Sleepless 2

Part One : Yet Even More Fragments Chapter 9

"You are adapting to the boosts a lot faster than I expected," Coach Marin said, puzzled. "The drain on your body's resources to fuel the change should be much greater than they are."

"Is that a bad thing?" Alex asked.

"No, it is a very good thing, just confusing," he replied. "I can't tell where you are getting the extra energy from, so I can't rely on it staying at the same level. You are going to have to eat more sea food, just as a precaution."

"You're the boss," Alex replied as he strapped lead weights to himself and entered the pool.

"This next boost I am readying will enhance your reflexes and increase your senses," Coach Marin said while Alex swam laps in the pool.

"Increase my senses?" Alex asked.

"Neurological changes will allow you to process information much more quickly and accurately," Coach Marin explained. "A side effect of that is that you will no longer ignore eighty percent of what your senses are telling you, which is what most people do."

"That sounds like one hell of a side effect," Alex said, talking while he swam without varying his pace.

"It got me a blonde secretary with no filing or typing abilities as a bonus," Marin said with a smirk.

"Then what... oh!" Alex said in surprise before crashing into the end of the pool.

The coach laughed. "If you'd taken this boost already, you'd have figured it out before you crashed into the wall."

Alex climbed out of the pool. "Who knew you scientists got up to all that? They didn't mention it in any book I ever read."

"Mother Russia knew how to motivate people," the coach said with a wistful smile. "These days it's all stick, no carrot."

"It's ready?" Alex asked.

"Da!" Coach Marin said excitedly. "I hope you don't mind needles, because I have to inject you in a dozen different spots to insure a uniform distribution of the serum."

"Way too late to back out now," Alex said. "Let's do this."

"Sit in this chair while I get everything ready," Coach Marin said.

A tray with a dozen syringes was laid out and Alex had a strap between his teeth when Vice Principal Snyder came in.

Alex froze, wondering how they were going to explain this.

"What are you doing?" Snyder demanded.

"I'm injecting him with steroids. What does it look like I'm doing?" Coach Marin asked.

"I- erm, isn't that illegal?" Snyder asked, eyes wide.

"Only in the Olympics, but we aren't competing in them, plus this formula can't be detected by even the latest tests," the coach explained.

"Don't those shrink the..." Snyder gestured downwards.

"Yes, they do," Coach Marin agreed. "Fortunately Alex has big enough balls that it's not noticeable."

"I'll just let you get back to that," Snyder said, backing away before vanishing out the door.

Alex laughed and spit out the strap. "I think you're the one with the massive pair here."

"Says the soldier allowing himself to be experimented on," the coach said absently as he re-checked everything.

"This wont shrink...?" Alex gestured downwards.

Coach Marin laughed.

"No, seriously!"

0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0

Alex looked across the lunch room where Willow was sitting with Buffy. He could almost hear what they were saying, but the cacophony of sounds from all corners of the lunch room drowned them out.

He had thought that having sharper senses would be painful, making everything too loud and too bright, but instead it was just distracting. His attention kept getting drawn from one thing to the next like the worst case of ADD ever. He could smell... well he wasn't quite sure what he was smelling, not having smelled whatever it was before. The amount of things he could smell was insane and unfortunately did not come with a manual, so he was having to guess about a lot of it.

He could hear everything, from the quiet buzz of a Walkman that had accidentally been switched on in someone's backpack, to the high pitched whine of the overhead fluorescent lights. He could hear countless conversations going on around him, but he couldn't filter out one voice among the multitudes yet, so it just sounded more like the roar of the ocean than anything intelligible.

His vision was a bit wonky as well. Colors were brighter and more varied, and there was a sort of glow... It was another sense he was going to have to work on to figure out what was going on.

The only senses he wasn't having problem with were what he thought of as body senses. He could feel exactly where every bit of him was in relation to the rest of him, in minute detail. He could feel the temperature more accurately than a thermometer, which was quite a step up from simple hot, cold, too hot, and too cold; which is what most people dealt with.

Vibrations and air currents were taking up a lot of his attention at the moment. In the Spider-man comics they claimed a spider's ability to sense danger was a psychic sixth sense, but in reality it was their ability to sense the very air around them that did it. If he hadn't known what was going on then he would have sworn someone had laced his school issued gruel with LSD.

Sensing someone approaching from behind, he turned and saw Amy carrying her lunch tray. Sitting beside him, she gave him a bright smile. "Hey, Xander. You're looking fit."

"Alex," he corrected her. "I joined the swim team and started working out," he said. "You look like you've been putting some hours in the gym yourself."

"Thanks," Amy said with a bright smile. "Glad to see all my hard work and dieting hasn't been for nothing."

Thanks to his much faster thought process, it only took Alex a couple of seconds to realize she was flirting with him. "You're flirting with me!" Alex exclaimed immediately, blurting it out in shock.

"Is that a problem?" Amy asked, amused.

"No. I'm just not used to having pretty girls flirt with me," he admitted.

Amy's smile widened and Alex noted half a dozen physical changes in her that he was pretty sure he was reading correctly as her not being remotely upset at his response.

o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o

Buffy noticed Willow had fallen silent and saw the shy redhead was staring at something across the crowded lunch room. Turning, she followed her gaze to where a dark haired young man was sitting with a blonde girl who laughed at something he said. "You could tell him," Buffy said quietly, even though she was the one who had insisted on keeping her destiny and its dangers a secret. But given a choice between secrecy and her new friend's happiness, Buffy chose her friend.

"No. It's better this way," Willow said softly. "I'd rather Xander hated me than he ended up hurt or killed."

"It's your decision," Buffy agreed. "If you ever change your mind, let me know and I'll do my best to help."

The bell rang, ending lunch, and the two stood up to drop off their trays, and leave.

"Thanks, Buffy. I appreciate it," Willow said, giving her a small smile and taking comfort in her friend's support.

Typing By: Ordieth