Dry the Rain
Chapter II: The Risen
by Troll Princess
So, let's review. Me. Field. Naked. Okay, so the naked thing had been fixed, sort of.
I wasn't human.
Not totally, anyway. I just couldn't get over it. I, Alexander Harris, was not the Zeppo. I wasn't sure whether to shout how happy I felt that maybe I could be of some use to the Scoobs, or feel as terrified as I thought I was going to be if I found out we were the bad guys.
"Alexander."
I froze. Another voice behind me, another voice that didn't seem real. And this one was male.
Oh, God, please let this be him.
Slowly, I turned around, and let myself get a good look at the man standing behind me.
And was stunned by what I saw.
He was my age. I mean, he couldn't have looked any older than twenty-one, but something told me he probably made Angel look like a toddler.
"It's good to finally meet you," he said, stepping forward and throwing his hands around me.
He hugged me tight, so tight you would have thought he was glued to me. But if I had wanted to turn to see his face, I wouldn't have had to. My mind's eye already had a picture of him memorized.
It was the face in my mirror every morning.
He looked like me. God, he looked so much like me, it was scary. The hair, the eyes, everything. You have no idea how much it means to an abused kid to see that they look like their father, or mother, depending on who's doing the hitting. You don't see any of yourself in the attacker, you get a lot of hope about black-market adoptions and unwilling parents giving up ... well, you.
Can't say I didn't have those thoughts as a kid.
And now they were coming true.
Go on, say it. You know you want to. "Dad?"
He chuckled, and pulled back. "I see you opened the book."
Actually, that had been in the book. But I hadn't needed a book to tell me that this man was my father. Too easy, drill sergeant, too easy. "What's the what here, Dad? I mean ..." Okay, start simple, Xander. "Where are we?"
"We're home."
It came off so simple. Home. I felt like I should arguing for more information. But I couldn't. He was right. This felt like home. The humming was out of control here. It gave me a case of the warm fuzzies you can't imagine, and a part of me knew why.
I guess my emotions were splashed across my face. I've been told never to play poker, so no surprise. "You can't tell me you never felt out of place among the humans," he said.
Ha. That's a laugh. "Everyone I know feels out of place among the humans."
"I can imagine. An ex-demon, a Slayer, two Witches, and a Watcher. I'm surprised all of them are sane," he said, then frowned. "They are all still sane, right?"
I decided to ignore that question and skipped right to the next thing my brain was refusing to let me know. "What am I?"
He got this weird little smile on his face -- is that what I look like when I smile? -- and started circling me like a shark. "You ever study mythology, kid?"
Actually, between English class, "Xena: Warrior Princess," and being all helpy with Giles, you'd think I'd be a little more "the expert." And then came the book. "No, but it got sucked into my head from the book just like everything else," I said.
"It did, didn't it?" He reached out and rumpled my hair playfully, and I swear, for a second I had an overwhelming desire to join Little League.
He took a deep breath and said, "The Greek gods --"
Gods? I was a god?
"And don't say it." I was almost positive he'd read my mind, but the look on my face must have said it all. "No, we can't read minds. But we're not gods. And shut your jaw. Didn't you ever hear that catching-flies thing from your mother?"
"Actually, it was the trout comparison that always got me."
We exchanged an awkward smile at that. Obviously, moms on my side of the dimension fence were the same as moms on his side.
His smile faded almost immediately as he got back to the subject at hand. "Thousands of years ago, our people were foolish. And arrogant. They had all this power in their hands, and they used it to make everyone think they were gods."
See? Gods. I said gods. I was paying attention. "Greek gods."
He nodded. "Right. They learned their lesson fast, though. One mention of the word demon, and people were trying to kill us left and right. We've been in hiding ever since."
The fact that he didn't say they were killing us rather than just trying to stuck in my head.
Then he put his hands on my shoulders, looked me straight in the eyes, and said the thing I'd been waiting for him to say.
"You, my son, are an Orrick demon."
Orrick demon ... Orrick demon ... nope, not ringing any bells. Maybe that was a good thing.
"Part," I said. It was reflex. "Part Orrick demon."
My father stared at me, letting the look in his eyes sink in. "No, a full Orrick demon," he said, as serious as could be.
Nope. Sorry. I'll buy the "I'm part demon" thing, but Mom was human. Therefore, I get to check the human box.
He took a deep breath and went on. "Let me explain how this works. Worked. Whatever. Your mother and I --"
Oh, God, he's going to talk about sex. With my mother.
I think the abject fear in my eyes stopped him from going any further. When that lopsided smile of mine showed up on his face, I relaxed. It just ... this all felt so right.
Finally, he said, "That's not how Orrick demons work."
"I'll bite. How do they ... we work?"
"Up until the moment you officially turned twenty-one, no one would have been able to distinguish this body from a human's. Not a doctor, not the Slayer ... no one. It bled --"
I'll say.
"-- it hurt --"
Again with the "I'll say."
"-- and it felt just like a normal human body."
Something in that just sounded so not right. "But now?"
"When you opened the book, you absorbed a few thousand years worth of knowledge in a millisecond. And when you opened the bag, you accepted your destiny. Your demon. The other half of you."
Twenty-one years of Hellmouth living made me ask the next question. Again, reflex.
"Are we evil?"
He started at that. "What?"
C'mon, Xander, ease up on the guy. "I just -- I work with the Slayer. You say demon, I say how many big, pointy teeth does it have?"
He smiled at that, maybe a little more uneasily than I would have liked. "No, we're not evil."
"Then why did you leave me with him?
At first, I couldn't believe I had said it. But then it just felt right. Why had he left me with that abusing, kid-beating jerk?
And it was incredible, because I found a question he didn't have an answer to.
When he didn't answer, it was like I froze over inside. I stepped back a little. "I have to go home."
"You are home."
I turned and started to walk away. "I meant Sunnydale. You know, the place I live."
I had no idea where I was trying to walk to -- I knew that if I wanted to get home, I was going to have to poof myself in the general direction, because walking would get me nowhere. But I wanted my friends.
I wanted my family.
"Xander --"
I started at that. He called me by my real name. Not the one scribbled on my birth certificate, but the one everybody called me on a daily basis. Even my own mother had trouble with that.
"Don't you feel the tuning?"
And that's when I found out about the tuning. The hum. Whatever.
Orrick demons don't exist anymore.
Apparently, it's a given fact. They're a legend, a myth, a haunting bedtime story other demons tell their kids at night to spook them.
If you're ever a bad little demon, an Orrick demon will show up and make you be good again!
The legends have changed over the years, like most legends do. It started out that Orrick demons were pretty rocking guys who were usually the kind of guys to hang with the band and spike the punch. And then you fast forward a few thousand years, after everyone's fairly sure that they're extinct, and suddenly they're bloodthirsty monsters out to drain you dry and steal your kidneys while they're at it.
But it was okay, because we were extinct.
But we weren't.
And it's all because of the tuning.
The first Orrick demons didn't even know that other demons didn't get to feel this good all the time. They thought it was a given. Always feeling full of power, of strength, of life. And of course, they were stupid enough to brag about it.
I've lived on the Hellmouth my whole life. Trust me, you don't brag about your powers unless you have 'em to back it up.
It wasn't that they brought in the demon exterminator and just got rid of them all. They just vanished. The lot of them just ... poof. Gone. Never to return to the mortal coil.
Well, so went the story, anyway. Obviously, I'm proof that that's a gross exaggeration.
The tuning makes Orrick demons --
Be honest with yourself, Harris.
The tuning makes us different. It's immortality, it's power, it's the tingle of being able to do almost anything you want and the warmth of knowing you can get away with it.
It's the hum that takes over your life. It's the tuning that makes the thought of a bunch of demons setting themselves up as the gods of an entire civilization not much of a surprise.
The tuning is the knowledge of the world and the power to make use of it all rolled into one. And when I say it feels good, I mean it.
Who needs crack when you've got the hum?
Okay, maybe I'm going over the line.
So here I am, sitting with my father, my real father, in an unbelievably beautiful meadow talking about how we had running over our fingertips the power to rule the world.
With great power, he says, comes great responsibility.
Welcome to my new mantra.
I wanted to go home.
You are home.
I ignored the voice in my head that told me otherwise and lie back on the grass. I'd been here so long, listening to his story. Listening to what he had to tell me about my past, and my future.
"I have to go home."
He didn't fight me this time, didn't argue over whether or not Sunnydale was the place I belonged. He knew it was useless. I could see it, not in his eyes or his expression.
I just knew it. The same way I knew how to turn a couch into a tiger or make an entire room full of furniture and knickknacks disappear.
My thoughts were starting to organize. All those things I knew all of a sudden? Filing themselves away for whenever they were needed. Like how to make clothes out of thin air. All I'd needed to do was think about it, and the old T-shirt and jeans uniform was back.
My father was sitting next to me in the grass, watching me, almost as if he expected me to grow an extra head. "They won't miss you," he said. "You've only been gone a second to them."
A second. Right.
"When you want to come back --"
Notice the absence of the word "if."
"-- all you have to do is think about this place."
I nodded. "I know."
Huh. I knew something. New experience, that.
I didn't bother saying good-bye, I just vanished. I doubt my father minded the lack of good-bye. I think he knew I was coming back even if I didn't.
After all, this was home.