Somehow, a part of her always thought it would go from them and stolen Barbies to them and formalwear, to them and a white picket fence, a double bed reserved in a retirement home, Saturday morning cartoons every week always.
In a way, it does.
His girlfriend is the homecoming queen (almost! robbed!) and her boyfriend's in the band, and somehow that part is more confusing than the bit where they all team up and fight the forces of darkness every Tuesday.
And sometimes, when the crush of the student crowd or even just of the Scoobies is gone, Oz will talk with paragraphs, inflections, ill-thought-out sentences and unpremeditated enthusiasm. And sometimes, she sees Xander, in the middle of a full-on loveable-dork-babble-fest, and Cordelia listening and smiling quietly, but not in a mean way. Not in a mean way at all.
She tries to sketch it sometimes, like a diamond – or possibly a rhombus, she's never been exactly sure where fringe group members like musicians stand in relation to socialites-in-training. Her and Xander closest together, Oz and Cordelia, polar opposites, drawn inwards by their ties to the two Scoobies who, of all others, know each other the closest to being one person.
Drawn inwards - unwillingly? Being a Scooby was never unwilling. It was wanting in on the fight because it was a good fight, and sometimes you could do things to help. She remembers, with the clarity of a multiple-mocha-induced migraine, when she made her final decision on that front, but somehow never thought to ask him when he did the same.
Them and formalwear. A topic best left alone.
And yet it comes back to this, only three years but somehow a lifetime later: two different girls, her and Xander still at the core, a closer-knit group but diamonds involved nonetheless because this is Anya, was anyone expecting her to go for a plain wedding band?
Are they still at the core? She looks at him and sees not the boy she grew up with, but a man, parts of whose growth she somehow missed, and he missed hers. Something changed last summer, Scoobies working together to mimic the efforts of the Slayer and yet-
(Understand
We'll go hand in hand
But we'll walk alone in fear)
- she'd wanted to make it better, she'd tried to make it better, and now Tara had-
This was Xander's day. And maybe she didn't know him as well as she once had, but she knew that she could ask him, later, and they'd talk, and he could explain how things changed, for him. And she would do the same. They could do that later, because they would always be near each other. That had never changed.
Later, she will think that maybe if she had been a little closer to him, she might have recognised that the jitters were a little too real, when she has to tell Anya that no, she didn't know he would- she didn't know he was thinking of-
Later still (your shirt) diamond hard pain in her bedroom, in the Magic Box, piercing through her body on Kingman's Bluff. She will defeat the Slayer, the vengeance demon, the magic of a coven, the silly little boys with their silly little toys.
(She knows on some level that it doesn't matter with Xander, not really, if they missed a month or a year or a lifetime of growing up and apart, because all it takes is a little time and they will clasp back together as if they were never apart, but what if there were no more time? What if she ends it all?)
The part of her that had planned long ago for every week always will be unsurprised that Xander has come to meet her there alone, no real plan to stop her. That he somehow refuses to let her tear away from herself. That he still tries to make jokes, never shows even the slightest trace of anger and refuses to quit, to stop, to shut up shut up, refuses to understand that there is no point in bringing her back, there is nothing to bring back.
He finds her, and brings her back, just as she did with Tara, Tara, but this same thought that drives her to her knees saves her, maybe just enough, because Xander loves her. She knows that. She knows that there will be pain, and mourning, maybe forever, but there will also be love. Xander, every week always. And she will do the same for him.