Xander was not sleeping. He had tried it several times. It wasn't that the cot was uncomfortable, because for a cot in a basement, it was prime real-estate, and surprisingly springy. But the fifth time he found himself lying awake on its semi-comfortable surface trying to get his heart rate to come back down again, he decided that for the foreseeable future, he wasn't sleeping. Which gave him plenty of time to do other things. He was up Friday morning just in time to wave Dawn off to school and spent his day doing little tasks around the house that Joyce kept trying to dissuade him of, keeping his mind empty by keeping his hands busy. Eventually, she gave in and gave him a list.

Xander dusted the undersides of drawers, making sure they ran smoothly on their tracks, and cleaned out all of the window sills. He opened and shut every door in the house several times, oiling hinges and making plans for planing. Then he sat down at the kitchen table for an hour and sharpened every one of Joyce's kitchen knives until they'd cleanly slice through a tomato, and moved on to Buffy's battle axes until they would too. Then there were tomatoes, which he watched Joyce grill up with slices of cheese, so they had a nice lunch and just hung out in the fine tradition of actually enjoying a meal until it was time for Buff to go to class. It was nice.

By four pm, Xander was exhausted, but he couldn't sit still. So he called Willow and made plans to meet her for lunch the next day. She was delighted and very confused, and he spent the night quietly having a panic attack about seeing his best friend and mentally reviewing his plans for the weekend to keep his mind off it: a trip to the hardware store for some supplies because the back deck could use some love, the joists were starting to sag, and the grill looked like it hadn't been cleaned in a decade….

Save a brief period during his adolescence where he spent every day staring at the ceiling and listening to Pink Floyd, Xander was very bad at doing nothing, and he spent the night in a kind of paralytic state of anxiety, afraid of making noise, afraid of falling asleep, and gnawing on a hangnail until his thumb was bloody with it in an effort to stay awake. He got up when he heard Joyce moving around the kitchen, and made scrambled eggs for everybody.

By the time he was ready to meet Willow at the little bistro off Elm that hovered in some undefined space between a coffee shop and a deli, he felt like crap. He was exhausted and starting to feel it in the lay of his bones; his blood felt like it had too much acid in it, and he knew he needed sleep, but he ignored it in favor of ordering a bucket of the sugariest, slushiest, and – vitally – most caffeinated concoction on the menu.

Willow herself was about fifteen minutes late, stumbling around the corner and looking just a bit frazzled with strands of her hair floating in multiple directions like a coppery halo. She looked so young, and so grown up, and all at once she was no longer the little girl he'd known all his life. Xander had had that moment before, realizing that his best friend was not the girl he'd known when they were both ten and riding bikes down Sunnydale's version of the iconic Dead Man's Hill. It was the hellmouth, so that hill probably had killed a few people under its own power, but that realization, and the one about Willow's sudden entrance into the land of adulthood, were probably the result of an over-taxed mind, and they were probably unimportant. This time, he doubted the revelation would leave them making out in formal wear. Willow was wearing a fuzzy sweater and a long skirt sprinkled with stream of orangey sequins, for one thing, and Xander had no desire to explore the inside of her teeth again because… she looked settled. Like she'd found where and what she was supposed to be in life, and the frisson of nervous energy that had always crackled under her skin was gone. It had become a hum of contentment, and whatever strangeness he felt about Tara, it was more than worth it to see this. She slipped into the seat across from his, smiling impishly, and three seconds later, after he shared a conspiratorial wink, out of her seat again and flinging her arms around him.

"Xander!" that old, giddy enthusiasm, and he hugged back reflexively, squeezing a cute little oof out of her. "I'm glad you called! How have you been? Why are you staying with Buffy? Any news on the whole… news front? With the whole… alive thing… You know what I mean. Don't you? You know what I mean. Oh I've missed you!"

It wasn't a stream of babble, it was a wave, crashing over him. He came up for air as she was pulling away, reclaiming her seat. He hadn't caught the brunt of a good Willow babble for a long time, and for a moment, all he could say was, "Hey, Wills."

"God I love you. I should've called. I should've done this so much earlier. I'm a poopy friend. You must think I'm such a horrible person."

He grinned and took a huge gulp of his coffee-flavored slurpee, "You're not a poopy friend. You're the un-poopiest friend. That… can we stop talking about poop?"

"Everyone Poops, Xander." She managed with the utmost solemnity, and they both dissolved into giggles that had the middle-aged women at the table beside theirs shooting them unsubtly wary looks from behind their bifocals. They were thirteen when the book came out, thirteen and the bane of their eighth-grade science teacher's existence because he and Jesse had joked and joked until Willow had to join in or go friendless for the last half of the year. The funny thing was, Willow's poop-book jokes were always the best, and once they'd gotten so sugared up and high on laughter that Jesse had actually peed a little. For a split second, it was like that again, and the ladies in bifocals looked away with a huff. When they settled down with synchronized sighs of enjoyment, she giggled again, "Definitely my Xander."

"Definitely your Xander." Willow made cow-eyes at him, and he felt himself making cow-eyes back, wishing he could reach out and take her hand because this was Willow and he hadn't really known until just now how much he'd missed her. And just when the moment had threatened to stretch too long and he was about to say something painfully sentimental for which he could never forgive himself, it broke; she giggled, he cleared his throat, and both sharing in the joke, he asked, "So how is life in Willowville?"

"Is that like Whoville? Because less with the singing, but I'm on board with the swirly architecture." He snorted, hands weaving imaginary swirly architecture all around her head, and she answered him with a giggle. "Good. Things are good in Willowville. The villagers are happy, the crops are all.. tended, and there are cows in little green fields and stuff… Good things."

"You do look… um…" He couldn't keep the leer off his face because Willow's frazzled had been a happy, distinctive sort of frazzled, and he wanted to tease her for doing "spells" with her girlfriend, but she would probably turn him into a newt. "Good. You look good."

"Shutup." Her grin was pure mischief for a moment, and then suddenly it wasn't. Suddenly she was just his Willow. "But no... It's good. I mean I'm good. Just got through with midterms, and oh my god I hate Freshman Comp. It's soooo boring so I put it off as long as I could, but it's a pre-req for this lit class I want to take next semester and I have to get it over with but, I mean, I know what a gerund is, you know?" He really didn't. "But my microbio class is awesome, and the professor really likes me. Well, except for the day I accidentally made an onion explode; she wasn't too happy with me, but I thought it would be pretty to try to make some of the skin cells dance and… it really was! Tara said it was better than the roses thing but… only until the pulpy oniony parts. And it's not like Doctor Vandermeer knows why it exploded but she wasn't thrilled."

He was saved from the outright laugh at her expense by a long slurp at the dregs of his slushy coffee drink and the long awaited appearance of their waitress. She was wearing a blonde ponytail and an expression of disaffected superiority. Willow ordered a fancy chicken salad with grapes and nuts and itty bitty bits of crumbled cheese; Xander shrugged and fatalistically ordered the same thing because he had never been to this little bistro on the far side of the campus and he hadn't given himself a chance to peruse the menu. He suspected from the air of contemporary girliness that a fancy chicken salad would be the most palatable of his gastronomic options. There were things called ciabatta rolls; he didn't have any idea what that meant.

The waitress turned away, and he and Willow shared a snicker at her expense. "So how is Tara, anyway?"

"She's… magic."

"Apparently she's a bad influence in Micro Bio… I approve."

Willow snickered, "She totally is. She's way more interested in sociology and the whole... living together in a tribe thing, and I keep trying to explain that sociology is just applied biology and then she gets all mad at me, even though it really is, and look, I know you don't know her that well yet and there was all that weirdness when we moved out to the dorms and I wasn't trying to replace you or anything, I swear, but she was there for me when Oz left and I thought that was the worst thing I could ever go through and god I was so wrong because then you… you went away and I was so far in the deep end and I swear if it wasn't for Tara I'd've done something really stupid but…"

"Willow! Willow, breathe for me…" If he thought Willow's greeting had been a full-throttle babble, he was sorely mistaken, and he was a little stunned by this one. He reached across their table, navigating around her iced tea to hold onto her hands. They were chilly and damp with condensation, but they burned through him. He smiled. "Wanna run that by me again?"

"Not really."

Xander shrugged, squeezed her hands and let them go with a shudder of relief.

"It's that scary, huh?"

He jumped, a little startled by the question after the dry moment of silence. "What is?"

"What I look like on the inside."

"Huh?"

Willow shrugged, "Xander… Buffy told me." She was so much more sedate now than she had been a moment ago, a calm, confident young woman with the poise to ask that question. "I mean, Spike kind of told all of us, and I don't… I don't really get it, but I do know what it's like to be able to see things a little differently. And… you haven't looked me in the eye once."

"Oh."

"So really scary?"

He thought about his answer before he made it, probably considering his words for the first time in his life, and he tried to meet her eye, but his flicked away from the flickers of orangey red that danced in the charcoal emptiness of the socket. "I… Only cause I love you. If you were a stranger, it might be pretty. It is pretty…. Unusual."

"What is it… exactly?" This time the question was tentative, and she couldn't quite meet his eye either.

"It's… how you're going to die." Xander shrugged, "It's a really long time from now, if that helps."

"Not really." Xander treated her to a wry smile, and suddenly there was green gazing back at him, like he'd been used to for as long as he could remember. "God, Xander, who could have done this to you? And how do you stand it? That has to be horrible for you! How can you even…"

"It's not… horrible. It's a little intense, maybe? It's like… I dunno. Y'know how when you're on a busy street, and there are people all over the place but… they're not really people? I mean, you don't know any of them, or really care about any of them and… you know they're human but… you would definitely take the last Elmo at the mall?"

That surprised a giggle out of Willow and she nodded, a little bemused. "Yeah, I guess. Like um… Proxy People."

"Yes. Proxy People. That's good. It's not like that. It's… everyone I see is a person. A person person, a… a person who has a life, and I can see it. Or… how it ends, I guess. It's… a lot to know."

"Intense."

"Exactly."

She looked troubled. "Even our waitress?"

The waitress who was delivering two salads with a vague smile and a swish of her hips. Xander took a closer look at her and saw the kind of wasting death that came for a woman who clung, too used to living. She would be thin, and wrinkled, and dried out like an old husk, "Pancreatic cancer. In her seventies though, so…"

"Xander, that's so… Goddess…"

He shrugged, "I'm getting better at it. Seeing Proxy People. Spike helps," he chuckled a bit, poking around a slice of dried apple on a bed of lettuce. "He likes to hunt them. It's morbid… and weirdly helpful."

"Helpful…" the tone was skeptical.

"Yeah. In his head, proxy people moo." She made a face, and he speared a chunk of chicken and waved it at her. "Or cluck."

"Oh… gross." The salad was surprisingly good, and he ate it with a relish that could only be attributed to Willow's continuing grimace. For all the time they spent around vampires and werewolves and other things that went bump in the night, he hadn't really understood the nature of the beast until he'd started hunting with it. Slaying was different – patrolling was different – that was just long walks punctuated by the occasional demon baying for his blood; Spike was instinct and aggression and teeth when he hunted, and the humans that weren't his, the people that weren't people to him were really just fair prey. Xander hadn't minded so much.

"So what's the real reason you called me?" The non-sequitur caught him off guard. Willow managed to abandon the previous topic, and they ate their salads with a friendly familiarity, calling up old jokes and laughing like they used to, but when she put down her fork and sucked the last of her iced tea up with a rattling slurp, the recess was over.

"What do you mean?"

"I know you, Xander Harris. It's been months since you… got back and you only call me now? Something's changed." She pinned him with a look she'd learned from her mother, another sociologist, if he remembered correctly, "And you never did answer my question about staying with Buffy."

"I told you… there was a demon, our place isn't exactly livable right now."

The resolve face reared its resolute head, and he sat back in his seat, tempted to run away. He would rather chew through an apple full of razor blades than tell her the actual truth. "Don't lie to me, Xander."

"No, I…"

"Spike make a move?"

He was so shocked he croaked, "Huh?"

"Oh please. Even I can see he's totally crazy about you. You didn't break his heart, did you? Cause I know you aren't gay, but he's your friend."

"Um… what?"

"Oh goddess, did you guys have a fight?"

"Wait. Wait, back up. You think Spike… has some kind of thing for me?"

The resolve face melted away into a knowing smile, "If by 'some kind of thing' you mean 'wants to bake you cookies and have sweet cuddly Xander babies with you' then yes. Well… maybe not that exactly cause that was Willow circa 1997, but you know what I mean."

"You wanted to bake me cookies?"

"Xander…"

"I love cookies."

"Xander!" He was unrepentant, and her voice was a low, frustrated grind, "Talk to me about Spike."

"I really… there's nothing to say."

"Horse hooey, Xander."

This time, he really couldn't look her in the eye. He loved Willow, but he couldn't tell her everything. Wouldn't, because he loved her. "Yeah, um… it's… I don't know, Willow. It's complicated, I guess? Did I just say that? God what a cliché. But it is, it's…"

"It's okay. I'm sorry, I shouldn't pry. I'm just curious and I've missed you and I'm a poopy friend, I'm sorry."

"You're not a poopy friend." Back to that, and he said it with a wry smile. It was so much easier to let Willow believe that he was having a straight-male freak out. It was so much easier to pretend he was the person he used to be than it was to tell her the truth, and he had been so afraid before, so afraid that the girls would see through the cracks and see what he had become, but there was enough of him now that the cracks weren't the giant fissures they had once been. He was stronger now, and only just realizing it. Stronger because of Spike, and the irony made his self-deprecating chuckle a little bitter. "You're right. Um. He…"

"Oooh, did he kiss you? Was it a good kiss?" Xander felt his face heat up until he thought he'd need an ice pack. "Ohmygod! He did! You're blushing! That's so...!"

"Awkward." He lied. "Horrible." He lied again, because kissing Spike was really very nice. And had gotten him into trouble. He hated that he had to be having this conversation instead of sitting in his imaginary home where nothing bad had ever happened. If only. He was resigned to flinching every time someone got near him, and thought he would probably never kiss anyone again, especially not Spike, who was a sore tooth he couldn't stop prodding. There wasn't the time to let himself be angry about it, or to grieve. "Horribly awkward."

"I think it's sweet."

"It's…" there was not an adjective big enough to encompass the lie. "Look, I just needed some space. Can we not have this conversation here? This is an ice cream conversation I think."

"They have ice cream here."

"Oooooof course they do." He resigned himself to that too, to crafting a believable picture out of fragments of truth, like stained glass that was a flimsy barrier against Willow's investigative nature. This conversation had probably been an inevitability the moment Spike kicked him out, and he hated the vampire for putting him in this position. Hated with a fierce, black, twist in his stomach that made ice cream seem like swallowing lead. But he would need it. "He's kinda my best friend these days. You're still my Willow! I mean, I don't want you to feel… you're still my best friend, it's just…"

"I get it, Xander." She was laughing at him. "It's like Tara."

"Yeah, except Tara's nice."

"Spike can be nice…" She tried gamefully, and he shot her a smile, "Sometimes."

Spike could be nice. But he was nice in the way of wary anticipation that had, at first, left him wondering when it was going to be over. And when he'd finally stopped wondering… it was. The grin froze on his mouth. "He's the only person I can touch." He blurted it out before he could stop himself, telling Willow because Willow always had an answer, and he would always come to her when he needed one. And this was the only problem that made any kind of sense to him. "What I see… is the easy part. I can't sleep at night because instead of dreaming, I see people dying, and it's stupid. Everyone dies in pain, and for some stupid reason I see all of it."

"Oh god, Xander…" a softer reaction, a hurt one from when she had been younger and hadn't discovered witchcraft and goddesses and girlfriends, and Xander hurt on her behalf, because he'd gotten used to it in himself.

"It's not… that big a deal. Except Spike's already dead, and it happened so long ago, and he…" Xander couldn't quite bring himself to say it, to betray the man that Spike had been when he was alive, how sweet, how much in love he was with his murderer. "It doesn't hurt to touch him. And apparently I don't sleep so well without him… and then it got all weird."

"You can't dream?" She looked stunned, and horrified, and he wished they had ordered that ice cream after all, because here was the check and Willow just gaped at it. "That's horrible!"

It startled an incredulous bark out of him, "That's the horrible part? The dreaming?"

"Xander, you have to dream! It's a psychic dump thing. Your brain needs down-time to process the day, that's why we dream. You really mean you can't?"

He shrugged, "I don't think so. I… mean, I see things when I sleep, but it's not dreams."

"That's horrible!"

"I just go with not sleeping."

"That's worse!"

At least they were off the topic of Spike.

"You're gonna go all crazy! And start seeing things! And kill people!" The middle-aged ladies who were now lingering over a shared brownie glared at them again, and it was Willow's turn to blush. "Okay, so maybe I've seen too many movies, but… hey, have you tried meditation?"

"Can you really see me sitting still for that long?"

"But… but it's really helpful! Tara taught me. And… and if you could learn then maybe… I'm worried about you, Xander. That sounds…"

"Okay." Resignation was officially the word of the day. "What else am I doing with my time, right?"

"Great!"

So Xander learned to meditate. Willow dragged him back to her dorm room that afternoon, lit some incense and put on some music that sounded like wailing goats. She eventually turned it off because he was giggling too much to concentrate. She glared at him, told him to get comfortable, and then they sat there. Sat and sat and sat. And Xander fidgeted at first, uncomfortable in this space that smelled like sandalwood and camphor where he was used to his smoke smelling like Spike. He shifted and sneezed and scratched his elbow and then the spot behind his ear and whenever he opened his eyes, Willow was there, calm and placid and telling him "Just clear your mind, Xander. Breathe."

It was easier said than done. He tried to clear his mind but his mind refused to clear, leaping on him with memories and daydreams that scared him for their complexity and violence. His inner dialogue became a babble, thinking about meditation and how he spent twenty years with a totally blank slate and now he was trying to think of nothing and it wasn't working so maybe he was trying too hard. He breathed again, thinking of how numb his butt was getting, thinking of how much his elbow actually did itch now, and maybe there was a bug bite there, but who ever heard of mosquitos in February? Thinking about, when the image crept up on him, the corpse-blue skin of Dru's wrists and how much she looked like she wanted to rip his off and wear it and how little he'd needed the insight into her head because Angel's teeth in his neck and hands on his ass and…. He jerked himself out of his stillness to find Willow, orange hair and white smile and warm skin in the lamp light, because the incense had long since burned down and the sun had set. Tara had joined them at some point, blonde and green and humming with how alive she was; Xander could see the appeal.

He went back every day that week, and only fell asleep once, jerking himself away and Tara, who was sitting with him, looked at him with nothing but sympathy. He saw the spot where the bullet would rip through her chest, bleeding onto her blue blouse, and returned it, and he was careful to pinch bruises into his ankles to keep himself awake after that.

It became a ritual. A quiet place, a deep breath, space for his own mind to churn through the crap of his daily life – and when faces started crawling out of the shadows, faces full of pain and sorrow, the same shadows that he thought he'd left far behind him, he was calm and awake for the fifth day in a row. Calm, even as they pressed themselves into his skin and fell through him into whatever was next.

It was at Willow's that he was invited to the party. Buffy called her, and he happened to be there, standing in the crossfire and staying out of Buffy's space. His last frat party had been a disaster of course with the whole lust spirit thing that tried to drown him, and the one before that where he'd turned invisible, and even the one before that where he'd been wrestled into a skirt and spanked. There was no reason to think this one would go any differently, but Willow insisted, and even Buffy threatened to dress him up like a Ken doll, so he put on his best khaki's and a fairly inoffensive polo and went with them.

The atmosphere of casual acceptance and low-pressure indescribable alt-rock was a surprise. As was the cute red-head who chatted him up; she was going to die in a car crash, the left side of her body crushed and speckled with glass that shone and sparkled in a glaring afternoon sun, but she was pretty, and she laughed at his Star Trek joke. Then his eye was caught by a beautiful girl who wasn't ever going to die because she wasn't ever going to be alive, and he was smacked for his trouble, but when it turned out the girl was a robot, Xander figured it was pretty much par for the course, and the whole way home, Buffy teased him about the future of his sex life with really convincing robot chicks. Or even not-so convincing robot chicks, they'd never known him to be picky.

Xander laughed, took it good naturedly, even made a crack about boy-bots being in demand at Chez Summers, but when they reached the red door, he had to pause her before he lost his nerve. "Buff…"

"Yeah?"

"There's something I need to tell you about your mom…"