Snowflakes the size of portuguese water dogs fall down from the gray expanse of wintery sky. All is well. All is not well. The narrative begins here.
The story of the little match girl so goes that on a cold New Year's eve, an orphaned child forced to support herself fails and ultimately freezes to death. This is not that tale. This is the tale of the sex toy vendor.
This day was in that awkward and brief period between Black Friday and Christmas day right before the great capitalist's wet dream of obligatory gift-giving; the sun shone cool on Northern California and Xander Harris stood in the shadow of much more legit street vendors.
"Sir," he called out, latching onto a speedwalking passerbuyer, "would you please buy a dildo? Every one sold is another shirt on my person and many shirts make up one giant warm shirt pile, it's like how all the people come together and celebrate like holidays I think well it means something like the meaning of-uh-Christmas!"
But the man only picked up speed and continued on, like every other passer of by.
"Ah man," Xander sighed, eyes catching on a cluster of individuals led by one with magnificent Perfect Carlos hair (AUTHOR'S NOTE: Jillie this is you!) who carried on past him. The sun was already tipping behind the line of buildings and people were already ducking away from the chill wind cooling the otherwise warm evening. It was still snowing though. Don't judge.
Shrugging to himself, Xander patted the comfortable line of shirt patterned colorfully with humuhumunukunukuapua'a.
His sales pitch left much to be desired, this much he knew, but there are only so many effective ways to request that passing individuals take time out of their busy lives to purchase stimulatingly phallic objects. It wasn't like he was trying to sell them as the used dildos they were, stolen in a suitcase for the meager profit he hoped to attain.
"Hey, kid, got any dildos?" asked a passing man with spiky purple hair. He had black eyes, like a demon.
"Oh!" said Xander, then paused, and then said in a way that was vaguely sing-songy, "Do you want to buy a dildo-?"
The demon-man blinked at him.
"Uh, right, sorry, I'll stop singing now," said Xander. He cleared his throat and said, hopefully in a manner that resembled a hardened dildo seller, "So-do you?"
"I'll take two," said the demon-man, "but I'm going to need them stuck together. Do you have duct tape?"
"Duct tape?" said Xander, a little bit confused. Still, hopeful at the prospect of a potential sale, he tried not to look accepting of duct-taped dildos without revealing that he thought the whole idea to be… well… he had never actually tried it, so he didn't really have any right to say or any expertise on the subject. He decided it was best to ask, "Is that one of those-things? With tape?"
"It's very important. But if you don't have any, I can just go to the dollar store. Shame, I was hoping for one of those hearty used dildos. There have been a lot of warnings about the d store's products lately…"
"So are you still buying?"
The demon-man narrowed his eyes in consideration. "I don't know-do they come in fuschia?"
"Well, I think we've got one of those," Xander replied, pushing his hand into the suitcase and letting it flop around. He would be guided by the Spleen of the Dildos. He pulled out the dildo in question, scoffing at its hellish bright neon shade.
"Hmmmmmm," said the demon-man, except it came out more as a faint, fiery buzzing noise that set Xander's hair on edge and threatened to knock his teeth out of his mouth and into the sidewalk. He didn't even know if there were supposed to be demons in this "universe," since he only lived in it, it wasn't like he knew everything about it or anything, and he didn't even know which season he was in currently, so he just assumed that demons did in fact exist and that they wanted to buy dildos. A lot of dildos. Hopefully enough for him to buy several shirts, because at this point he was facing the prospect of Not Walking Away at the End of the Day With Enough Shirts, which was always a problematic notion. Not as problematic as the lack of women in media, but "problematic" nonetheless.
"Was that a-yes?" Xander inquired, doing a motion that was vaguely well-characterized as Something Xander Would Do.
The demon-man made a "pleased" buzzing noise, and nodded.
Xander shoved the dildo in his hands.
"Two," grunted the demon-man.
"Two what?"
"Two dildos."
"Two dildos who?"
"This isn't a knock-knock joke," snapped "his" customer. "That's it. I'm going to set these dildos on fire."
"NO!" screamed Xander, and tackled him to the ground. "At least gimme some cash!"
They made vaguely fight-sounding noises for quite some time, and when they emerged from their scuffle they were both unscathed, except Xander's Suitcase o' Phallic Objects had been scattered across the ground and there. Were. Dildos. Everywhere.
"Now I have to wash these!'
"No you won't!" said the demon-man, and threw 500 yen at Xander before disappearing in a cloud of phallic "purple" smoke.
"I really won't," Xander muttered, kneeling down and picking up the dildos. He was making a game of it, seeing if he could toss them into the suitcase at the allyway (is he even in one of those- a place for those frequently-forgotten allies to congregate and lament the lack of ally representation in gay media). "I should totally buy some shirts soon. Radical!"
"You're outta your vector," said the phallic cloud of smoke.
One of the other vendors spat at Xander and some of the saliva got on his shirt. "Now I definitely need a new shirt," he said. "Where can I support the local economy without demonizing small business? There have been a lot of demons. Heh heh." He kept laughing (it went something like this: "heh" "heh" "heh" "heh") and the vendor moved her pretzel stand far away from Xander's reach so he would not affect
her business negatively. She did have a butchery to keep running.
He walked over to Your Local Vaguely Hipstery Thrift Shop where hipsters often punched homeless people in the face in order to buy ripped "secondhand" jeans and universe "scarves." The inside was pretty alright- y'know it was one of those shops where there are things that you can buy everywhere. There was a Sunnydale: Founded 1333 (that wasn't quite right…) sign in the corner and it was potentially glowing. Xander ignored that and headed "straight" (WHY DOES IT ALWAYS HAVE TO BE STRAIGHT) to the shirt and gem sweater section.
There was a girl there, trying to become one with the gem sweater rack. She was mumbling vaguely in an East Asian language that sounded almost German if you had no idea what you were listening for (or if you simply thought that all foreign languages were German, as some humans are wont to do). It might have been Japanese. It might have been Korean. Xander couldn't tell-to him all of them looked exactly the same.
He realized that it was possibly some sort of translation or whatever of an old burned out boy band. Who were those guys again? Whatever, they all sounded like Lance Bass.
THE END
"NO!" screamed Giles in a very low-key, laid-back, hyphenated-adjective, British-seeming way. He was sipping tea out of his pinky finger and had a book balanced carefully on his head. "I am, uh, a librarian and I, uh, forbid this story to end here. It has not been properly concluded. Xander has not yet purchased a shirt." Blinking furiously, he strolled out of the shop with a look of poorly-disguised, still-hyphenated disdain on his face.
Xander turned back to the racks, questing for a shirt that expressed his feelings of deep holiday "joy." Possibly one with some palm trees wearing Santa hats. Those were totally awesome and mad-radical. So … Xander. They spoke to him at a level best described as "at the very core of his soul, not to be confused with the core of his apple." He would have had stars in his eyes if he had had two eyes visible, but as it were the only eye with stars in it was the eye he had given up so valiantly in that one story so that Buffy could have an eye transplant and see once more.
Wait, Xander thought, meandering almost intentlessly through racks of shirts. Hold the banana, he thought, passing the banana lamp into the confused maw of a nearby cacodemon.
He had found the shirt. The shirt. Proud coelacanth knitting sword cozies on a biohazardous tone of green. Seeing the shirt, Xander Harris knew he had to have it as one of the stack of shirts layered upon his person.
Xander froze, hands reaching reverently to the shirt. It was nine thousand and forty-seven Vietnamese dong. With grim determination Xander turned from the shirt.
He would have to return the creeping dark and sell more dildos, all for the sake of the shirt. It was worth standing about in the dark in a small town with a fatality rate matching that of a far larger city, probably even a match for a small country. Still, Xander mused, he'd done as much for less: he'd made it to high school, hadn't he?
"Dildos, dildos, fresh dildos," Xander called out into the night. He sighed, leaning against the conspicuous alley opening. "All new dildos! Ah, guess nobody's out shopping now. Getting to the later part of the night and not yet the day morning part."
And then something vampire-shaped slipped behind Xander who yelped and rotated, like you spin me right 'round baby.
"Oh hey man," Xander said, clasping his case of "dildos" close to his chest. "Weren't you Jesus in the nativity thing when we were kids? What happened?"
What happened indeed? There was something distinctly odd about the state of his skin-manger Jesus (maybe Vamp Jesus now? why that of all fashions?) really needed a new dermatologist-and his teeth, Xander realized as the mouth opened in an "angry" snarl. Maybe some anger management techniques, or meditative activities, he thought as Vamp Jesus lunged at him.
Somewhere in the confusion of limbs Xander's hand fastened on something and impaled Vamp Jesus on a truly impressive dildo that Xander privately thought of as Thor's Hammer.
Vamp Jesus paused, seemingly befuddled. Xander stood there, also greatly fuddled.
"Uh," Xander said, and his mouth moved once more on an autopilot he'd never quite been able to deactivate. "Your ass-guard isn't going to stand a chance against this."
A hand drew him and his wares into the shadows.
"So," said the vampire, "I'd like to tell you a bit about our… xenophobia."
"Xenophobia? What-no, man-I thought that killed you! How are you talking right now?"
"It wasn't a wooden dild-mmmph!" And the vampire keeled over.
"Ha!" said Xander in triumph, even though he had no idea what had just occurred.
Well, now that the second coming of Christ was stopped... what could really top that? Another apocalypse in Sunnydale: done. Check. Xander, finished. Xander, untamed. Xander… the incredibly ripped shirtless green man. Except that was all wrong, because he liked shirts, that was why he was doing this, that was the whole dildo-sellingy operation, and he wasn't incredibly ripped.
Maybe he could wait out the rest of the night and hit the morning rush. Except that wasn't going to happen, because everyone would be sitting at home with their cute kids enjoying their own personal Christmas Special life. Ugh (boots)-Xander was "cute". He deserved more than illegally sold dildos and shirts that cost too many Vietnamese dong.
He was about to pick up the meager remnants of his life and resume his miserable existence at "home." ((Sad "quotations." Xander didn't really feel at home there. Home made him feel sad.)) As he turned, he noticed the other late-night vendors all standing dutifully at their cardboard tables. Was that the creepy librarian selling used Doritos and kitchenware?
"Hey kid," said the librarian in a way that indicated that he might not be one hundred percent rooting for rock, flag, and eagle and might even in fact like Queen, "come here for a tick."
"Uhhh me? As in, me me? Me? Over here?"
"Uhh indeed," he responded, polishing his glasses in frustration. American nerds. A delicacy in many countries. Always so tender due to lack of muscle and general… well… robustness.
"Hey," said Xander indignantly, "are you stealing the narrative? Not cool. This is my depressing story! And I wanna be… in it! Still! Without you in it! And I don't want your used Doritos."
"You like cheesy shirts," the librarian said, "so I do not comprehend why you would not also, uh, like cheesy chewed tortilla chips as well. But never mind that." He shook his head so hard his glasses slipped down his nose. He figured that this was a good time to take them off and polish them again.
"I can hear you doing that," Xander said accusatorially.
"Doing what?"
"Stealing my thunder."
"There was no thunder of yours for me to steal," said the librarian, "I was simply taking advantage of the obvious gaps in the narrative. I have something to… give you."
"Are we going to go on a self-reflexive time-traveling adventure? I mean you're, like, British and everything."
"I'm-that is not the point here. The point… is that I have something to give to you."
"Is it a shirt?" Xander asked, trying to keep the desperate quivering hope from his voice.
"Of sorts," said the librarian, and he revealed a miniscule stuffed shark.
"That definitely won't fit me," said Xander.
"Of course not," the librarian said, handing him the stuffed shark and an appropriately-sized Hawaiian shirt,"this was my childhood shark and this was my childhood shirt. I was small once, you see."
"That's definitely not going to fit," Xander said.
"My intention was not to give you a horrendously flamboyant Hawaiian shirt," said the librarian. "You seem to choose them perfectly well on your own."
"Hell yeah, I do!"
"However… I do have one present for you, Xander."
"Really? Me? For me? Is it a shirt?"
"No. You really have to stop asking that. That narrative arc is over."
"Oh." Xander "looked" dejected.
"Don't pout like that. I'm going to cheer you up."
"Really?" said Xander, already ninety-two percent happier.
"Yes," said the librarian. "We're going 'surfing'!"
And Xander never "sold" another dildo again.