In Which Another Apocalypse Is Averted
With prom( and the marvelous and in no way deadly distraction that had turned out to be) over, there was nothing but feelings of doom and gloom everywhere. And they wouldn't leave, even with Andrew blowing in Xander's ear when they met in the cemetery the week leading up to graduation. Andrew thought it was creepy, shivered and said he wished they could meet anywhere else. But Xander was supposed to be patrolling, so it was the cemetery or nowhere, and Andrew's shivers changed when Xander pushed him up against a mausoleum and tried not to think about anything else.
He came in late to class the day before the Ascension, a before with no after that Xander could imagine, because Andrew caught his hand in the hallway and asked if he was ever going to see him again after graduation. Andrew meant it as a joke, Xander thought, though maybe his smile was a little bit too fluttery for that to be completely true. But either way, Xander didn't know, on so many different levels. But he caught Andrew's hand right back and said, "Hey, you know how you told me I maybe shouldn't go to prom?" and when Andrew nodded he continued, "Well, you should possibly consider not going to graduation." And Andrew nodded again and said, "Something bad?" and Xander said, "Like you wouldn't believe."
Anya, who was still in school for some unfathomable reason, showed up to talk about the Ascension, and after she took off for the hills Xander thought at least this time he'd be rid of her (though, she was very pretty. Maybe even prettier than Buffy. But that wasn't the point). But she showed up again that night, said, "Come with me," and Xander didn't even hesitate before he stepped back and said, "I can't." It was another one of those times when he didn't even really think about the curse in the moment, just after. There were more important things here, and Xander couldn't leave.
Important things like Buffy being in the hospital. Spending the night clutching cups of horrible, horrible coffee in the waiting room (nice change from the library. Or not) meant that Xander didn't see Andrew again before graduation. When he stepped outside the next morning after prepping the troops, Xander's heart leapt as he scanned the crowd of students and parents and couldn't find Andrew there, couldn't find him anywhere. He hoped until his teeth hurt that Andrew had decided to skip graduation and also town until he saw him edging into the courtyard and sliding into his seat, third from the end in the last row, just before Snyder stood up to introduce the Mayor. And he let his teeth unclench: at least some new horrible thing hadn't happened, or if it had, Andrew hadn't gotten in the way of it.
After the horrible torture of the Mayor's speech had ended, everything was a rush of arrows and giant fireballs and shouting orders and watching his classmates die, and after it was over, Xander's head hurt and it was hard to breathe. His chest felt weighed down with it all, but even so, there was a tiny bit of lightness dancing there, telling him, "We won!"
Afterwards, everyone who wasn't grievously injured (and there were more of them than Xander would have liked, hence all the chest weight) pretty much scattered, and that made it hard to get a good body count. Actually, it was kind of hard to count anything, especially with the stars floating in front of Xander's eyes. Sparkly.
Xander walked with Buffy through the wreckage, past too many ambulances, and it was dumb but he couldn't help expecting to see Andrew sidling around a corner of one of them any second now. Because surely, after all that, surely not Andrew too...
After watching him crane his neck around for perhaps the fifteenth time, Buffy gave him a funny look.
"Hey," she said, smiling sort of soft and sad. "I know who I'm looking for. But who are you looking for?"
He ahem-ed and scratched the back of his neck and tried not to think of Larry being snake-snapped before he had a chance to see Xander doing what he'd always said he should. "Andrew Wells," he mumbled.
Buffy cocked her head. "Tucker's brother?"
"Yeah," Xander said. "You guys didn't know, but I've sort of been…seeing him. Or something! I don't know."
To his surprise, Buffy's eyes lit up. "Aha! So that's who! That's what we couldn't figure out. Will will be sad to learn that she owes me twenty bucks."
"Uh, I think 'excuse me' is an understatement, here," Xander said, sure his eyes were bugging out in an extremely lifelike and not at all cartoonish way.
"Because it's not Larry." Buffy made to pat him on the shoulder, then winced when her hand slapped into her temple. "Don't worry, friend. I knew he wasn't your type."
"My…type?" Xander was still more than a little lost. "But you're not surprised to find that my more general type…how should I put this? Lacks of the bosoms?"
Buffy laughed, and stopped herself from trying to pat him on the shoulder again. Xander was sure it would have felt less than reassuring anyway.
"No, not really even a little bit," she said, her mouth quirking. "Sorry, Xander."
When Xander continued to stand there staring agape at her, trying to work out through the fuzz in his brain when he had failed to be stealthy, what he must have done differently, if he had somehow drastically changed without knowing it and nobody had bothered to tell him.
"Come on, Xander," Buffy said, letting her hand fall back down to her side. "I think we've all had our suspicions for a while."
"Have we?" Xander distinctly did not yelp (you can't prove that that was a yelp). "Even…even before?"
And Buffy nodded. "Xander. Yes. You've had some gay…tendencies as long as I've known you. Think about the praying mantis incident."
And Xander remembered, back in the days when Buffy shone in his eyes as the one and only girl in all the world (ha, it was funny because she was the Chosen One). He remembered the beginning of his trouble with nefarious lady-demons, and he thought of himself and that kid Blaine stuck in the same cage and clutching each other as Ms. French clacked her pincers.
How Xander had felt a weird thump and a leap in his heart that had nothing to do with the monster outside the bars.
"You know there's only one way out of this?" he had asked Blaine, not quite sure what he was saying or what was making him say it, but hey, they were going to be dead soon so what did it matter?
"What?" Blaine had asked.
And Xander had licked his lips and said, "We have to not be virgins anymore."
Luckily Buffy and Willow and Giles had burst in before Xander could see the look on Blaine's face, see whether it was horror or disgust or glee that now Blaine had something else to mock Xander about. But it was true that Xander hadn't been super disgusted himself at the thought of pressing his body up against Blaine's again, except without all the clothes between them.
"And the mind reading thing kinda confirmed my suspicions," Buffy went on. "Though I agree: Oz does have nice hands."
"I knew it!" And this time Xander really did yelp. "I knew you were listening to my brain!" But Buffy only shrugged.
Xander hadn't considered before that this…thing, these feelings couldn't be traced and pinned back to the exact moment that Cordelia and Anya had cursed him, changed him, twisted his insides in some way that he still didn't even begin to understand. He hadn't considered that maybe nothing had really changed at all, that the curse had just given certain…feelings room to struggle their way to the surface.
So yeah, maybe there had been some signs that Xander should have been reading. Still, standing there with Buffy amidst the ruins of their adolescent prison, he wanted to balk at the term "gay," so definite and clear-cut. But instead he found that a warm happy bubble had encased his chest when she said the word, and he realized that it must be true. Or at least, that it made up a part of him that he knew was true. Watching the last fires burn themselves out, Xander came to the decision that he had to stop being so afraid of saying things out loud.
But he didn't have to start just yet. Especially since words were kind of the most difficult thing right now. So he gave Buffy a smile and a reassuring pat on the air above her shoulder, then turned away, toward home. He would go back and sleep. Then he would find Andrew. Then he would figure out the rest.
