PROMPT: "Spike smokes in Xander's bed."
1. If there was one thing Xander really hated, it was when Spike smoked in bed. He wasn't too worried about the vampire falling asleep and burning the house down, but he couldn't stand the mess.
Spike got ashes everywhere. He would start waving his cigarette around while he yelled at the TV and gray ashes and embers would fly in all directions. He hadn't yet burned a hole in the mattress, but he'd ruined a set of blue sheets.
"Do you think I'm made of money or something?" Xander snarled at Spike's leather jacket, imagining that the vampire was in it. "You're lucky we need you, or you'd have bleached your last."
He huffed and smoothed the comforter over the new sheets he'd used to make the bed. It had cost him $15 for the sheet set and he wasn't exactly pleased with the brown and blue design, but he couldn't afford anything better.
He kicked the old sheets in the direction of the garbage can in the corner. They didn't make it even halfway there. Instead of going to pick them up, he turned around and flopped backward onto the bed.
Staring at the ceiling of his basement hell, he had to wonder how things had gone so wrong in his life.
Living in an apartment over the garage like a not-as-cool Fonzie had always been the fate he wanted to avoid. So ending up in the basement, an even worse place than the attic, left him wanting to weep. Add to that a defanged vampire that insisted on smoking in his bed, and Xander had to wonder if he had somehow died and this was his own personal hell.
I have to get out of here, he thought, not for the first time. He'd always stopped himself when he started remembering his ill-fated road trip and Oxnard as a pleasant memory, but he didn't this time.
He imagined the life he could have lived if he'd kept the job dancing, saved up to go to night school, and settled down somewhere that didn't have such a fangy nightlife. He definitely wouldn't be living in a basement and working at the Doublemeat Palace. Things might actually be good.
When he'd returned to Sunnydale after the road trip, it was because the gang needed him. That's what he'd told himself. He'd been key guy at graduation and he'd really starting getting good at the fighting and the planning. He did his part to save the world week after week and there was no way he could flake out on that.
He'd made himself come home because the gang needed him.
Only Willow, Buffy, and Oz were enrolled in college and he wasn't. They were out there making other friends, spending less time with him, drifting off into lives of their own. And it wasn't like Giles was begging for his company.
Everyone still met up for the world saveage, but Xander was feeling pretty useless. If he hadn't let himself be roped into babysitting the Fanged Wonder, it would be like he wasn't a member of the group at all.
I've gotta get out of this place, he thought. And he wasn't sure if he was thinking about the rut he was in or Sunnydale.