"Found her in a smoky room!" Xander sang along with the radio, then the song dissolved into static and the car began sputtering. "No, don't do this to me," Xander cajoled the dying vehicle, "it's the middle of the night and in the middle of the desert. It's like the cliché start of a horror movie."

The car died and he had to use both hands to force the older vehicle to pull off to the side of the road and practically stand on the brakes to get it to stop.

"Fuck!" Xander cursed, slamming it in park. He glared at the dash. "If I get chopped up by an axe murderer not only are you going to end up rusting on the side of the road, I'm going to come back as a ghost and haunt you."

Suddenly the desert lit up bright as day and a deep thrumming noise caused the car to vibrate, rattling the half empty bag of peanut M&M's on the dash and making Xander wince and cover his ears. The light reached a blinding intensity and the car shuddered under a wave of sound for several seconds before cutting off, leaving an empty car sitting in the middle of nowhere.

Five minutes later

The sky roared and night turned to day again, before becoming quite and dark once more.

Xander sighed as he leaned his head back against the headrest, he looked a bit older and had an impressive mustache but was otherwise unchanged. "Well, this was a hell of a trip." He pulled a silver sphere the size of a marble out of his jacket pocket and grinned. "Can't beat the classics."

He set the sphere on the dash and it rolled down to the vent, breaking into dozens of tiny metal spheres that vanished inside the dashboard.

"M&M's," Xander said with a grin, grabbing the bag off the dash and popping several in his mouth.

A dent popped out of the rear fender while a crack in the front window slowly vanished.

"Man, have I missed junk food!" Xander exclaimed.

He popped open the ice chest on the passenger seat and pulled out a coke "Cheers!"

The chipped and faded blue interior regained its prior luster and grew over the gaps in the vinyl, returning it to factory new appearance. Xander was still enjoying his coke when the car started itself up and pulled back onto the road, making a U-turn and heading back the way it had come, seemingly of its own volition. He burped loudly and tossed the empty can in the back seat. The radio came on and switched to AM, smoothly changing channels until it reached a news broadcast.

"That can't be right," Xander said, shaking his head as the radio switched channels until it found another news report. "Huh," he said as the report ended, "I guess it is, but how did I lose two years?" He stroked his mustache.

The car sped up, the body reshaping itself to reduce resistance, Xander paid little attention, lost in his own thoughts.

Several hours later…

The radio beeped, waking Xander up as he had fallen asleep while he'd traveled. Blinking sleep from his eyes he smiled as he saw the welcome to Sunnydale sign. It was good to be home. Even at this distance he could feel the warmth of the Hellmouth as its subtle corrosive emanations wore away at the fabric of reality making the fantastic, both great and terrible, possible.

"Time to make some decisions," Xander said. "Go home or become an emancipated minor? That's an easy one. Rent or buy? I'm going to have to say buy. I need a newspaper...and a phone line."

OoOoOoOoOoO

Joyce was surprised to find her three-o-clock appointment was someone she knew. "Xander?"

"Joyce?" Xander replied in the same tone, even though he knew in advance she was going to be his realtor. "I didn't know you were in real estate."

"It helps pass the time," Joyce replied. "I didn't know you were solvent enough to afford a house."

"A relative I didn't know passed away leaving me a large sum of money and emancipation papers," Xander lied. "They didn't leave a letter explaining why, but I'm not complaining."

"Well I'm happy to see you made a full recovery from whatever accident landed you in the hospital. What would you like to look at today?"

Xander made a mental note to check the local hospital records. "Sunnydale real-estate is generally decently priced, but I'm sure you have one or two properties that are a steal because of some unfortunate past."

"That's a nice way of putting it," Joyce said. "I have several on the books, but if you really don't mind a property's past history, I have two that are move-in ready."

"Is one of them Ted's old place?" Xander asked already knowing the answer, as that was why he'd contacted this particular realtor office.

"It is," Joyce admitted. "If not for its history I'd have bought it myself but... Are you sure?"

"I'll want to take a look at it to make sure, but I'm not really all that superstitious," Xander said. "As far as I know, every square inch of the Earth has had someone die on it and from what I recall all of his wives went peacefully in their sleep."

"I suppose that is one way to look at it," Joyce said as she considered his point of view.

"If you don't want to visit the house, I'll understand," Xander told her.

"It's not that, I just want to make sure you don't end up with a property that you'll dislike or outright hate," Joyce assured him. "Plus...There's always a slight danger he could return."

"One of my first purchases will be a top of the line security system," Xander assured her. "A little prevention is worth any amount of I-told-you-sos later."

Joyce laughed. "Let me grab my purse and we can drive over."

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

"And here we are," Joyce said. "I swear the creepiest thing about this property is how normal it seems."

"Norman Rockwell eat your heart out," Xander agreed, as he looked over the picture-perfect house and lawn.

Joyce lead the way, taking a set of keys out of her purse and unlocking the front door. "The power bills are surprisingly low, as... Ted made sure to update all the appliances with the most energy efficient models and even installed solar panels on the roof." She pushed open the door. "It's been left entirely furnished."

Seeing her hesitation Xander preceded her inside. "You could film a 50's sitcom here and it wouldn't look out of place. I like it."

"It does have a classic charm," Joyce admitted as she slowly stepped inside and looked around. "It has four bedrooms and a den, plus a complete basement..."

"I've seen enough to make my decision," Xander said, "I'll take it."

"Really?"

"Definitely," Xander assured her. "Of course, you're welcome to use your feminine wiles to try and change my mind." He wiggled his eyebrows comically.

Joyce grinned, her nervousness fading away. "Sorry, I'm into college guys, though I do like the mustache."

"Curses!" Xander said dramatically. "Damn college boys always hogging the beautiful women. Looks like I have a whole new reason to attend college now."

Joyce laughed. "Promise you'll attend college once you graduate and I'll let you buy me lunch."

"I promise to at least get a bachelors," Xander said.

"Where would you like to go?" Joyce asked.

"Is that Italian place on fifth still open?" Xander asked.

"I love that place," Joyce replied.

OoOoOoOoOoOoOoO

Xander had checked his caches after lunch and found them empty, not surprising considering most of his stuff was in the trunk of his car, showing he hadn't planned on returning, but it was what was missing that had caught his attention.

His final cache, had been hidden inside an old-fashioned US mail box that was welded shut in the park and used as a decoration. It had taken some work to cut through the welds holding the back of it shut and replacing the old rusted lock with a new one without anyone being the wiser, but it had provided a safe place to store a surprising amount of stuff when he had lived in Sunnydale.

Thankfully his key fit. Opening it he found over a dozen video tapes and his missing mementos, all ones connected to Willow and Buffy, in the box inside.

He laid a hand on top of one of the tapes and closed his eyes, after a few seconds he shivered. "That was horrifying," Xander muttered, before locking the mailbox and carrying the box to his car.

He'd already stopped by the hospital and picked up a copy of his medical file, which he'd had yet to read, so the last thing on his to do list for the day was to go to several fast food places and get a ton of food.

He could figure out what had happened to send him out of Sunnydale two years earlier than he had left, after he had a few good meals.

Half an hour later

Xander was halfway through his second pizza before he picked up the folder containing his medical file and glanced through it. "Man, I was one accident prone child."

It took a while to get to the last entry as he double checked all the earlier hospital visits and made sure they matched his memories.

"Comatose, broken ribs, assorted cuts and burns, brought in by Rupert Giles who claimed it was a hit and run though the injuries did not support it." Xander noted aloud as he ate a slice of pizza.

"Between those tapes, the earlier departure, and the hospital records... I'm guessing something happened with Buffy."

He got up and paced back and forth as he thought about it. "I fell out with the gang... got injured somehow... and split."

Shaking his head at all the gaps in his theory he grabbed a burger and took a bite.

**Knock*Knock*Knock**

Wondering who could be visiting him, as only Joyce knew he was there and he doubted she'd mention it to Buffy, or Willow would have kicked in his door already.

"Cordelia?" he asked curiously, before getting tackled by the curvy brunette who was clutching him tightly.

"I thought you were dead!" Cordelia exclaimed.

"No... I'm quite alive," Xander replied picking her up with his free hand and kicking the door shut. He returned to the couch and sat down, holding the upset girl in his lap while he finished his burger and she sobbed and said thing he couldn't understand through her tears.

"I can't believe you're back." Cordelia squeezed him tightly. "After the entire thing with the bitch... I was half convinced she'd killed you and they were covering it up!"

"Which bitch?" Xander asked.

"Which? Buffy!" Cordelia shouted. "You can't remember?" she asked softly.

"How can I put this..." Xander chewed on his mustache as he thought about it. "I am Alexander Harris, but... thanks to some timey-wimey hi-jinks my past diverged from this world at some point. Thing happened a bit differently for me, I never ended up in the hospital and I'm a year or two older."

"How does that work?" Cordelia asked confused before looking at his mustache suspiciously. "Is this like that Spock's goatee thing you went on about?"

"Close," Xander said

"So, you're evil?!" she demanded pulling back, but still making no move to get off his lap.

"No one ever see's themselves as evil," Xander complained. "I mean, if you asked Hitler, he'd assure you that he was just helping his people and protecting his country."

Cordelia rolled her eyes. "Fine, where do you stand on rape, torture, and murder?"

"I'm against them," Xander assured her, "but if I was evil I'd lie about it."

"And if you were evil you wouldn't be trying to convince me the question was useless, you'd be trying to convince me I was right to ask it," Cordelia replied.

"Unless I was being clever and tricking you by doing the opposite," Xander fired back.

Cordelia laughed. "You aren't that smart."

Xander opened his mouth to argue and then closed it and shock his head. "Fine, you win, I'm the good Xander."

"Good," she said with a smirk before leaning in close. "I've missed you so much."

Xander put a finger to her lips to stop her from kissing him. "I think out timeline diverged a bit further back than you think. We were just friends when I left for my summer road trip."

"Friends?" she asked plaintively.

"The best," Xander assured her. "You helped me over a bad break up, I helped you deal with you father's little IRS fuckup and... I admit we were kinda headed this way, but you were moving to LA and I thought you deserved to be more than a simple fling or a rebound girl."

"Who were you dating?" Cordelia asked.

"Willow," Xander replied. "She cheated on me with some drummer guy. Anyway, we broke up and you became my best friend. Still not sure how that happened, but we got really close. If not for you moving to LA, to try your hand at acting, we definitely would have ended up dating."

Cordelia nodded. "Well, it's an entire year earlier, I'm not moving to LA, and we have been sorta dating since the thing with the bug guy and officially dating since Buffy's birthday party with the arm thing."

Xander grinned. "We will have to compare notes and see where our timelines split, but I think I like this one."

"Does this mean there's another Xander out there?" Cordelia asked.

"No, one Xander to a timeline," Xander assured her.

"Good," Cordelia said. "Now, where was I?" She leaned in close.

*Knock*Knock*Knock*

"I should probably see who that is," Xander said reluctantly.

Cordelia undid the top two buttons on her shirt. "I think we both know who it is."

*BANG*BANG*BANG*

She undid another button. "Which pair of girls would you rather see right now?"

"I can replace the door," Xander decided, pulling Cordelia close.

AN: I love Twisting around old Tired Tropes!

Typing by: Hawfeld