"You're evil, Harmony."
The girl didn't turn her head to look at Xander, instead concentrating on walking on the sidewalk in the gloom. The time she'd spent back in the school, along with the shortening days of autumn, meant that it was now fully dark. This helped hide her calm expression as she merely answered, "Oh?"
Xander was slouching alongside Harmony. "Yeah. You know full well that back there on Monday morning, in front of everyone, Buffy and Willow are gonna imitate taxidermists and gut me, skin me, stuff me, and mount me. The last, not in a good way."
"You didn't tell them before what you were doing, did you?"
"I….thought about it. I don't think there's anythi--- much, that I haven't told Willow, ever. But, now, you and me….It was private. Just, uh, stuff in my life just for me."
Harmony wasn't walking anymore, she was floating over the ground after translating in her head what the teenage boy had tried to convey. *Yeah, the big idiot would act like that, and I want to spend the next half hour kissing him for it.* She looked at Xander out of the corner of her eye, seeing the troubled expression on his face as he wondered if he'd said the wrong thing. *Oh, he's the cutest thing ever, and I'm so not gonna tell him that. For now, anyway.*
Instead, Harmony brightly asked, totally out of the blue, "What were you doing in the library anyway, Xander? I thought you weren't big on school."
"Oh, uh," started Xander, both relieved and sorry about the change in the conversation, but willing to give the excuse he'd thought up before about this. "A while back, to get my grades up, I volunteered for school stuff. They call it extra-credit work. I thought maybe I'd help out in shop, or work on the ball fields, that kind of thing. But, uh, they sent me to the library. I do stuff like stacking books, carrying things, looking up stuff in the books, whatever Giles wants me to do."
"What about Willow and, uh, Buffy? Are they there for extra credit, too?"
"Buffy, yeah, she got assigned there, too. She helps around, like me." Xander silently prayed that the small blonde would never hear about what he'd said, otherwise a certain Slayer would pound him into paste. Shivering at this, the teen continued, "Willow's a big brain. She likes being there, and she volunteered to help Giles out in his work."
"Being a librarian?" frowned Harmony. "Like Batgirl?"
"What?" Xander blinked, and then he grinned as he remembered the '60's television show with Adam West, Burt Ward, and Yvonne Craig in the tight, tight Batgirl costume with the red wig. "Yeah, she was a librarian in her civilian identity, wasn't she? Looked pretty---"
Xander suddenly remembered Number 254g on the Male Commandments List ("Thou shalt not use the words 'babe', 'hot', 'stacked', or the like to describe any female in the hearing of any other female in your presence not currently being addressed by these words and capable of giving you a good shot in the chops.") and hastily shut his mouth.
Harmony coolly gazed at Xander's desperately hopeful expression that he had averted disaster at the last possible moment, while reviewing in her mind Number 999z ("Women know every rule, you poor bastard."). She struck while the iron was hot. "Are Willow and Buffy just your friends, or more?"
Xander boggled at this, wondering what brought it on, but he answered honestly anyway. "No, Willow's just been my bestest bud, like, forever. Since kindergarten. I met Buffy last year on her first day at school here." He tried not to think how much of a doofus he had acted on that day, skateboarding and catching sight of a truly fine girl and colliding with a railing, and then having his mouth run away from him and asking Buffy, "Can I have you?"
Knowing he risked girlfriend catastrophe, Xander cautiously went on. "I, uh, thought I had a chance with Buffy, but, well, she prefers older guys." The teenager viciously kicked a rock on the sidewalk, sending it skipping out in the street ahead of them, and muttered under his breath, "Really, really older guys who are totally obsessed with their hair and who could easily win the 100-meter Olympic brooding dash. From a standing start. With a ball and chain attached." Xander stumbled, having just realized what he'd thought. *Girlfriend. I called her girlfriend. Wow. Uh, does she think so, too?*
Baffled by Xander's last remarks, Harmony shot a puzzled glance at him, only to see a dazed look on his face as he walked along. She shrugged, willing enough to disregard this to concentrate on his earlier comments. *Okay, Buffy's out of the game. Willow, you have to get her on your side. She probably knows everything about him. You made a good start, now begin making her your friend.* Harmony nodded to herself, and began plotting.
The two teenagers walked down the sidewalk, both lost in their thoughts and not paying attention to their surroundings. A state of mind that was extremely dangerous in the town of Sunnydale at night.
At a particularly dark part of the block they were walking through, two men suddenly loomed up on both sides of the teenagers, causing them to stop short with beating hearts. The man at Xander's side, a thirty-year-old white guy in a faded blue t-shirt and jeans with boots, cocked his head towards the boy and said, "Hey, Sam, they sound nice and fresh. Hearts are in good shape and they don't smoke. Dee-lish!"
The other man by the girl, another white guy a few years older and dressed more formally in a button-up shirt and dress pants, leered at Harmony, growling, "Before we eat, I want to have some fun, Frank!"
Grinning at the frightened couple, both men's faces….changed, rippling into inhuman countenances that included fangs and glowing yellow eyes.
"RUN, HARMONY!" yelled Xander, making a lunge towards the guy menacing her. The girl didn't move, totally frozen in fright at what was standing before her.
The guy Xander rushed at moved faster than Harmony thought humanly possible, knocking aside the boy's pathetic left hook, and then grabbing Xander's left shoulder, while turning his head to sneer at his partner, "Oh, we got a real hero here, Fr---"
To Harmony's disbelieving eyes, her potential rapist/killer holding her boyfriend helpless suddenly…. dissolved. His human body with a monster's face changed from solid muscle into dust that momentarily maintained its bodily form, and then fell soundlessly to the ground.
The girl stared at Xander, his body frozen in a thrust, holding before him a pointed wooden stake in his right hand, that had slid out of the sleeve of his flannel shirt when he had thrown his decoy punch, to be rammed into the man's chest. Xander then began to turn towards the other man, but the boy was much too slow.
"BASTARD!" bellowed the remaining monster, leaping forward with blinding speed to grab Xander's upper right arm around the boy's biceps, and making a single twist of his hand. Xander screamed, and his arm spasmed, tossing away his stake, as everyone there heard a dull crack! as the teenager's arm was broken.
The thing that looked like a man then grabbed Xander's throat with this right hand and pulled him close. Despite this, the teen managed to choke out, "Harmony, run!"
Yellow eyes flicked towards the petrified girl, and then its lips pulled back in a horrific grin, showing all its fangs, as Harmony slumped down to her knees on the ground as her legs gave way. The monster directed its attention back to the boy in its grasp, who was fruitlessly trying to struggle, and snarled into Xander's face, "She's not going anywhere, punk! After I've drained you, me and her are gonna have a LOT of fun!" Xander convulsed, as the monster's grip tightened savagely around his throat.
Kneeling on the ground, Harmony could only drop her eyes to prevent seeing her boyfriend murdered. Dully staring at the street beyond her, the girl's mind began to shut down in acceptance of her fate.
A last flicker of attention made her see something in the road.
It was….a rock.
The rock that Xander had kicked just a few seconds ago.
A rock that was a rough sphere, about the size of a baseball.
A….baseball.
Within arm's reach.
Before coming to Sunnydale, the young girl known as Harmony Kendall had been a tomboy, happily playing with the other boys in her old neighborhood, her strong body not yet growing curves. During that time, Harmony had easily learned how to throw a baseball like a boy, and she had won the guys' respect over how hard she could throw it. Often, any boy making a catch from Harmony would yelp in mingled pain and respect at their stinging hands after the high-speed baseball had smacked into their gloves.
All that had ended when her father had died and she and her mother had moved to Sunnydale. Besides those upheavals in her life, Harmony also had to deal with her changing body, that to her disbelieving eyes, basically exploded up and out. Her depression and other feelings of misery over all that resulted in her not trying out for athletics in school, but in burying herself in girly stuff, in an attempt to make herself feel better. One consequence of this had been joining the Cordettes and subsuming her personality to Cordelia's domination, in a desperate attempt to be part of something. To….belong.
*Xander.*
*Boyfriend.*
*Xander….belongs….
TO….
MEEEEE!*
Harmony lunged forward, her right hand darting towards the rock, snatching it up and with a twist of her hand, spinning it to a more comfortable position in her palm. All this while jumping to her feet, and then her body was moving in the old, familiar positions. Head steady, locked at target. Torso straight up perpendicular from the ground. Left leg straight down, foot flat on ground, right leg a step back, just toes and ball of foot touching ground for balance. Twisting upper torso back with left arm in front of body, to balance the right arm going back and down for the rock in the right hand to touch the back of her right thigh.
A breath huffed from Harmony, as her right arm blurred in a full overarm throw that used every single muscle in her arms, torso, and legs in a paroxysm of effort that included her fear and horror, all expressed in changing her exhalation into a shriek of pure rage as the rock left her hand.
It was a totally perfect throw. Except for one thing.
Harmony hadn't thrown a baseball for years. In that time, while biology had changed her outward form into something that matched her gender, or as the high-school jocks expressed it with the phrase "built like a brick outhouse," she had also added quite a bit of pure muscle since her adolescence. That, combined with the adrenaline of a life-or-death situation, meant her delivery of the rock reached nearly pro baseball speeds.
A radar gun would have read the rock as traveling over eighty miles an hour.
Even a vampire, distracted from the last moment just before sinking its fangs into Xander's neck, to glance up at Harmony's scream, and putting its face right in the path of the rock, wasn't fast enough to dodge this.
The rock hit the monster directly in its left eye, destroying that organ and shattering the bones in the eye-socket.
"AAAAAAHHHHH!!!" screamed the vampire, letting go of its victim to grab its face and stagger back a few steps.
Xander, now released from his stranglehold, barely able to breath and in his own agony from his broken arm, stood on quivering legs, and he knew they had only seconds before the vampire began to recover and killed them both. His right arm limp against his side, Xander lurched forward, shaking his left arm to slide out his spare stake up his sleeve and barely caught that weapon as it came down into his left palm.
Harmony was standing in the street and clutching her chest, with that part of her body sharply reminding her there was a reason for sports bras. She ignored this, watching in terror as Xander stumbled towards the monster holding its face, with the boy's left arm thrusting his stake into the thing's chest. A split second later, a savage backhand from the vampire threw the teen up and back in a curve through the air that ended in a sodden thump as Xander hit the ground on his back ten feet away from the demon.
Now barely conscious, the Scooby Gang member stared with horror at his stake protruding from the chest of the still-standing vampire. It hadn't penetrated far enough to dust the demon, and only the greater agony of its destroyed eye from which the vampire was still suffering made it ignore the piece of wood sticking out of it. Xander weakly turned his head to find Harmony, and he croaked out to her, "Harmony, push that stake in it, now!" He knew there wasn't enough time for her to run to safety before the vampire recovered and chased her down.
"I….I….what?!" babbled Harmony, not believing her ears. Move closer to THAT?
Xander stared at the terrified girl, and he did the only thing he could think of. Pushing with his sole working arm, he tried to get back up to his feet, to go up against the vampire, hoping the few seconds it spent killing him meant Harmony could escape.
He suddenly found Harmony besides him, her hands grabbing him under his shoulders to help him get up and away.
"No! No time! Leave me! RUN!" gasped Xander, as pain exploded in his head from the girl's handling. It wasn't enough distraction to avoid seeing the vampire put its hands down from its face to glare one-eyed at the pair of teens.
"YYYYYAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!" screamed Harmony as she let go of him and jumped over Xander's body collapsing to the ground, to rush directly at the vampire, who screamed back and lunged forward, its outstretched arms having its claws ready and its eager fangs about to tear her flesh. The stake still in its chest bobbled as the vampire prepared to end Harmony Kendall's life.
The girl ran right into the vampire's clutches, its arms coming together to rend her into pieces. The points of its talons were a fraction of an inch above her skin….and then they turned into dust.
Harmony was unable to stop, her arms still pointing forward for her hands to push inward a now-destroyed stake, and she ran right through the dust cloud that had been her death less than a second ago. The girl skidded to a stop, coughing convulsively to clear her throat and lungs, and then her entire body began to shake as she realized she was still alive.
"Uhhh….uhhhh….uhhhh," gasped/sobbed Harmony, for how long she never knew, until she finally responded to her name being repeatedly called. She turned around to see Xander close his mouth and start writhing on the ground.
"XANDER!" screamed the girl, and she rushed to him, kneeling down beside him, but holding her hands helplessly, not knowing how to aid the boy.
His face paper-white, Xander blearily looked up at Harmony's tear-streaked face and croaked, "Get help, house….call cops, ambulence….don't tell cops wha' happened. Tell 'em we got mugged, nothin' else. When you can, call Buff--- Buffy, Willow, Giles. They'll know….what to do." Xander's eyes closed as Harmony sobbed, and then he opened them again to look at the girl.
He smiled. "You done good, Harm."
Then, Xander Harris passed out.