Their second morning in the hotel, and Xander has a fresh change of clothes. The world seems just a teensy bit more bearable. He wonders idly if Andrew felt the same way when he was gifted with Xander's old sweats and T-shirts.
Willow brought them to his room not long after he woke up, along with coffee and donuts. He tries not to think about the origins of the black jeans, since there is still a lingering shadow of a memory, lancing through the fog, that suggests he's supposed to resent Angel. The T-shirt, however, has actual colours, leading Xander to suggest it must belong to one of the nameless faces gracing the lobby the night before.
Physically, he feels almost ready to face the world again. Mentally, he's drowning in treacle, gloopy and clinging and muffling everything else, making anything solid seem so far away.
He tries to remember what it's like to feel something other than tired or hungry or restless: tries to find a tangible thread of happy, angry, loved, scared, anything that goes beyond muscle and bone and insides. All he can manage is a sensation akin to stepping up to the edge of the high-dive and looking down at the water, feeling the floor about to disappear into unrelenting space, that vertigo-rush of on-the-precipice terror.
The day turns into a smudge, everything rubbing into the next thing as he watches the city out of his window, stares uncomprehending at the newspaper Willow brings him, and occasionally wanders the hallways on his floor. At some point mid-morning he runs into Buffy on her way back to her own room, and they exchange twin smiles of sympathetic grief, Xander's stomach crunching into creases when he remembers Spike never made it out of the school either. There are generic inquiries into each other's well being, until they run out of painless things to say, and Buffy announces she has to find Dawn.
Willow visits his room again after midday to tell him lunch has arrived, which he declines, and to let him know that Faith and Robin are leaving, should he wish to see them. He tells her he'll be down shortly, then crawls into bed and sleeps for a couple of hours until Dawn knocks on his door. She updates him on downstairs life, tells him they've started shipping the girls back home to their respective families, gives him vague second-hand details about L.A. events over the past few weeks. Cordelia's missing, she says, and Dawn is helping with research stuff while L.A. people move some things out of the hotel: to where, she doesn't know.
On his walks (or more accurately, stumbles) around the hallways, he catches fragments of sounds from downstairs that inform him that yet again, life still carries on around his little moments of worth. While Will and Dawn check up on him occasionally, everyone else leaves him to his grief.
It's evening again when he finally gets fed up of hiding and traipses down the movie-set staircase in search of a distraction. He puts it down to his rotten luck that the lobby crowd has disappeared. There's just the green guy and Andrew behind the desk, packing some stuff into boxes. Or possibly unpacking, since they've stopped what they're doing to watch him and he can't judge the direction the book in Andrew's hands is about to take while it's stationary.
Xander mooches on over to the desk, simply because there's nowhere else to go. He shoves his hands in his pockets and glances at the books and papers scattered around.
"Hey." Andrew's voice is hesitant, like a clearing of the throat, and Xander knows the worst possible thing he can do is look into his face. The knowledge comes too late, though, because he's already looking up, and there's that damn trapped expression again, rabbit-eyes, and Xander thinks, 'no. Not now, not while I really am capable of hugging him to death.'
He's saved only when he remembers they're not alone. The green guy is watching them intently with an air of expectation that's obvious even to Xander.
"Uh, this is, um, Lorne," Andrew explains, gesturing to mister tall, green and conspicuous. Lorne nods in acknowledgement, and when he smiles Xander begins to realise why no one else seemed wary of him the night before.
"Lemme guess: Xander, right?" Lorne asks him. "Well, good to see you up and about, kid. You're looking, well, better than yesterday at least."
Xander simply responds with a tight smile, still unsure of his vocal abilities right now. He tries to remember the last time anyone called him 'kid'. Somehow it reminds him of Spike, even though this guy makes it sound perfectly friendly, and that makes him feel just a little uneasy. Andrew also seems at a loss for words, dropping his gaze and fiddling with the button on his shirt cuff. Itchy silence worms its way in again until Lorne clears his throat abruptly.
"Maybe I need to be somewhere else right now," he breezes. "You gonna carry on here, Andy?" Andrew nods, and Xander barely catches the quizzical glance Lorne shoots at him before he bustles off into a room on the other side of the desk.
The quiet is back again, thistle-sharp, so out of desperation Xander waves a hand at the boxes and debris littering the desk and asks what it's all for.
"Something about, uh, moving to a new base, I think," Andrew drawls, still worrying at that button. For the first time Xander is aware that Andrew too has new clothes: dark grey slacks that look a shade too long, and a blue button-down shirt that doesn't quite match. He wonders if perhaps they belong to Wesley, since there's no way any of Angel's clothes would suit Andrew's slight frame. "I was just helping Lorne box up some stuff." He looks longingly in the direction that Lorne has disappeared to, and Xander can tell he's dying to follow. His shoulders are hunched, and he's twisting visibly away from Xander.
"Are you avoiding me?" The words ring out sharp and shrill in the spacious marbled lobby. Xander silently curses his voice for sounding so out of practice. Andrew's head snaps up, and of all the things Xander expects to see, the guilty shadow around his eyes is definitely not one of them. Neither is such a positive affirmation of his suspicion. "Wha - why? I don't…" Since when had he become so incoherent? Whole days of silence - really not good for him. "I don't get it."
Andrew pulls some more at his button, and Xander can see that the thread is loose, that soon it'll fall right off.
"Why would you want me around?" It reminds Xander of the whine of his early hostage days, but there's a dash of wretchedness in there too that makes Xander regret shouting.
"Why wouldn't I?"
"Because…" Andrew looks over at the door Lorne went through, sniffs, then looks back at his hands. "It was 'cause of me." He draws a quick breath, then falls into a rapid torrent of words. "I know you still loved her and she loved you and you were practically back together and then she didn't make it, and," he trails off to draw another breath, "and now you're all, with the grief and everything…" It trickles to a standstill, Andrew looking up at him now with a wet shine to his eyes that makes Xander's skin feel hot and too tight. "I just figured you wouldn't want me around right now."
His gaze pulls away from Xander, back to his cuff. Pick, pick, pick at that damn button again, until Xander darts out a hand and captures his wrist, holding him still.
"How do you know what I want?" There's nothing aggressive about it, but too late he remembers blotchy yellow bracelets, and even though he knows Andrew's wrists are unmarked now beneath those baggy shirt cuffs, the memory still nauseates him. He relaxes his grip, but does not let go entirely. "Just…" And it's so hard, because he can't even say exactly what it is he wants from Andrew: just knows he can't stand the thought of driving him away like that. "Just don't, okay?"
Andrew watches him with furrowed brow, evidently as confused as Xander is, but there's no better way to explain it, and even if he could find the words, pull some meaning from the miasma of feelings that are fizzing inside him, the front doors are clicking open and lively chatter is flooding into the room to draw them both away to see who it is.
He drops Andrew's arm before Willow and Dawn see them. They're followed by Wesley and another guy Xander doesn't recognise, and they all smile to see him, calling lively greetings and filling the space with life and warmth.
They dump what must be a dozen pizza boxes on the front desk, and Xander wonders if every meal at the hotel is take-out. Surely there must be a kitchen somewhere, he reasons? Don't these people ever cook for themselves?
As Willow calls upstairs for the rest of their team to come and get it, Wesley gives his first proper hello. It's a little stilted, and not helped by the fact that Xander is still trying to reconcile this worn-looking, soft-spoken man with the suited and bespectacled gent from Sunnydale. He introduces the other man as Gunn, and Gunn makes some joke about his shirt that leads Xander to believe he is the donor. Gunn moves over to the food before he has a chance to say thank-you.
Everyone here seems to move fast, even the ones who arrived with him, and Xander cannot understand how they can have recovered so quickly.
He joins them for pizza, then while everyone else is clearing away empty boxes and Coke cans, he steals away and heads back to his room, tired from the effort of conversation and keeping up with the crowd. He clambers into bed still wearing Gunn's T-shirt with his boxers, and leans back against the headboard, wishing he could quiet the rattle of thoughts inside his head.
When the voices sweeping past outside as people make their way to their own rooms eventually quiets, and Xander can hear the far-away slide of traffic down in the streets, there's a knock at his door. He calls for whoever it is to come in, too drained even to go to the door himself. A moment later, and Andrew is silhouetted in the slat of light between door and frame.
When Xander says nothing, he slips inside, easing the door closed with a soft 'snick' and padding over to the bed. Still Xander says nothing, so he balances himself carefully on the edge of the mattress. He fidgets with the edge of the blanket, then asks, "You sure you want me around?" There's a shake in his voice that makes Xander wonder how much courage it took for Andrew to come to his room in the middle of the night, dressed for bed in sweatpants and T-shirt, and sit on Xander's bed like this.
There's something familiar about the squeak of bedsprings when Andrew sits, and in the sudden spread of weight over both sides of the double.
"Stay," he replies, and when Andrew slides in next to him he remembers that the even distribution of two bodies means he is not pulled into the empty middle of his own bed.
They lay side by side, a gap down the middle of the bed almost wide enough for another person, but the nearness is enough to remind Xander that his room is not empty tonight.
*****
tbc
Willow brought them to his room not long after he woke up, along with coffee and donuts. He tries not to think about the origins of the black jeans, since there is still a lingering shadow of a memory, lancing through the fog, that suggests he's supposed to resent Angel. The T-shirt, however, has actual colours, leading Xander to suggest it must belong to one of the nameless faces gracing the lobby the night before.
Physically, he feels almost ready to face the world again. Mentally, he's drowning in treacle, gloopy and clinging and muffling everything else, making anything solid seem so far away.
He tries to remember what it's like to feel something other than tired or hungry or restless: tries to find a tangible thread of happy, angry, loved, scared, anything that goes beyond muscle and bone and insides. All he can manage is a sensation akin to stepping up to the edge of the high-dive and looking down at the water, feeling the floor about to disappear into unrelenting space, that vertigo-rush of on-the-precipice terror.
The day turns into a smudge, everything rubbing into the next thing as he watches the city out of his window, stares uncomprehending at the newspaper Willow brings him, and occasionally wanders the hallways on his floor. At some point mid-morning he runs into Buffy on her way back to her own room, and they exchange twin smiles of sympathetic grief, Xander's stomach crunching into creases when he remembers Spike never made it out of the school either. There are generic inquiries into each other's well being, until they run out of painless things to say, and Buffy announces she has to find Dawn.
Willow visits his room again after midday to tell him lunch has arrived, which he declines, and to let him know that Faith and Robin are leaving, should he wish to see them. He tells her he'll be down shortly, then crawls into bed and sleeps for a couple of hours until Dawn knocks on his door. She updates him on downstairs life, tells him they've started shipping the girls back home to their respective families, gives him vague second-hand details about L.A. events over the past few weeks. Cordelia's missing, she says, and Dawn is helping with research stuff while L.A. people move some things out of the hotel: to where, she doesn't know.
On his walks (or more accurately, stumbles) around the hallways, he catches fragments of sounds from downstairs that inform him that yet again, life still carries on around his little moments of worth. While Will and Dawn check up on him occasionally, everyone else leaves him to his grief.
It's evening again when he finally gets fed up of hiding and traipses down the movie-set staircase in search of a distraction. He puts it down to his rotten luck that the lobby crowd has disappeared. There's just the green guy and Andrew behind the desk, packing some stuff into boxes. Or possibly unpacking, since they've stopped what they're doing to watch him and he can't judge the direction the book in Andrew's hands is about to take while it's stationary.
Xander mooches on over to the desk, simply because there's nowhere else to go. He shoves his hands in his pockets and glances at the books and papers scattered around.
"Hey." Andrew's voice is hesitant, like a clearing of the throat, and Xander knows the worst possible thing he can do is look into his face. The knowledge comes too late, though, because he's already looking up, and there's that damn trapped expression again, rabbit-eyes, and Xander thinks, 'no. Not now, not while I really am capable of hugging him to death.'
He's saved only when he remembers they're not alone. The green guy is watching them intently with an air of expectation that's obvious even to Xander.
"Uh, this is, um, Lorne," Andrew explains, gesturing to mister tall, green and conspicuous. Lorne nods in acknowledgement, and when he smiles Xander begins to realise why no one else seemed wary of him the night before.
"Lemme guess: Xander, right?" Lorne asks him. "Well, good to see you up and about, kid. You're looking, well, better than yesterday at least."
Xander simply responds with a tight smile, still unsure of his vocal abilities right now. He tries to remember the last time anyone called him 'kid'. Somehow it reminds him of Spike, even though this guy makes it sound perfectly friendly, and that makes him feel just a little uneasy. Andrew also seems at a loss for words, dropping his gaze and fiddling with the button on his shirt cuff. Itchy silence worms its way in again until Lorne clears his throat abruptly.
"Maybe I need to be somewhere else right now," he breezes. "You gonna carry on here, Andy?" Andrew nods, and Xander barely catches the quizzical glance Lorne shoots at him before he bustles off into a room on the other side of the desk.
The quiet is back again, thistle-sharp, so out of desperation Xander waves a hand at the boxes and debris littering the desk and asks what it's all for.
"Something about, uh, moving to a new base, I think," Andrew drawls, still worrying at that button. For the first time Xander is aware that Andrew too has new clothes: dark grey slacks that look a shade too long, and a blue button-down shirt that doesn't quite match. He wonders if perhaps they belong to Wesley, since there's no way any of Angel's clothes would suit Andrew's slight frame. "I was just helping Lorne box up some stuff." He looks longingly in the direction that Lorne has disappeared to, and Xander can tell he's dying to follow. His shoulders are hunched, and he's twisting visibly away from Xander.
"Are you avoiding me?" The words ring out sharp and shrill in the spacious marbled lobby. Xander silently curses his voice for sounding so out of practice. Andrew's head snaps up, and of all the things Xander expects to see, the guilty shadow around his eyes is definitely not one of them. Neither is such a positive affirmation of his suspicion. "Wha - why? I don't…" Since when had he become so incoherent? Whole days of silence - really not good for him. "I don't get it."
Andrew pulls some more at his button, and Xander can see that the thread is loose, that soon it'll fall right off.
"Why would you want me around?" It reminds Xander of the whine of his early hostage days, but there's a dash of wretchedness in there too that makes Xander regret shouting.
"Why wouldn't I?"
"Because…" Andrew looks over at the door Lorne went through, sniffs, then looks back at his hands. "It was 'cause of me." He draws a quick breath, then falls into a rapid torrent of words. "I know you still loved her and she loved you and you were practically back together and then she didn't make it, and," he trails off to draw another breath, "and now you're all, with the grief and everything…" It trickles to a standstill, Andrew looking up at him now with a wet shine to his eyes that makes Xander's skin feel hot and too tight. "I just figured you wouldn't want me around right now."
His gaze pulls away from Xander, back to his cuff. Pick, pick, pick at that damn button again, until Xander darts out a hand and captures his wrist, holding him still.
"How do you know what I want?" There's nothing aggressive about it, but too late he remembers blotchy yellow bracelets, and even though he knows Andrew's wrists are unmarked now beneath those baggy shirt cuffs, the memory still nauseates him. He relaxes his grip, but does not let go entirely. "Just…" And it's so hard, because he can't even say exactly what it is he wants from Andrew: just knows he can't stand the thought of driving him away like that. "Just don't, okay?"
Andrew watches him with furrowed brow, evidently as confused as Xander is, but there's no better way to explain it, and even if he could find the words, pull some meaning from the miasma of feelings that are fizzing inside him, the front doors are clicking open and lively chatter is flooding into the room to draw them both away to see who it is.
He drops Andrew's arm before Willow and Dawn see them. They're followed by Wesley and another guy Xander doesn't recognise, and they all smile to see him, calling lively greetings and filling the space with life and warmth.
They dump what must be a dozen pizza boxes on the front desk, and Xander wonders if every meal at the hotel is take-out. Surely there must be a kitchen somewhere, he reasons? Don't these people ever cook for themselves?
As Willow calls upstairs for the rest of their team to come and get it, Wesley gives his first proper hello. It's a little stilted, and not helped by the fact that Xander is still trying to reconcile this worn-looking, soft-spoken man with the suited and bespectacled gent from Sunnydale. He introduces the other man as Gunn, and Gunn makes some joke about his shirt that leads Xander to believe he is the donor. Gunn moves over to the food before he has a chance to say thank-you.
Everyone here seems to move fast, even the ones who arrived with him, and Xander cannot understand how they can have recovered so quickly.
He joins them for pizza, then while everyone else is clearing away empty boxes and Coke cans, he steals away and heads back to his room, tired from the effort of conversation and keeping up with the crowd. He clambers into bed still wearing Gunn's T-shirt with his boxers, and leans back against the headboard, wishing he could quiet the rattle of thoughts inside his head.
When the voices sweeping past outside as people make their way to their own rooms eventually quiets, and Xander can hear the far-away slide of traffic down in the streets, there's a knock at his door. He calls for whoever it is to come in, too drained even to go to the door himself. A moment later, and Andrew is silhouetted in the slat of light between door and frame.
When Xander says nothing, he slips inside, easing the door closed with a soft 'snick' and padding over to the bed. Still Xander says nothing, so he balances himself carefully on the edge of the mattress. He fidgets with the edge of the blanket, then asks, "You sure you want me around?" There's a shake in his voice that makes Xander wonder how much courage it took for Andrew to come to his room in the middle of the night, dressed for bed in sweatpants and T-shirt, and sit on Xander's bed like this.
There's something familiar about the squeak of bedsprings when Andrew sits, and in the sudden spread of weight over both sides of the double.
"Stay," he replies, and when Andrew slides in next to him he remembers that the even distribution of two bodies means he is not pulled into the empty middle of his own bed.
They lay side by side, a gap down the middle of the bed almost wide enough for another person, but the nearness is enough to remind Xander that his room is not empty tonight.
*****
tbc