So maybe they're not all weird, Xander decides as he listens to the mis-matched rhythms of their breathing. Anya may be… different, but she has all the physical and emotional components of a typical, normal woman.
Including the ability to crush his heart into dust.
It's the sense of finality that's the hardest to deal with. He can manage awkward social situations. Uncomfortable conversations: not a problem. Sexual tension? Got it covered. Because all that stuff means there's still something there: some evidence of what they had. Still a possibility. Somewhere, some-when, their relationship still exists.
But now Anya says it's not there anymore. It's over. They're over. In Xander's mind, that's just not possible. He's having a really hard time getting his head around the nothingness of it all.
How can something just cease to be?
The love is still there. He said so, and so did she, so how can there be love and nothing at the same time? How can something become nothing?
She said she still loved him, and in that moment the world was just him and Anya and the couch and those words. No house, no camera, no Andrew…
It gets cold when Anya leaves the basement. Or maybe it was always cold and he was too preoccupied to notice. Maybe he's always been cold. He felt warm with Anya, but she's just turned all that into nothingness, so perhaps the warmth is nothingness too.
When you put out a fire, you still feel the warmth afterwards as it dissipates and touches the things around it. He pictures his love leaving his body and spreading through the basement, soaking into the walls. Maybe the walls will fall in love with each other, and the washing machine will start crushing on the drier.
He was happy with the tension. It meant there was still something between them to make them tense. But then Andrew had to go playing Michael Moore and make them talk about it all, like the apple-woman and her husband. Except Anya doesn't have a gay brother.
It's cold, and Xander has a sudden sensation of emptiness, not just inside him but around him. He can't deal with empty spaces and silences: they have to be filled.
When he finds himself beginning to shiver, he pushes himself out of the cot and forces himself to get dressed. His head has cleared enough that he remembers to strip the sheets and stuff them into the washing machine (and is half tempted to formally introduce it to the drier, just in case). After all, the last thing he wants is Spike of all people knowing what they did in his bed.
There's no more sunlight streaming through the windows when he gets back upstairs. It doesn't worry him that he has no idea how long he's been in the basement. If anyone needed him for anything, he'd have heard them calling. Unless they called while he was…busy.
Voices drift like mist from the living room, soft and slightly tired, almost like they don't want to travel that far. He knows it's Will and Buffy before he gets there, but he is unsurprised to see Spike and Principal Wood with them at the dining table.
"Hey." Buffy looks up, the first to greet him, and she smiles a weary smile that's not entirely about him. "Did you get back before us?"
Xander isn't even aware that she's been away, but doesn't want to draw any attention to his current confusion.
"How are…things?" It's about the safest thing he can think of to say, since he really ought to have been up here helping instead of down there doing… other things. He's still trying to adjust to the fact that the rest of the world has just carried on while he was busy having his insides metaphorically splattered over the basement walls.
"Things are good," Buffy answers with something that might almost be satisfaction. "Better, anyway." Suddenly Xander wants to know if they're even aware he's been in the house all afternoon. Things aren't good. Things are about as far from good as they could possibly be, short of the world ending, and…oh wait, it is.
"We closed the seal," Willow explains. "Well, Buffy and Andrew did."
He looks around the occupants of the room. All four look tired, but triumphant. Like they've pulled off something huge, while all he's been doing is - okay, enough with the self-pity, he decides. Something's clearly happened this evening, and he has no idea what.
"Seal?" he asks, then, "closed? Buffy? Andrew? How?" Five questions in five words, he realises. Is that some kind of record? "When?" Must be, now.
Buffy and Wood explain about finding the seal uncovered again, and Willow jumps in to tell him about needing the person who opened it in the first place. He has to concentrate for a moment to realise she means Andrew.
Suddenly he's flashing back to being suspended over the seal himself, wondering if that's what had to be done to Andrew to close it up. His stomach bungees down to his shoes and his skin picks up a freezing cold shiver that he somehow identifies as dread.
But then, Buffy doesn't look as though she's just killed someone. She's still kind of smiling. Then again, this is Andrew they're talking about.
How the hell has he missed all this? The rest of the conversation kind of wafts right by him, a breeze that stirs his own thoughts only slightly. All that research and planning going on right over his - their - heads, and he had almost forgotten the rest of the house was still there. And then Buffy working with Andrew, and the seal actually being closed and not just out-of-sight-out-of-mind, and, and he needs more time to take all this in.
"Where is Andrew?" he hears himself ask, and it's like the words went straight to his mouth and bypassed his brain altogether. Buffy and Willow exchange and odd glance that he thinks he wasn't supposed to see, and he thinks, damn, probably shouldn't have asked that so soon. But they don't question him.
"Upstairs I think," Willow answers, and the tension whooshes out of his body in one quick breath. He waits a moment more, trying to decide what to do. He knows that, for the sake of his own sanity, he should stay downstairs, at least until he's had some time to get the evening's events straight in his head, but when nobody appears ready to say anything else to him, he finds his feet betraying him completely and taking him out of the room and up the stairs.
If Andrew is upstairs, then there's only one place he can logically be, and Xander is knocking on the bathroom door before he can stop himself. He's not sure when, or why, he became The Guy Who Checks Up On Andrew, but he's fairly certain that no one else will have thought to do it.
There's no answer, so he tries the door, wondering if maybe Andrew's not there at all. It clicks open and swishes softly over the carpet. Xander feels his stomach strapping on the bungee cord for another try as he steps forward and sticks his head around the door.
Andrew is sitting on the toilet seat, head back against the wall, looking at Xander with that trapped expression that Xander has spent the past couple of days trying to forget. Xander can see that his eyes are rimmed with red, and as if to prove his suspicions, Andrew sniffs and bats at an eye with the back of one hand. He steps all the way inside the bathroom and carefully closes the door behind him.
Being in here with Andrew makes him feel uncomfortable and prickly, kind of like being around Willow after the love spell from Hades. He's trying not to think about the way Andrew must look at him and think about him, wishing he could focus on whatever it is Andrew's had to do tonight that's made him shut himself up here to cry. Instead he catches himself wondering if Andrew knows he can tell, if Andrew's speech was a deliberate attempt to clue him in, because sometimes he just seems so child-like in his openness. Like now, as he watches Xander without any effort to hide the fact that he's been crying.
"You closed the seal?" he asks, and knows it's probably the dumbest thing to ask, but he still has no clue exactly what happened at the school. Andrew nods, and sniffs again. He doesn't look physically hurt, and somehow that seems to settle Xander's unease just a little. "How?"
Andrew draws a shaky breath that catches audibly, making Xander's stomach lurch yet again.
"It needed my tears," Andrew begins, "in return for… for spilling blood." He scrunches up his face, looking like he's about to fall into a fresh bout of sobbing, but there's no sound. His shoulders shake just once, then he's still again. His voice is flat, and Xander thinks maybe he's just completely cried out. Down in the basement, the last remaining ripples of his nothing-love are trickling out, and he thinks maybe the same has happened to Andrew's sorrow. Little bits of it are soaking into Xander, tightening his chest and pulling him inexorably towards Andrew. With his back against the door he slides slowly downwards to sit on the floor, his eyes on a level with Andrew's knees. What's the point of feeling anything anymore, he asks the world, when you just end up all empty like they do?
"How?" he repeats. Apparently his vocabulary is dissipating too. Andrew leans forward, elbows on his knees, head down, eyes closed.
By the time he's done explaining how Buffy put him in Jonathan's place and made him feel just the way Jonathan did in his last few moments alive, the floodgates have been pried open and Andrew is sobbing openly again.
Xander knows he's supposed to feel that Andrew had to repent for killing Jonathan, and that maybe he deserves the pain that is making him shudder and weep like this. He's just having a hard time really believing it. The conversation in his head is running something like: Andrew summoned demons that made life hell for Buffy. *He did it because he was following Warren's orders.* Andrew held a sword to his throat. *Andrew was scared for his life.* Andrew was evil. *Andrew was just a kid playing at being a villain. Andrew has no idea what evil really is. Andrew's just scared and lost and alone.*
It's not supposed to work like this, Xander thinks. He's not supposed to be able to rationalise everything Andrew's done like that. It's not stuff he should be able to wipe away so easily.
It's just that, if Buffy can say there's good in Spike, and Willow can find someone who can see beyond her past, and if they can all bring Anya back into their house, then why can't he take this fragile, punished thing and want to take care of him?
He takes hold of Andrew's elbow, gentle but firm, and steers Andrew to sit beside him. He needs no further encouragement: in a heartbeat he's practically in Xander's lap, face pressed into Xander's shoulder and an arm wrapped around his waist. Tears soak a damp patch on Xander's shirt as his shoulders heave, and Xander's own arm winds around Andrew to try and hold him still. He tries not to think about what this might mean to Andrew: just lets himself succumb to the image of egg-yellow bruises and rabbit eyes, and reminds himself that this is just one more pattern in the cycle.
*****
tbc
Including the ability to crush his heart into dust.
It's the sense of finality that's the hardest to deal with. He can manage awkward social situations. Uncomfortable conversations: not a problem. Sexual tension? Got it covered. Because all that stuff means there's still something there: some evidence of what they had. Still a possibility. Somewhere, some-when, their relationship still exists.
But now Anya says it's not there anymore. It's over. They're over. In Xander's mind, that's just not possible. He's having a really hard time getting his head around the nothingness of it all.
How can something just cease to be?
The love is still there. He said so, and so did she, so how can there be love and nothing at the same time? How can something become nothing?
She said she still loved him, and in that moment the world was just him and Anya and the couch and those words. No house, no camera, no Andrew…
It gets cold when Anya leaves the basement. Or maybe it was always cold and he was too preoccupied to notice. Maybe he's always been cold. He felt warm with Anya, but she's just turned all that into nothingness, so perhaps the warmth is nothingness too.
When you put out a fire, you still feel the warmth afterwards as it dissipates and touches the things around it. He pictures his love leaving his body and spreading through the basement, soaking into the walls. Maybe the walls will fall in love with each other, and the washing machine will start crushing on the drier.
He was happy with the tension. It meant there was still something between them to make them tense. But then Andrew had to go playing Michael Moore and make them talk about it all, like the apple-woman and her husband. Except Anya doesn't have a gay brother.
It's cold, and Xander has a sudden sensation of emptiness, not just inside him but around him. He can't deal with empty spaces and silences: they have to be filled.
When he finds himself beginning to shiver, he pushes himself out of the cot and forces himself to get dressed. His head has cleared enough that he remembers to strip the sheets and stuff them into the washing machine (and is half tempted to formally introduce it to the drier, just in case). After all, the last thing he wants is Spike of all people knowing what they did in his bed.
There's no more sunlight streaming through the windows when he gets back upstairs. It doesn't worry him that he has no idea how long he's been in the basement. If anyone needed him for anything, he'd have heard them calling. Unless they called while he was…busy.
Voices drift like mist from the living room, soft and slightly tired, almost like they don't want to travel that far. He knows it's Will and Buffy before he gets there, but he is unsurprised to see Spike and Principal Wood with them at the dining table.
"Hey." Buffy looks up, the first to greet him, and she smiles a weary smile that's not entirely about him. "Did you get back before us?"
Xander isn't even aware that she's been away, but doesn't want to draw any attention to his current confusion.
"How are…things?" It's about the safest thing he can think of to say, since he really ought to have been up here helping instead of down there doing… other things. He's still trying to adjust to the fact that the rest of the world has just carried on while he was busy having his insides metaphorically splattered over the basement walls.
"Things are good," Buffy answers with something that might almost be satisfaction. "Better, anyway." Suddenly Xander wants to know if they're even aware he's been in the house all afternoon. Things aren't good. Things are about as far from good as they could possibly be, short of the world ending, and…oh wait, it is.
"We closed the seal," Willow explains. "Well, Buffy and Andrew did."
He looks around the occupants of the room. All four look tired, but triumphant. Like they've pulled off something huge, while all he's been doing is - okay, enough with the self-pity, he decides. Something's clearly happened this evening, and he has no idea what.
"Seal?" he asks, then, "closed? Buffy? Andrew? How?" Five questions in five words, he realises. Is that some kind of record? "When?" Must be, now.
Buffy and Wood explain about finding the seal uncovered again, and Willow jumps in to tell him about needing the person who opened it in the first place. He has to concentrate for a moment to realise she means Andrew.
Suddenly he's flashing back to being suspended over the seal himself, wondering if that's what had to be done to Andrew to close it up. His stomach bungees down to his shoes and his skin picks up a freezing cold shiver that he somehow identifies as dread.
But then, Buffy doesn't look as though she's just killed someone. She's still kind of smiling. Then again, this is Andrew they're talking about.
How the hell has he missed all this? The rest of the conversation kind of wafts right by him, a breeze that stirs his own thoughts only slightly. All that research and planning going on right over his - their - heads, and he had almost forgotten the rest of the house was still there. And then Buffy working with Andrew, and the seal actually being closed and not just out-of-sight-out-of-mind, and, and he needs more time to take all this in.
"Where is Andrew?" he hears himself ask, and it's like the words went straight to his mouth and bypassed his brain altogether. Buffy and Willow exchange and odd glance that he thinks he wasn't supposed to see, and he thinks, damn, probably shouldn't have asked that so soon. But they don't question him.
"Upstairs I think," Willow answers, and the tension whooshes out of his body in one quick breath. He waits a moment more, trying to decide what to do. He knows that, for the sake of his own sanity, he should stay downstairs, at least until he's had some time to get the evening's events straight in his head, but when nobody appears ready to say anything else to him, he finds his feet betraying him completely and taking him out of the room and up the stairs.
If Andrew is upstairs, then there's only one place he can logically be, and Xander is knocking on the bathroom door before he can stop himself. He's not sure when, or why, he became The Guy Who Checks Up On Andrew, but he's fairly certain that no one else will have thought to do it.
There's no answer, so he tries the door, wondering if maybe Andrew's not there at all. It clicks open and swishes softly over the carpet. Xander feels his stomach strapping on the bungee cord for another try as he steps forward and sticks his head around the door.
Andrew is sitting on the toilet seat, head back against the wall, looking at Xander with that trapped expression that Xander has spent the past couple of days trying to forget. Xander can see that his eyes are rimmed with red, and as if to prove his suspicions, Andrew sniffs and bats at an eye with the back of one hand. He steps all the way inside the bathroom and carefully closes the door behind him.
Being in here with Andrew makes him feel uncomfortable and prickly, kind of like being around Willow after the love spell from Hades. He's trying not to think about the way Andrew must look at him and think about him, wishing he could focus on whatever it is Andrew's had to do tonight that's made him shut himself up here to cry. Instead he catches himself wondering if Andrew knows he can tell, if Andrew's speech was a deliberate attempt to clue him in, because sometimes he just seems so child-like in his openness. Like now, as he watches Xander without any effort to hide the fact that he's been crying.
"You closed the seal?" he asks, and knows it's probably the dumbest thing to ask, but he still has no clue exactly what happened at the school. Andrew nods, and sniffs again. He doesn't look physically hurt, and somehow that seems to settle Xander's unease just a little. "How?"
Andrew draws a shaky breath that catches audibly, making Xander's stomach lurch yet again.
"It needed my tears," Andrew begins, "in return for… for spilling blood." He scrunches up his face, looking like he's about to fall into a fresh bout of sobbing, but there's no sound. His shoulders shake just once, then he's still again. His voice is flat, and Xander thinks maybe he's just completely cried out. Down in the basement, the last remaining ripples of his nothing-love are trickling out, and he thinks maybe the same has happened to Andrew's sorrow. Little bits of it are soaking into Xander, tightening his chest and pulling him inexorably towards Andrew. With his back against the door he slides slowly downwards to sit on the floor, his eyes on a level with Andrew's knees. What's the point of feeling anything anymore, he asks the world, when you just end up all empty like they do?
"How?" he repeats. Apparently his vocabulary is dissipating too. Andrew leans forward, elbows on his knees, head down, eyes closed.
By the time he's done explaining how Buffy put him in Jonathan's place and made him feel just the way Jonathan did in his last few moments alive, the floodgates have been pried open and Andrew is sobbing openly again.
Xander knows he's supposed to feel that Andrew had to repent for killing Jonathan, and that maybe he deserves the pain that is making him shudder and weep like this. He's just having a hard time really believing it. The conversation in his head is running something like: Andrew summoned demons that made life hell for Buffy. *He did it because he was following Warren's orders.* Andrew held a sword to his throat. *Andrew was scared for his life.* Andrew was evil. *Andrew was just a kid playing at being a villain. Andrew has no idea what evil really is. Andrew's just scared and lost and alone.*
It's not supposed to work like this, Xander thinks. He's not supposed to be able to rationalise everything Andrew's done like that. It's not stuff he should be able to wipe away so easily.
It's just that, if Buffy can say there's good in Spike, and Willow can find someone who can see beyond her past, and if they can all bring Anya back into their house, then why can't he take this fragile, punished thing and want to take care of him?
He takes hold of Andrew's elbow, gentle but firm, and steers Andrew to sit beside him. He needs no further encouragement: in a heartbeat he's practically in Xander's lap, face pressed into Xander's shoulder and an arm wrapped around his waist. Tears soak a damp patch on Xander's shirt as his shoulders heave, and Xander's own arm winds around Andrew to try and hold him still. He tries not to think about what this might mean to Andrew: just lets himself succumb to the image of egg-yellow bruises and rabbit eyes, and reminds himself that this is just one more pattern in the cycle.
*****
tbc