, his arms around her, immersed and drowning in his warmth – Cordelia hadn't
been able to help but think otherwise.

And then, at the perfect time, he had kissed her. Slow and gentle, just his lips
caressing hers, slightly opening them so their breaths could mingle and their
mouths know the taste of each other.

And Cordy had just known.

Xander was the one. Her one and only.

And now she knew, after wasting all their chances, after wasting so much time,
that she had lost him.

There. She had said it. She had lost him. She was never going to see him again.
The certainty of it fell on her like a ton of bricks, suffocating her,
asphyxiating her.

Walking along the high school hallways, wondering how and when she had made it
from her house, feeling the bitter tears coming once more to her eyes, she felt
once again that void inside her.

Telling her that she had lost her biggest chance at happiness, even before ever
really knowing it.

And it was killing her. His loss was making her die.

Almost not knowing what she was doing, she made it to her locker, barely
noticing at the edge of her awareness the odd looks that all those that crossed
her path sent to her.

That, and the hushed conversations that her passing by was generating in the
narrow hallways.

Seeing the ornaments for Valentine's Day still hanging from the walls, the paper
hearts, the red bows that adorned the doorframes, she felt a cold shiver rock
her insides, chilling her to the bone.

It was a sappy and commercial celebration, but it could have been so much more
for her. The exaltation of romance, the time to tell him her real
feelings...their first anniversary.

Shivering, her fingers closed over the metal lock. She was about to open the
door, thinking about leaving her textbooks inside it and rushing to the library
to talk with Giles about continuing the search, when she noticed a presence
behind her. Almost breathing down her neck.

Very slowly, she turned around to face a very pissed-off Harmony and her group
of snobby sheep, who were looking at her as if her mere proximity was causing
them to have a deep case of nausea.

Harmony raised an eyebrow slightly and, with her hands on her waist, took a long
and slow look at her from head to toe, cringing with distaste.

Cordelia followed the path traced by her eyes, and could not help but be
surprised at her own appearance. A comfortable and used sweater over her
T-shirt, sneakers and worn-out jeans – hardly what would be expected from the
dreaded prosecutor of the ugly and unfashionable.

"Well, it's official then," the blonde girl said with a deep bitter note in her
voice, "you're one of them."

Sighing, Cordelia turned away from her, avoiding her accusatory glare and trying
to concentrate on the combination of her locker's lock. "I do not have time for
this, Harmony," she told her former best friend without looking at her.

The blonde snorted like a bad-mannered small dog, and looked at the rest of the
sheep with amusement. "Sure, being a loser is such a demanding job that it has
to take up all your spare time. Let me ask you something, Cordy," she said,
almost turning her nickname into a bad joke, "do you have to take classes for
it, or do you just become one by oxmofis?"

Stopping her fumbling with the lock, the brunette looked at her sideways. "It's
osmosis, you airhead," she corrected her with an acid-dripping tone. "Why don't
you try reading something that doesn't contain 20 different euphemisms for male
genitalia, for a change?"

The sheep around Harmony couldn't help but giggle at hearing this and Cordelia,
feeling a smug grin of satisfaction coming to her lips, mentally scratched
another notch on her belt.

Shifting uncomfortably on her feet, the blonde girl looked hard at the brunette
one. "So, I have to accept the fact that you've abandoned all hope of being a
normal person and launched yourself into your dear frog-man's arms? Where is the
mighty loser, anyway?"

As she felt Cordelia's body stilling in front of her as if a lightning bolt had
struck her, paralyzing her former mentor, Harmony thought that she had obtained
a real bull's-eye and decided to go on. "Hmmm, so, what, Cordy? Did you have a
good Valentine's Day in Dork Land? Enjoyed the time you spent with that useless
idiot? Finally done it with that good-for-nothing loser?"

=Good-for-nothing loser.= That was it. That was what she'd called him that
horrible night. That was what had driven him away from her. That, by definition,
was what had made her lose him.

She never knew where it came from but, before even she knew what she was doing,
her books were falling to the floor and the palm of her right hand was crossing
Harmony's face with a hard slap that resounded along the hallway with the force
of a cannon shot.

Cordelia had turned around to hit her so fast that her ponytail swung wildly
over her shoulder and her slap carried so much strength, that the impact
destabilized Harmony and the blonde ended leaning on the row of lockers for
support.

As her books bounced on the floor, her gaze locked with Harmony's blue-eyed and
surprised one.

For a second, a thick blanket of silence fell like a shadow on the crowded
hallway and all eyes were on them. The students of all classes, football players
and cheerleaders, jocks and computer nerds, bookworms and vandals, even some
teachers and administrative personnel stopped dead in their tracks, and looked
at them in astonished silence.

The sheep behind Harmony looked at each other with open-mouthed amazement,
wondering what to do. Harmony, her face covered by a cloud of wild golden hair
and the crimson print of Cordelia's hand beginning to appear on her cheek,
looked up to the brunette with a mixture of fear and surprise on her face.

Even before she could figure what to do or say, the blazing fury in the head
cheerleader's reddened hazel eyes told her it was better to keep her mouth shut.

"Don't you ever dare to talk about him like that," Cordelia harshly whispered to
her in a low and threatening tone. Nonetheless, a slow and burning tear began to
trace a wet path down the pale skin of her cheek.

"He's better than you. Or me. He is way better than what you could ever dream to
be. He's better than any of you!!" she practically screamed, turning around to
face all the curious crowd gathered around them, whose members were looking now
at each other as if they were facing a madwoman.

Facing Harmony once again, Cordelia practically spat her next words in her face.
"If you ever dare to put down the man I love again, I swear to you that I'll-"

Nevertheless, the brunette's menace was cut short by a deeply nasal and twanging
voice that made both of them turn around. "Bwhat the hell is gwoin' on here?"

Turning around, both the blonde and the brunette faced the strange apparition
that was Principal Snyder wearing a patch over his obviously swollen nose, and
looking at them with blackened eyes.

It was quite clear that someone had given him a run for his money. "Dwon't you
have anythin' else to do?" he asked to no one in particular. "Clwasses to
atten'? People to stalk? Gwalls to spway-paint?"

As people began to walk away, mumbling and whispering animatedly between them,
sending amused looks at Cordelia and Harmony, the high school principal walked
closer to the girls.

He was so near in fact, that Cordelia was able to notice (much to her loathing)
the tampons in his nose, stained with dried blood. And the disgusting white
traces of dried saliva at the corner of his lips, produced by the fact that he
had to breathe through his mouth.

"Dyou," he said pointing at the sheep, "gwo agway. Dyou," he added taking
Harmony's chin in his hand, making her shiver at the contact and slightly
turning her head around to examine her reddened cheek.

"Gwo agway and put somethin' on dat. An' dyou," Snyder added, finally facing
Cordelia and letting out a tired sigh that sounded like a dry cough. "I can't
tell dyou bwhat a disappointmen' dyou mean' to me, Miss Chwase."

Rolling her eyes, Cordelia just made a face, too tired and wired up by the worry
and lack of sleep to stand a lecture from the balding little troll.

Nevertheless, she decided to remain in silence, thinking that with a little
luck, she could get free from him in a few moments.

But of course, that kind of ending was the farthest one from Snyder's mind.

"Dyou are, or I shoul' say were one of the mos' promisin' students of 'dis, for
de mos' par', padthetic group of hormone-filled liddle mwonsters, Miss Chwase.
Buth' now? Now dyour face shoul' figure on a poster abouth bwhat bad company can
do to a gworl. You've tudned into one of dem," he finished, awkwardly spitting
out the words as if they were disgusting to his mouth.

Cordelia just looked at him, through half-closed eyes. "At least my face still
can figure in a poster, which is more than what I can say for others," she
answered him, each one of her words dripping an acid sarcasm that obviously
passed some inches over Snyder's balding head.

Then, making one of those lovable pouts that she knew turned every guy into a
babbling puddle, she raised her hand to softly caress his patched nose. "Oooh,
poor principal," she purred, getting a look of surprise from the little troll,
"I bet this hurts a lot."

"Gwe-gwell," his twanging voice said, "'da wors' par', is dat I can't bweathe
cowwectly..." As if to confirm his last words, he gulped down a mouthful of
saliva before choking up with it and panting painfully, sounding too much like a
broken accordion.

Still smiling innocently, Cordelia tilted slightly her head to one side and
closed the space that separated them, each one of her words coming out in a soft
pop of warm air that caressed the principal's face as her fingers traced and
idle pattern around his nose. "Well, you know the best cure for that?"

"N-no, bwhat?"

Suddenly, Cordelia trapped Snyder's broken nasal appendage between her index and
middle finger and closed them tightly, yanking painfully with all her strength.

"Clearing the nostrils!!" she exclaimed, her voice barely audible over the
principal's loud scream of pain and the crunching sound of the twisted and
broken cartilage coming from his nose.

"God!!" he shouted, violently breaking away from the furious brunette and
bringing a hand to his face to stop the renewed hemorrhaging, before the blood
had the chance to drip on his cheap suit. "Dyou are cwazy!! And dyou are goin'
to pay fo' 'dis!!"

In his haste to get away from the angered cheerleader, Snyder backpedaled
without looking who was behind him, and without noticing that Giles and the rest
of the Scooby Gang had silently gathered near them.

Therefore, he wasn't able to notice when Buffy extended her left leg either,
placing it in the short man's path and he clumsily stumbled upon it,
ridiculously falling flat onto his ass to the floor.

"Watch your step, Principal Snyder," the Slayer told him with a sweet smile.
"You could fall and hurt yourself."

Oz, who was the nearest to him, kneeled down and offered his support to him,
only managing to make the process of standing up more awkward, complicated and
compromising for Snyder's ego.

"Le' me gwo!" he exclaimed, nervously slapping the red-haired boy's hands away.

"Hey," Oz said, raising his arms in surrender, "Just wanted to help. I wasn't
trying to cop a feel or anything like that."

The principal looked at him through half-closed and blackened eyes, and then
turned to Buffy and the rest, menacingly pointing at them with his finger.
"Dyou... dyou..." Buffy raised her brow expectantly. "Dyou are gwoin' to pay for
'dis. All of dyou!! And dyou," he turned around to Cordelia and pointed at her.

The brunette took a step towards him and the principal recoiled as in fear,
letting go a weak croak. "I'll see dyou in detention, Miss Chwase," he told her,
quickly getting the hell away from her, "and dyou bedder be calmed down by den."

Looking down at his retreating back as he unsuccessfully tried to regain some of
his composure by shouting at a pair of innocent bypassing students, Buffy
smoothly raised one of her eyebrows. "What's up with him?"

Cordelia shrugged, uninterested, turning back to her locker. "The cat ate his
nose."

"How are you doing?" Willow asked her, while the brunette resumed her fumbling
with the combination.

Cordelia sighed, and leaned her forehead on the cold surface of the metallic
door. "What do you think?"

Willow got closer to her and, leaning a comforting hand on her shoulder made the
taller brunette turn around and, slow and almost painfully, took her into her
arms, enveloping her into a tight and fierce hug.

Shaking with a thousand emotions that she wasn't able to completely understand,
Cordelia felt herself breaking into quiet sobs, practically held up on her feet
by the smaller redhead and completely forgetting about the people and students
surrounding them.

Feeling the bitter tears coming to her eyes too, Willow softly rocked her like a
child, shushing her.

Beside them, Buffy had to avert her eyes away feeling the sharp piercing pain of
her guilt and self-blame – thinking that she had failed her friends once more,
not only Xander but all of them.

Then, to her amazement, she heard Cordelia's broken voice calling her. "Buffy."

The blonde Slayer raised her eyes from the floor and found the brunette's arm
extended to towards her while her other arm was still wrapped around Willow. The
eyes of both girls, swollen, red and wet were looking at her with a
heartbreaking mixture of pain and hope, begging her to take the next step.

Biting her lower lip not to cry, and failing miserably, Buffy took a step
towards her two friends and entered into their embrace, locking with them into a
three-way hug, searching and finding comfort in the shared pain, in the mutual
feelings.

It was in different ways, expressed with dissimilar words, but it was a truth as
big as the universe that the three of them loved Xander Harris.

Somewhere near them, some clueless idiot let out an insinuating whistle and
somebody else laughed along with it. Both Oz and Giles turned around immediately
and glared at the pair of jocks, their usually controlled faces now turned into
harsh masks of barely-repressed rage.

The two guys looked at each other and, deciding that discretion was indeed the
better part of valor, quickly walked away.

Then, when the three girls finally broke apart, Giles coughed politely, getting
their attention. "I'm, um, afraid...th-that you need to get to class."

"Are we going to abandon the search?" Cordelia asked him, with a little more
bitterness than what she'd intended.

Sighing, understanding her, Giles took off his glasses and settled his sincere
green gaze on her. "There's nothing more that anyone can do for now, Cordelia.
We've searched the whole town for the last two days, and I've filed a missing
persons report with the police department. The only thing we can do right now is
to keep an eye on the hospitals, to see if someone with Xander's physical
description is admitted."

"And the morgue," Cordelia practically spat out, looking at him with almost
accusatory eyes. Avoiding her gaze, Giles nodded sadly, not able to voice the
words.

"How come you made the report?" Oz suddenly asked him.

Blinking in surprise at the question, using the moment to place his glasses back
over his nose and gather his thoughts, Giles took out a little piece of paper
from the interior pocket of his tweed jacket. "Oh, yes, I-I almost forgot.
Xander's parents refused to make one."

"What?" Buffy asked with incredulity. "How can they-?"

"I-it seems that they're convinced that, um, Xander has run away from home. They
received an official notification announcing that Xander was expelled from the
high school on Friday night because of a, uh, physical aggression on the person
of our dear Principal Snyder."

"Xander broke Snyder's nose?" Willow asked with surprise. "Why would he do
something like that?"

Giles shrugged helplessly, he knew as much as they did. "Snyder d-doesn't
exactly seem prone to explain the precise facts to anybody, but h-he has
commented that he is thinking on suing Xander's parents. That would explain why
they don't want to see him right now, i-if what I've gathered about Xander's
family life is correct."

"Maybe he really has run away," Willow said, her sea-green eyes bright with
reborn hope. "Don't you think so? Maybe he'll call in a few days, and tell us
that he's alright."

"Yeah," Buffy joined her, almost fearing to hope, "he'll probably be very
confused right now. Lord knows I was, when I... well, you know. What do you
think, Cordelia?"

The brunette looked at her in silence. How could she explain it to her? How
could she tell them that there was an empty spot in her soul, that was telling
her in quite unmistakable terms that Xander was no longer walking the earth? How
could she?

"Maybe," she just said, recovering her books from the floor and turning around
to put them into her locker. "Maybe."

Closing her eyes for a second, trying to regain her equilibrium after a short
wave of dizziness hit her, Cordelia fumbled with the lock until she was finally
able to produce the right combination and it popped open with a click.

She opened the door.

Something fell from the interior of her locker, hitting her face and making her
backpedal and yelp in surprise. It was something cold and soft, and for a
second, she thought that someone had put a live frog into her locker, wanting to
pull a practical joke on her.

But it wasn't a frog. It wasn't any innocent joke.

It wasn't even alive.

For an endless moment, a thick silence fell around them; people kept walking
around the gang, not noticing them, as if they were invisible. The group of
friends looked at the thing falling from the interior of the locker in slow
motion, not wanting to believe what their eyes were seeing.

A hand with long and slender, almost feminine, fingers matted with blood that
seemed almost brown after having dried upon the pale, white skin.

A naked arm attached to it, the elbow joint twisted in an odd, impossible angle.


Following its path, their eyes ascended into the darkness of the locker. None of
them were breathing. None of them said anything.

Then Willow screamed. Loud, hard, and with the sound of pure and unadulterated
spiritual pain.

Everything around them stopped, as dozens of heads turned around towards them.

Submerged in the thick haze of confusion, Cordelia felt herself distancing from
the scene, as if she watching a movie or something.

Someone else screamed. Someone cried out like a wounded animal. Yet another
someone cursed violently.

Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed how a very pale Oz ran to Willow and
took her in his arms, before her body hit the ground when the red-haired
hacker's legs weren't able to hold her up anymore. For a short second, the
brunette turned around and looked at all of them.

Buffy was beyond pale; she looked like a ghost, her lips were trembling with
sorrow and rage. Her eyes were wet with tears, that slowly began to roll down
her cheeks.

Giles was pale too, but he also looked surprisingly lost and suddenly twenty
years older. His lips were moving, but no sound came out of them and she had to
read them to understand that he was repeating the same two words one time after
another, as if they were a mantra. 'No please, no please, no please...'

Still in slow motion, Cordelia turned around once more and tilted her head to
one side. Strangely, all she was able to think about was that whoever had put
him into her locker had had to break a lot of his bones, just to make him fit
into the narrow space of the enclosure. His legs, his arms, his backbone and
spine...

Had Xander still been alive? Had he screamed and fought while he was pushed into
that darkness, feeling his bones splintering like thin wooden branches – his
insides broken and bleeding, pierced by his own bones?

If so, his face didn't reflect that suffering, and Cordelia indulged herself the
fantasy that his death had been quick and painless. He was pale, his head turned
to her, leaned on his knees, which were pushed up against his chest in an angle
that was humanly impossible.

His brown eyes were closed, and his generous mouth was shut into a thin line. If
it hadn't been for the bloodstains and the open wounds, someone could think that
he was just sleeping.

Not knowing what she was doing, Cordelia went closer. She was beginning to feel
the brunt of her own tears escaping from her eyes, but she ignored them as if
they belonged to another person.

There was dried blood matting his cheeks and lips.

She caressed his handsome face. He was cold.

His lips were still soft, as was the unshaven hair under his nose and around his
mouth. How many times he had joked about growing a moustache and a goatee in the
last few years? Something to look a little cooler?

How many times had she laughed, when those same hairs had tickled her lips when
he kissed her?

How many times?

However many there had been, there were not going to be any more.

Why wasn't she screaming? She couldn't tell. Maybe it was the shock. Maybe it
was that she couldn't gather enough strength in her lungs to do it. Maybe it was
that she couldn't accept the truth. Maybe...

"Cordelia," a voice said behind her at the same time that a set of strong hands
leaned on her shoulders. Through the thick mist of unreality that was
surrounding her, she recognized Giles' voice calling her name. "Cordelia, don't
look at him... Cordelia..."

With a violent, almost enraged shake of her shoulders, the girl shrugged away
his hands, never taking her eyes from her loved one's pale face.

=I never told you I loved you,= her soul cried inside her. =I never let you know
how much you meant to me. I never showed you how important you were to me. You
never knew, you never knew, you never, never, never...=

There was something stuck on his body – a piece of paper placed on his lap,
attached to his skin with a piece of adhesive. With trembling hands, Cordelia
took it.

A paper-heart card, almost brown with the thick smears of his bloodstains.

Using the back of her hand to wipe her eyes, she used her other hand to open it.

It was one of those pre-made ones, that were exchanged during the most romantic
festival of the year. Something to show your significant other how much you care
about them, a gift, a memento.

There were three words, and an initial. Written in blood.

Three words.

'Be my Valentine.'

And an initial.

'F.'

Everything turned dark, as her eyes began to lose focus. Cordy felt weak, her
head light as if she were beginning to fly away. She was suddenly weightless
and, almost from a distance, she saw her friends gathering around her, looking
down.

She never felt the impact of her body against the floor, or anything else around
her when everything turned as dark as the interior of a wolf's mouth.

The cheerleader just closed her eyes, and surrendered to sweet and painless
oblivion.

~~~~~~

To be continued...