Title: The Observer
Author: Jane McCartney
Feedback: Don't make me beg for it. Oh hell, whatever: pleeeease? Pretty please? It'll just take a sec from ya! I really wanna know what you think about this particular fic.
Acknowledgments: Every beloved reviewer, and my beloved Theo. My fics are practically his work too. But probably not half as good as his own fics.
Author's note: This fic takes the movie "The Watcher", the one with James Spader and Keanu Reeves, as a reference - but you don't need to have watched the movie in order to follow this fic. It's probably better if you don't watch it after all, because you'll have more surprises that way.
Summary: As his health decreases and every trace of the man he used to be seems to be just a shade of an abandoned life, Xander finds out that he has to deal once again with the pain and quarrel of his past. Post S6 and S3, B/A crossover.
***
Xander Harris staggered along the living room to the bathroom of his home, and took a quick look into the mirror.
The reflection of a slumped, drained man stared back at him; his brown orbs seemed like hollow pits, and the man's eyes had dark circles below them. His features were incredibly thin, and his dark locks of hair, longish and loose, hung in front of Xander's face.
The former Slayerette quickly diverted his eyes away, and pushed the knob at the mirror's side to uncover the hidden shelves behind it.
Several bottles filled with many different kinds of pills were either piled up or lined up on the wooden edge. Xander took one of the bottles in his hand and opened it, taking two little white pills and swallowing them with a mouthful of water.
The dark-haired man sighed with great weariness and closed the door of the small closet, finding himself obligated to stare at his shadowy reflection once more.
His initial impulse was to punch the mirror so hard his hands would bleed, and the surface's glass would shatter into millions of little pieces.
But after so much time, he had learned to control himself and simply deflected his gaze from the glassy surface, his steps leading him out of the bathroom.
His body fell onto the couch, and Xander passed a hand through his dark hair - and that was when the memories assaulted his mind, like they so often did.
~ Flashback ~
"You fuckin' son of a bitch!" Xander yelled, his body and face connecting with the foliage of the forest's trees with uttered every word.
If possible, his pace increased to an even higher speed as he ran even faster; Xander's target, a man about his height who had longish hair, and whose face was obscured by the nightfall's darkness, was getting closer with every new step.
But when they reached the roadway, the unknown man jumped abruptly in front of the sole passing car. Its alarmed motorist stopped the vehicle with a loud honk of the horn, just two meters away from connecting with the stranger.
"Are you freaking crazy or just a moron, you bastard?!" the medium-sized motorist started shouting, but the stranger just shoved a sharp knife deep into the other man's chest.
"You know, the doctors say I'm most likely the first option," the stranger murmured with an odd tranquility in the agonized man's ear, and carelessly let his body drop onto the harsh asphalt.
"But, hey, I never believed much of what they say anyway," he amended with a cold smirk, getting into the car and starting the engine.
Despite Xander's great speed, the unknown man had had a considerable advantage of distance and the Slayerette was only capable of reaching the scene at that precise moment.
And he was not able to do anything except watch, as the car sped away.
Taking a moment to recover his gasping breath, Xander turned to the wounded man, "Are you Ok?"
He reconsidered his words quickly. "Alright, that was a stupid question. Look, stay still and I'll call for help, Ok?"
"Oh man, he stabbed me! He actually stabbed me!" the injured guy suddenly cried, his voice rough from the injury; and, occasionally, he coughed blood.
"I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die," the medium-sized wounded man started to mumble. "And I didn't even tell Tina I love her! Shit, and I just got a promotion last week! I was gonna be the secretary of the secretary!"
"Look, relax, you're not going to die, all right?" Xander tried to calm the mumbling man, and cursed as his cell phone didn't succeed on the first try to get a connection.
And then, unforeseeably, two yellow pools of light glittered on the darkness of the roadway, momentarily blinding Xander.
As the dark-haired man raised his hands to cover his eyes by pure instinct, he noticed the lights were actually headlights, and that the car's owner was now coming straight at him, at full speed.
The first thought that passed through Xander's mind was to get away from the stabbed man, so that his maniac pursuer wouldn't turn the guy into roadkill.
Thus, the construction worker threw his body towards the forest, but the car was way faster and bumped into him - shoving the dark-haired guy onto the cold asphalt.
The collision hadn't been strong enough to injure Xander, at least not more than to generate a few bruises, and both he and the stranger knew that that had been on purpose.
Because, in the unknown man's mind, Xander was too much of a vital piece in the puzzle - a vital factor in the stranger's plans. Plans that had been taking form, during the last few months.
Xander tried to make out the identity of the man's face, but the darkness and his position made that damn well impossible.
Before the Slayerette could do anything else, the car was once more disappearing onto the roadway, but not before the thief had shoved two sealed envelopes out the window.
"Oh, my car dude, that was my car! I just finished paying the last installment this month, already!" the wounded man wailed with a moan.
"And here I'm thinking I was the unluckiest guy in town," Xander said absent-mindedly, as one of his hands held the cell phone to call for help and the other grabbed one of the envelopes.
His fingers impatiently opened it to find what looked like a personal card, like those usually owned by businessmen.
In the middle of it, two words were printed - it was the strange man's personal signature, unlike the cards of ordinary businessmen: [The Observer].
Startled for a second, Xander turned the small card over and found a small sentence, written in a stylized font this time.
[She looks so pretty when she has her hair like this.]
Xander's heart skipped a beat, and he let the cell phone drop from his ear as a female voice said on the other end of the line, "Sunnydale Memorial, how can I help you?"
He opened the other envelope violently; and when the young carpenter finally managed to succeed in getting it open, he found a picture.
With a certain fear, Xander noticed that, in the corner of it, there was the date and the hour the photograph was taken - 09/15/03, 8:34 p.m.
That had only been 45 minutes earlier.
The photograph was of a petite young woman with long, straight blonde hair, done up in a ponytail. She was wearing blue pajamas, and opening a fridge.
A little dazed, Xander managed to shove the cell phone at Steven Masterson - for that was the wounded man's name - and mumbled, "Hey, call for help, 'kay? The number's on speed dial, you just press #2..."
"Where are you going?!" Steven shouted with a hint of despair, but Xander seemed to ignore him and just threw his body in front of another passing vehicle, the first one to appear since Steven's car.
The dark-haired man took out a badge and said, "I need to borrow your car, sir."
At the first sight of protest by the motorist, Xander aggressively grabbed him by the collar of his shirt and threw him out of the car, forcing the man to open the car's door in a somehow awkward movement.
"What an asshole-" the short man still managed to scream, before noticing Steven's bloodied silhouette on the asphalt. "-am I!" he amended quickly, his eyes wide and his voice suddenly nervous.
"Y-you can keep the car if you want! I, I really don't mind!" the motorist babbled, but Xander was already long gone.
Cruising at the highest possible speed, Xander reached the apartment complex eight minutes later. All of his actions, every step he took - it felt like being on auto pilot, as the dark-haired man climbed the stairs jumping three, four, five steps at a time.
And, as Xander entered the apartment, he found the woman tied up in a chair.
But she wasn't moving.
~ End of Flashback ~
Xander woke up from his fleeting remembrance, rubbing his temples with a defeated sigh.
He picked up a pile of papers that had lain forgotten on his desk and wandered his eyes along them with noticeable disinterest, until an old picture that had been lost in the middle of the papers fell onto the floor.
Xander bent over to pick it up, and felt his blood freeze.
~Flashback ~
"Oooh, look at them! Can we have one of those?" Anya chimed in, her body lost in the larger embrace of her husband.
"Ahn, remember the commitment problem thing?" Xander replied, somehow awkwardly.
"You mean your paralyzing fear of having a family, because you wrongly think you could become your father?" the young woman asked with a frown.
"And that would be the one," Xander confirmed with a forced chuckle, suddenly feeling the need to loosen the collar of his shirt.
"That's lame and unacceptable," the former demoness rationalized. "You already used that excuse on our wedding day, to run away that time."
"But we did eventually end up getting married," the carpenter shot back.
"Yeah, a year later," Anya just groaned.
This from a woman who had become and given up being a demoness twice in her long life, the first time because she had been obligated to and the second by her own free will.
"Oookay, wrong tactic here," Xander mumbled nervously.
He pushed gently his wife's body away from his own, and Anya let out a moan of protest.
"OK, now, I'm in favor of having children with you. But we can, you know, maybe start with something... uh, smaller. Yeah, like we can buy ourselves a plant and see how we go!"
"We bought a plant already," the blonde woman replied. "But it died because I forgot to water it regularly, and take it out into the sun."
"A pet, then?" Xander tentatively asked.
Anya sighed, frustrated. "We had a goldfish once. You forgot to feed it, and it died too."
"Oh," Xander simply replied, scratching his head.
"We'll suck as parents!" Anya wailed suddenly. "And our kids will eventually go on Jerry Springer or something - and that's only if we remember to feed them when they're still little, when they cry!"
"No, we won't. And they won't, honey," the construction worker hurried to comfort the woman. "Maybe we're just not plant and fish people, ya know? But I'm sure you'll be a wonderful mom, and that our kids won't want us to appear on national TV that way."
Anya snorted. "You're only saying that because you're thinking Jerry Springer will be too old to be fashionable by then."
Xander looked at her and paused before saying, "Every time I remember the summer when Buffy wasn't here for Dawn, I remember you being there and proving it to me. I think we'll make some mistakes and we'll have to adjust a bit at first, but I'm only saying that because I know you'll make a terrific mother."
Anya stayed in silence for some seconds. "But I killed the plant," she sniffed belligerently.
"You won't kill our child if you forget to put her in the sun, I promise," he replied, a smile on his lips.
Anya pondered it all, for a long minute. "Wanna start making children now?"
Xander took another extensive minute to let the matter revolve about in his own mind. "Ok," he nodded simply, and they started to kiss.
~End of Flashback ~
Xander felt his breath being cut short as the pain became his whole world, and he tottered to the bedroom with visible difficulty, barely managing to open a drawer and pull a needle from it.
The dark-haired man adjusted the medicine and injected a shot into his belly; a region that looked bruised, and was dominated by a large circle with an unhealthy purple coloration.
Xander felt his world fading away as the medicine started to take effect, as a sea of oblivion surrounded his mind.
Nightmares of the past assaulted his dreams; and the unknown face of the man that had shaped his life into the worst of all possible nightmares, would twist into the shape of horrible demons in his dreams.
***
Review, please!
Author: Jane McCartney
Feedback: Don't make me beg for it. Oh hell, whatever: pleeeease? Pretty please? It'll just take a sec from ya! I really wanna know what you think about this particular fic.
Acknowledgments: Every beloved reviewer, and my beloved Theo. My fics are practically his work too. But probably not half as good as his own fics.
Author's note: This fic takes the movie "The Watcher", the one with James Spader and Keanu Reeves, as a reference - but you don't need to have watched the movie in order to follow this fic. It's probably better if you don't watch it after all, because you'll have more surprises that way.
Summary: As his health decreases and every trace of the man he used to be seems to be just a shade of an abandoned life, Xander finds out that he has to deal once again with the pain and quarrel of his past. Post S6 and S3, B/A crossover.
***
Xander Harris staggered along the living room to the bathroom of his home, and took a quick look into the mirror.
The reflection of a slumped, drained man stared back at him; his brown orbs seemed like hollow pits, and the man's eyes had dark circles below them. His features were incredibly thin, and his dark locks of hair, longish and loose, hung in front of Xander's face.
The former Slayerette quickly diverted his eyes away, and pushed the knob at the mirror's side to uncover the hidden shelves behind it.
Several bottles filled with many different kinds of pills were either piled up or lined up on the wooden edge. Xander took one of the bottles in his hand and opened it, taking two little white pills and swallowing them with a mouthful of water.
The dark-haired man sighed with great weariness and closed the door of the small closet, finding himself obligated to stare at his shadowy reflection once more.
His initial impulse was to punch the mirror so hard his hands would bleed, and the surface's glass would shatter into millions of little pieces.
But after so much time, he had learned to control himself and simply deflected his gaze from the glassy surface, his steps leading him out of the bathroom.
His body fell onto the couch, and Xander passed a hand through his dark hair - and that was when the memories assaulted his mind, like they so often did.
~ Flashback ~
"You fuckin' son of a bitch!" Xander yelled, his body and face connecting with the foliage of the forest's trees with uttered every word.
If possible, his pace increased to an even higher speed as he ran even faster; Xander's target, a man about his height who had longish hair, and whose face was obscured by the nightfall's darkness, was getting closer with every new step.
But when they reached the roadway, the unknown man jumped abruptly in front of the sole passing car. Its alarmed motorist stopped the vehicle with a loud honk of the horn, just two meters away from connecting with the stranger.
"Are you freaking crazy or just a moron, you bastard?!" the medium-sized motorist started shouting, but the stranger just shoved a sharp knife deep into the other man's chest.
"You know, the doctors say I'm most likely the first option," the stranger murmured with an odd tranquility in the agonized man's ear, and carelessly let his body drop onto the harsh asphalt.
"But, hey, I never believed much of what they say anyway," he amended with a cold smirk, getting into the car and starting the engine.
Despite Xander's great speed, the unknown man had had a considerable advantage of distance and the Slayerette was only capable of reaching the scene at that precise moment.
And he was not able to do anything except watch, as the car sped away.
Taking a moment to recover his gasping breath, Xander turned to the wounded man, "Are you Ok?"
He reconsidered his words quickly. "Alright, that was a stupid question. Look, stay still and I'll call for help, Ok?"
"Oh man, he stabbed me! He actually stabbed me!" the injured guy suddenly cried, his voice rough from the injury; and, occasionally, he coughed blood.
"I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die," the medium-sized wounded man started to mumble. "And I didn't even tell Tina I love her! Shit, and I just got a promotion last week! I was gonna be the secretary of the secretary!"
"Look, relax, you're not going to die, all right?" Xander tried to calm the mumbling man, and cursed as his cell phone didn't succeed on the first try to get a connection.
And then, unforeseeably, two yellow pools of light glittered on the darkness of the roadway, momentarily blinding Xander.
As the dark-haired man raised his hands to cover his eyes by pure instinct, he noticed the lights were actually headlights, and that the car's owner was now coming straight at him, at full speed.
The first thought that passed through Xander's mind was to get away from the stabbed man, so that his maniac pursuer wouldn't turn the guy into roadkill.
Thus, the construction worker threw his body towards the forest, but the car was way faster and bumped into him - shoving the dark-haired guy onto the cold asphalt.
The collision hadn't been strong enough to injure Xander, at least not more than to generate a few bruises, and both he and the stranger knew that that had been on purpose.
Because, in the unknown man's mind, Xander was too much of a vital piece in the puzzle - a vital factor in the stranger's plans. Plans that had been taking form, during the last few months.
Xander tried to make out the identity of the man's face, but the darkness and his position made that damn well impossible.
Before the Slayerette could do anything else, the car was once more disappearing onto the roadway, but not before the thief had shoved two sealed envelopes out the window.
"Oh, my car dude, that was my car! I just finished paying the last installment this month, already!" the wounded man wailed with a moan.
"And here I'm thinking I was the unluckiest guy in town," Xander said absent-mindedly, as one of his hands held the cell phone to call for help and the other grabbed one of the envelopes.
His fingers impatiently opened it to find what looked like a personal card, like those usually owned by businessmen.
In the middle of it, two words were printed - it was the strange man's personal signature, unlike the cards of ordinary businessmen: [The Observer].
Startled for a second, Xander turned the small card over and found a small sentence, written in a stylized font this time.
[She looks so pretty when she has her hair like this.]
Xander's heart skipped a beat, and he let the cell phone drop from his ear as a female voice said on the other end of the line, "Sunnydale Memorial, how can I help you?"
He opened the other envelope violently; and when the young carpenter finally managed to succeed in getting it open, he found a picture.
With a certain fear, Xander noticed that, in the corner of it, there was the date and the hour the photograph was taken - 09/15/03, 8:34 p.m.
That had only been 45 minutes earlier.
The photograph was of a petite young woman with long, straight blonde hair, done up in a ponytail. She was wearing blue pajamas, and opening a fridge.
A little dazed, Xander managed to shove the cell phone at Steven Masterson - for that was the wounded man's name - and mumbled, "Hey, call for help, 'kay? The number's on speed dial, you just press #2..."
"Where are you going?!" Steven shouted with a hint of despair, but Xander seemed to ignore him and just threw his body in front of another passing vehicle, the first one to appear since Steven's car.
The dark-haired man took out a badge and said, "I need to borrow your car, sir."
At the first sight of protest by the motorist, Xander aggressively grabbed him by the collar of his shirt and threw him out of the car, forcing the man to open the car's door in a somehow awkward movement.
"What an asshole-" the short man still managed to scream, before noticing Steven's bloodied silhouette on the asphalt. "-am I!" he amended quickly, his eyes wide and his voice suddenly nervous.
"Y-you can keep the car if you want! I, I really don't mind!" the motorist babbled, but Xander was already long gone.
Cruising at the highest possible speed, Xander reached the apartment complex eight minutes later. All of his actions, every step he took - it felt like being on auto pilot, as the dark-haired man climbed the stairs jumping three, four, five steps at a time.
And, as Xander entered the apartment, he found the woman tied up in a chair.
But she wasn't moving.
~ End of Flashback ~
Xander woke up from his fleeting remembrance, rubbing his temples with a defeated sigh.
He picked up a pile of papers that had lain forgotten on his desk and wandered his eyes along them with noticeable disinterest, until an old picture that had been lost in the middle of the papers fell onto the floor.
Xander bent over to pick it up, and felt his blood freeze.
~Flashback ~
"Oooh, look at them! Can we have one of those?" Anya chimed in, her body lost in the larger embrace of her husband.
"Ahn, remember the commitment problem thing?" Xander replied, somehow awkwardly.
"You mean your paralyzing fear of having a family, because you wrongly think you could become your father?" the young woman asked with a frown.
"And that would be the one," Xander confirmed with a forced chuckle, suddenly feeling the need to loosen the collar of his shirt.
"That's lame and unacceptable," the former demoness rationalized. "You already used that excuse on our wedding day, to run away that time."
"But we did eventually end up getting married," the carpenter shot back.
"Yeah, a year later," Anya just groaned.
This from a woman who had become and given up being a demoness twice in her long life, the first time because she had been obligated to and the second by her own free will.
"Oookay, wrong tactic here," Xander mumbled nervously.
He pushed gently his wife's body away from his own, and Anya let out a moan of protest.
"OK, now, I'm in favor of having children with you. But we can, you know, maybe start with something... uh, smaller. Yeah, like we can buy ourselves a plant and see how we go!"
"We bought a plant already," the blonde woman replied. "But it died because I forgot to water it regularly, and take it out into the sun."
"A pet, then?" Xander tentatively asked.
Anya sighed, frustrated. "We had a goldfish once. You forgot to feed it, and it died too."
"Oh," Xander simply replied, scratching his head.
"We'll suck as parents!" Anya wailed suddenly. "And our kids will eventually go on Jerry Springer or something - and that's only if we remember to feed them when they're still little, when they cry!"
"No, we won't. And they won't, honey," the construction worker hurried to comfort the woman. "Maybe we're just not plant and fish people, ya know? But I'm sure you'll be a wonderful mom, and that our kids won't want us to appear on national TV that way."
Anya snorted. "You're only saying that because you're thinking Jerry Springer will be too old to be fashionable by then."
Xander looked at her and paused before saying, "Every time I remember the summer when Buffy wasn't here for Dawn, I remember you being there and proving it to me. I think we'll make some mistakes and we'll have to adjust a bit at first, but I'm only saying that because I know you'll make a terrific mother."
Anya stayed in silence for some seconds. "But I killed the plant," she sniffed belligerently.
"You won't kill our child if you forget to put her in the sun, I promise," he replied, a smile on his lips.
Anya pondered it all, for a long minute. "Wanna start making children now?"
Xander took another extensive minute to let the matter revolve about in his own mind. "Ok," he nodded simply, and they started to kiss.
~End of Flashback ~
Xander felt his breath being cut short as the pain became his whole world, and he tottered to the bedroom with visible difficulty, barely managing to open a drawer and pull a needle from it.
The dark-haired man adjusted the medicine and injected a shot into his belly; a region that looked bruised, and was dominated by a large circle with an unhealthy purple coloration.
Xander felt his world fading away as the medicine started to take effect, as a sea of oblivion surrounded his mind.
Nightmares of the past assaulted his dreams; and the unknown face of the man that had shaped his life into the worst of all possible nightmares, would twist into the shape of horrible demons in his dreams.
***
Review, please!