An awkward silence fell between the two, as Oz drove back to SDU, each deep in thought.

Xander looked about half dead and was still nursing at a 2 liter bottle of Coke like it held the secret to eternal life, instead of just high levels of caffeine and sugar. If anyone had ever bothered to ask him what the water from the Holy Grail tasted like, he would have assured them that it would have tasted similar.

"So by sexually transmitted you mean…" Oz's voice trailed off.

Xander sighed, while neither one of them particularly wanted to have this conversation, it needed to be done. "Any type of nibbling near the full moon can get someone furry. Think of it like Herpes…"

Oz's single raised eyebrow spoke volumes about his opinion on that comparison.

"Or not." Xander tried again "OK, let's get a little technical then. When it's that time of the month for you.."

Oz's eyebrow put in a return appearance.

Xander chuckled "Should we go back to the Herpes comparison?"

Oz made a show of reaching up and pushing his eyebrow back down, never taking his eyes off the road.

"Near the full moon your body goes through changes during the day as well as the night. Your teeth are a bit more fangy and you get the whole uni-brow thing going on. At least you're suppose to. I never noticed it happening with you." Xander took a moment to look at the lycanthrope curiously.

"I wax." Oz commented dryly.

"OK, and on that TMI note, let me point out something. When your baby cousin bit you, was he in wolf form?"

"No he wasn't." Oz's eyes lost focus for a second, as he reflected on his tiny cousin biting him; he'd barely had teeth at that point, much less hair.

Xander smiled tiredly, "And that, my friend, is how most Weres get infected. It's only in horror movies and bad fanfics that they actually get bitten by a fully transformed Were and get away without getting either eaten or mortally chewed. So you can rest assured that if you are getting frisky with one of the fur set, then you will become one of the fur set. It's the reason behind all those medieval laws about not having sex during that time of the month."

"And you didn't think to tell us this before now?" Oz's voice didn't hold even a hint of accusation, just a slight curiosity.

"I thought you guys knew all this stuff. You read all the books Gile's had about werewolves, right?" Xander burped loudly before taking another swig from his precious life giving two liter bottle.

Oz nodded slowly, running the list of books he and Willow had read, looking for a cure or some kind of control over his curse, through his head, "I don't think we missed any. We've gone through his entire library several times and I don't recall anything covering that topic."

"Well it's not stated straight out. It's just kinda' obvious to anyone whose read the books and been forced to sit through a feminine empowerment lecture by his best female buds, who really know how to punish a guy for a few simple and completely innocent comments by the way, made while watching Boobwatch. I mean Baywatch. It's not like they didn't make some inappropriate comments themselves about the gay actors on that show and yes they are gay. No straight man spends that much time and effort on looking good." Xander started to trail off muttering something Oz didn't quite catch about dead guys wearing leather and too much hair gel.

"Xander, focus." Oz said forcefully. As much as he was actually interested in Xander's story, it sounded like it was a doozy and had some decent blackmail potential, he was more concerned that his girlfriend was going to become a bitch, literally.

"Huh? Oh, sorry man. Anyway they went into all the crap about how badly women were treated throughout history and how sex during a woman's period was verboten. If you combined that info with Mrs. Langford's Sex Ed class…"

Both young men shivered in remembrance of that particular nightmare.

"That class completely killed my sex drive… for the rest of the day." Oz said bluntly, with a haunted look in his eyes.

Xander sighed mournfully, "I know exactly what you mean. I couldn't even think about sex til' lunchtime."

"Lunchtime?" Oz glanced over at his Twinkie addicted friend incredulously.

"Girl's swim team tryouts." Xander answered happily, visions of bikini clad vixens dancing in his head.

"Anyway…" Oz said attempting to drag Xander back to topic.

"Anyway, if you remember her speech on herpes transmission factors on college campuses, it all falls together."

Oz nodded to himself, "Well when you put it like that then it does makes sense. A bit of a leap, but it fits."

Xander just stared at him incredulously, "Are you trying to say that the two, highest scoring, brainiest, people I know didn't see the obvious connection?"

The laconic lycanthrope replied, "I just test well and Willow is not exactly big with the common sense. Do you remember when you had to get the bolt cutters to cut us loose from…"

"Stop! I lived through that story once. I don't want to hear it again, ever. Willow and sex do not go together in my mind." Xander covered his ears and hummed for a minute, rocking back and forth in his seat, until he was sure Oz had stopped speaking.

"Common sense is rarely common." Oz quoted softly.

Xander just shrugged, unsure of how he was supposed to respond to that.

"I know the topic of Willow and sex is uncomfortable for you and I have to admit I'm not exactly thrilled to be talking to you about it either, but we never did clear the air about the fluke."

Both men shifted uncomfortably for a moment before Xander sighed and began to speak. "Fortunately there was no sex involved, just some kissing, mild fondling at worst. I would have thought you'd have talked to Wills about this." Xander stared out the window, watching the trees flow past.

"Well, we kinda did, but between the crying and the patented Willow babble, I didn't understand one word in five she said. I eventually just forgave her to get her to stop crying. I knew she was sorry for her part in it and bringing it up again would just start the crying again, so I let it be."

Xander nodded to himself absently, taking a swig of coke before speaking. "Do you know how many love spells and other weird hellmouthy things we've been exposed to during high school?"

Oz frowned slightly. "So the Hellmouth was responsible?"

Xander shook his head. "Yes and no. If it were just the Hellmouth we could have handled it, but it wasn't just that. I think we were both afraid we were drifting apart. Here we were seniors in high school with our own designated snuggle partners and spending less and less time together, where before It'd always been just the three of us growing up."

"Three?"

"Yep, Me, Willow, and Jessie." Xander said sadly.

Oz cocked his head to the side, glancing over at his passenger. "I've heard the name mentioned a couple of times, but she hasn't said much about him. Did he move?"

"I staked him during out freshman year. Darla, Angel's sire, turned him as bait for Buffy during the Harvest.

I didn't know enough about vamps… well I knew, but I didn't know. You know what I mean?"

Oz nodded sadly. "Yeah, I get you."

"So there I am facing the closest thing to a brother I'll ever have and he's trying to convince me that being a vampire is the greatest thing in the world and how me and Willow have to join him…" Xander's voice trailed off into silence.

"And?" Oz knew they were getting off topic, but this sounded important.

"And I had my stake up, to keep him away from me, when the crowd shifted and Cordy pushed him into me. I almost let go, but I remembered what he said about draining Wills, so I just gripped it tighter and pointed it in the right direction. The last sight I had of my brother was a look of shock and betrayal."

"You know that wasn't him, right?"

Xander sighed. "Not completely him, no."

"Completely?" Oz took his eyes off the road briefly to give Xander a confused look.

His fellow Scooby just chuckled and took another swig, from his almost empty bottle, before replying. "Not completely. The demon twists what's left, but there is a… part of the person left. Did you ever wonder why so few demon hunters are ever turned? Why only master vampires and those with access to some high powered witchery even attempt it?"

"Not really. All the vamps we've run into seem determined to turn us."

"That's cause you've only paid attention to the Big Bads. The fledges and the rest of the minion types, are too stupid to know any better and usually end up dust while trying to kill us. The Big Bads are all high powered, so it's a different story with them. They used a lot of power to turn Kendra, but she wasn't much more effective then any master vamp. You'd think being a slayer would get you some big bonus, but really all it does is guarantee that she'll be a master. The magic wasn't to help turn her, it was to help control how she was turned. If had been turned without any major mojo being involved she would have become a Blood Drinker."

Oz just nodded. "Well, yeah. Vamp."

Xander shook his head. "Not just a vamp, a Blood Drinker."

"I thought they were basically the same thing."

"Nah, vampires feed on humans. Blood Drinkers feed on vampires and demons."

"Seriously?" Oz was stunned enough that a little of his shock was actually apparent in his voice.

"Yep. The demon takes over your body and distorts what you are, twisting it as much as possible, but some of the core traits remain, so if you're mission in life is to jam a stake up the boogeyman's ass…" Xander's voice trailed off, leaving the young lycanthrope to make his own conclusions.

"Then the demon that takes your place picks up the vocals." Oz relaxed and went back to watching the road.

"Got it in one. It's still a demon, don't get me wrong, but it's goal isn't killing humans. It usually doesn't care if they die, if they get in the way, but they aren't really on the menu anymore."

"How come I've never heard of it?"

Xander shrugged. "It's all in the watcher's diaries. They don't come straight out and say it, but it's plain to see. The only mention of Blood Drinkers is either of a vamp killing other demons or one vamp insulting another. They're almost always confirmed White Hats who've been turned. The demon that takes their place grabs a hold of their hate and what they consider prey and… picks up the vocals."

Oz nodded "And back to the topic at hand."

Xander nursed on his bottle for a moment before continuing. "So although he wasn't Jessie, he thought he was Jessie and trusted me, and I killed him."

"Harsh, but it had to be done."

Xander nodded and continued his tale. "There was just the three of us against the world, or against the popular kids anyway. I was a world class goofball, Willow was a brain, and Jessie was the biggest horn dog to ever grace God's green earth."

Xander snickered for a moment before speaking again. "Jessie's parents paid little attention to him, him being the youngest child of five. Willow's parental units mostly treated her like a sociology experiment, when they weren't neglecting her and my parents…" Xander's voice trailed off for a moment before he finished bitterly "…I would have paid good money to be neglected by."

He frowned for a moment. "Anyway, it all started pretty closely to the Band Candy incident. We went from feeling like family to… something else. It was a quick change and pretty damn strong. If something like this was going to happen naturally, it should have happened years ago. That should have tripped some flashing red lights for the both of us, but we'd been drifting apart lately and so rather then do the intelligent thing and talk to Giles, we clung to each other. For most of my life, Willow and Jessie were all I had and vice versa. The thought of losing Willow…"

"So…"

"So eventually we both had to admit something was up. I thought we could work it out between the two of us without involving anyone and Willow thought she could use her mojo to fix it. I'm not a real big fan of fixing your love life through magic, for obvious reasons, so we were arguing about it when Bleachboy showed up and kidnapped us."

Oz waited patiently as Xander fell silent and searched the back of the van for another two-liter bottle of caffeine and sugar. He knew Xander would get to the point eventually and all the little side trips would make sense. Well, most of them anyway.

Xander buckled himself back into the front seat and took a long pull off his new source of life giving fluid, before starting once more. "I figured we were goners. Love spells never work like they're suppose to and when Willow starts moving with the mojo things usually get pretty bizarre. Even if she did manage to make a love spell work on a vampire, there was no guarantee that we were getting out of there alive. If I had been healthy I might have gambled on distracting, Spike long enough for Willow to escape, but I was seeing triple and I had a whole lotta lumps, so I came up with a new plan."

Oz almost winced. Xander's plans… well it wasn't that they didn't work, the Judge and the Mayor knew how well they worked, it was just that his plans usually involved high explosives, or at least the most memorable ones did. His knuckles whitened on the wheel as the bit abought Blood drinkers came to mind. "You were planning on getting turned."

Xander nodded. "I was planning on getting turned. Spike was drunk and a Blood Drinker could have taken him out easily in that condition. The only real problem I had was how to make the demon with my face protect Willow."

Oz shuddered a bit, but kept the horror he was feeling out of his voice. "Picks up the vocals."

He could hear the grin in Xander's voice. "Yep, I needed something the demon would understand and sing along with once everything was said and done. I hate vampires with a passion, so becoming a BD was in the cards, but lust, something the demon could understand, and my memories of her would keep him protecting her long after my echo had faded and since I consider sex between the living and the dead to be abought the most disgusting thing you can do, other then going on one of those reality shows, she was safe from him becoming stalker boy as well."

"You were willing to…" Oz trailed off, the idea of Xander willingly becoming a vamp was nearly incomprehensible.

Xander's hatred of vamps could be very frightening at times. Just a couple of months ago a vamp had managed to backhand Dawn to the ground and Xander had torn into it with such single minded ferocity that Buffy had, had to pull him off so they could stake it. Staking it had been a mercy at that point. The vampire was a bloody mess; both it's eyes had been gouged out and its jaw broken, it's throat had been crushed and from the looks of it, half it's ribs had been broken. The only person who hadn't been scared was Dawn, who had the queerest little smile on her face.

"There are many people I'd give my life to protect, but there are only a handful I'd give my soul as well."

"So this list… all female?" Oz asked curiously.

"Nah, one or two guys may have been penciled in." Xander glanced over at Oz pointedly.

"If you're ever in that situation with Willow again…" Oz's voice was tight and his features could have been carved from stone, for all the emotion he showed.

"Yeah?" Xander asked nervously as the tension level in the van began to rise.

"Rub the small of her back, while nibbling on the side of her neck." Oz instructed carefully, "She'll melt."

"Gotcha." Xander replied as the atmosphere in the van became a bit friendlier.

He was in the middle of taking a big swig from his bottle when Oz made his next comment. "Works on me too. Just in case."

Xander sprayed Coke all over the dash, while the normally sedate werewolf laughed so hard tears were coming out of his eyes.