Preconceptions
Chapter 1
A week earlier:
The Sunnydale High Nurse's Office bore witness to many a strange wound or injury, but to the nurse's recollection, ironically enough, this was the first time they'd had to deal with something that would fit in one of her soap operas.
"You don't remember anything, Mr. Harris?"
"I didn't even know my name was Harris. What's my full name?" the dark haired teen asked.
"Alexander LaVelle Harris."
"LaVelle, that's a hell of a thing to stick a kid with." He snickered. "Pardon my French."
"I've heard worse."
"Yes, but hopefully not from me. I wasn't raised to be rude to ladies." He paused and frowned before continuing, "At least, I hope I wasn't."
The nurse smiled. "I don't recall you ever being rude to me if that helps."
"It does, thanks." Alexander smiled back at her.
"An ambulance has already been called for you. You seem to be ok, except for the memory loss – but even without that, any injury that causes someone to lose consciousness must be examined by a fully licensed physician."
* * *
"Did you hear? Harris was taken away in an ambulance."
"No way!"
"Yeah, he was just minding his own business when BAM! And they had to take him to the nurses' office on a stretcher."
"Is he ok?"
"I heard his brains got totally scrambled."
The two gossiping teens left the library unaware of the table full of wide eyed Scoobies behind them.
"Giles," Buffy half asked, half ordered her Watcher.
Giles just nodded as he had already picked up the phone and dialed when the two girls had started talking about Xander being injured.
"Yes, this is Rupert – I was wondering if you could tell me what the condition of Mr. Harris was. He often helps out in the library and I just found out he was injured. Really? Oh my word, that is unusual. Thank you for letting me know, it helps a great deal. Goodbye."
Giles had barely gotten off the phone before he was bombarded with questions.
"I can't answer everyone at once!" he said loudly. "If you would please settle down I'll tell you what I found out."
Everyone fell silent and focused their full attention on Giles.
Taking off his glasses he began cleaning them slowly while he spoke to cover his own worries, "He is uninjured physically, but seems to be suffering from acute amnesia. Ruth said he seems to be fine, if strangely polite for a teenage boy, he simply doesn't remember who he is or anything about his life."
It got loud for several minutes before Buffy stuck two fingers in her mouth and whistled loudly to get everyone's attention. "This is perfect!" she declared.
Everyone there simply stared at her as if she'd lost her mind.
"No, listen!" She quickly explained, "We've been trying to think of a way to get him out of the Slaying and this is perfect."
* * *
Present:
Alexander LaVelle Harris looked around his room one last time, he'd taken a good hard look at his life and he hadn't liked what he saw.
His grades were unimpressive and he found that when he put the slightest effort into improving them he was accused of cheating. He had proved he wasn't cheating, but he'd had to do it for every single class and quite frankly he wondered if it was worth the bother since getting higher grades had gotten him flak from all sides.
His parents, and he used the term loosely, weren't exactly receptive to any changes to the status quo and hadn't reacted well to the new him. Well, he assumed they did because it was really hard to picture anyone living with the two of them willingly if this was the norm, considering their behavior.
Alexander was pretty sure he knew now why a wolf would chew off its own leg when caught in a trap. He looked around Sunnydale and could practically feel the steel jaws closing in on him. People expected him to be some sort of underachieving loser from what he could tell, and any deviation from that was punished.
If he had friends things might have been different, but apparently the group everyone said he hung around with was nothing more than casual acquaintances, not to mention rather unfriendly to outsiders like him. So, he'd decided to leave.
Everything important to Xander Harris; pictures, mementos, and weapons was safely hidden behind the fake back wall of his bedroom closet where it couldn't be broken or stolen. Alexander never knew to look, so there it stayed as he packed up what little clothing he had that didn't make his eyes hurt and hit the road.
He kept to the back alleys as he headed for the bus stop. The last thing he wanted was to get caught by the cops and returned "home". Sure, there seemed to be a serious lack of police after nightfall in this town, but he didn't want to press his luck. Best to be safe and stick to the shadows.
Five minutes later:
'Note to self, next time – press it.' Alexander thought to himself as he backed down the dead end alley, a fanged figure stalking toward him slowly.
"Hey! What the hell do you think you're doing?!" a broad shouldered man said as he took in the scene.
'Shit!' Alexander thought, 'A good Samaritan.' He was more shocked by the appearance of someone trying to help him than by the vampire. He'd known somewhere in the back of his mind that vampires existed – but people going out of their way to help him?! In this town?! 'I think my reality check just bounced.'
"I told you this is my turf!" the 'Good Samaritan' growled as his game face came out.
Reality reasserted itself in Xander's mind. Vamps fighting over who got to eat him just seemed to fit what he knew of his life so far.
The two vampires tore into each other savagely with the smaller one getting the worst of it by far.
Scanning the alley Alexander didn't see a way out except past the two vamps and he wasn't about to get in between them. Spotting a metal pole with a hunk of concrete on the end he began to smile.
Alexander brought his makeshift hammer down on the larger vamps' head hard enough that he snapped its neck.
"At least he didn't win," the smaller vamp gargled out through a broken jaw. "I don't think I'm going to be able to heal this, and you don't want to know what happens to crippled vamps. Stake me?"
"I'll knock you out first so you won't feel the stake," Alexander promised.
"Thanks, for a blood bag you're all right," the vampire said just before Alexander clocked him with the pipe.
"Don't mention it," he muttered, quickly stripping the two vamps of everything they possessed of any value including their jackets before staking them.
The leather jacket the larger vamp was wearing fit comfortably, which surprised him as he thought the smaller one was closer to his size.
Shaking the dust off the smaller one, he wondered what he should do with it. It was valuable enough that he didn't feel right just throwing it away, but if all the local vamps were that into leather it probably wasn't worth it to hit a pawn shop because they probably had a glut of them.
"What happened here?" a dark haired girl asked as she appeared from the shadows.
Alexander shrugged, not showing any of the shock he felt at Faith appearing – wondering if Faith knew about vamps, and figuring she did from certain bulges he could see in the tight clothes she wore. "Here, have a jacket," he said, tossing her the jacket and grabbing his backpack off the ground. He still had a bus to catch, fortunately he'd left early enough that he wasn't in any rush.
"Um, thanks..." Faith said confused. Xander had apparently dusted two vamps for their jackets and he wasn't even breathing hard. 'Wasn't he supposed to be useless in a fight?'
Falling into step beside him she tried to strike up a conversation, "So, what have you been up to?"
He shrugged. "Taking multiple tests to prove I wasn't cheating at school. For some reason that balding midget who runs the school seems to need proof that I can regurgitate the brainless droning the teachers give off accurately before he'll accept I've scored higher than a D."
"That place is a hole. I'm surprised no one has offed him yet," Faith commiserated.
"Yeah, well good luck with that because I'm pretty sure he's part cockroach," he said companionably. Faith was apparently a little friendlier away from the group, but then both Buffy and Cordelia had pulled his former friend Willow away when it looked like she was going to talk to him. So, maybe it was just those two who had a problem with him.
According to rumor he'd dated one or both of them, possibly at the same time. 'Which would explain the hostility. Oh well, don't remember and don't care. Whatever problem they have with me is their own lookout, since I don't remember it.'
"So, where we going?" Faith asked, as tactless as a bull in a china shop which made him laugh.
"I am heading for the bus station. I have an appointment with the 105 to LA."
"What's in LA?" she asked curiously.
"A place that isn't Sunnydale. You may not have noticed." He smirked. "But this town is a hole – and it's got a major infestation." He paused as Faith suddenly dove into the shadows returning before he could do more than listen to a familiar poofing noise. "Who in their right mind would want to stay here?"
"So you're pulling up stakes and splitting?"
He grinned at her unintentional pun. "I got nothing to hold me here, and lots of reasons to move on."
"Hmmm," she said thoughtfully. "Family?"
"The Duke and Duchess of Daniels may not be better off for my absence, but I am assuredly better for theirs," Xander said in an over the top, snobby voice.
"Ouch! Friends?"
"None to speak of, and everyone seems to expect me to act like a brainless goofball. When I don't they get nervous and upset. Thus I have a total lack of anything remotely resembling a friend and a lot of pressure to become some sort of loser. Probably so everyone can feel better about themselves," he ranted.
"Damn." Faith didn't know what to say to that.
"Exactly! I have no idea what motivated me to blow off school work and act like 'idiot cousin Jed' for most of my life, but I'm escaping before I'm forced to do it again. Sometimes you just need a fresh start."
Faith nodded. "I hear ya."
"You can get a fake ID made pretty easily in LA. So, one Alexander LaVelle Harris, underage, vanishes and one reasonably priced name, just turned 18, appears." Alexander explained, knowing he was probably sharing more than she wanted to know and realizing that being friendless really had been harder on him than he'd realized.
The conversation moved on to other things, as he found she genuinely was interested in what had happened to him and what his life was like now, until they finally reached the bus station.
"I've moved around a lot but it always seems to wind up same shit, new scenery," she warned him.
Alexander nodded. "But part of the reason for that is it's always been the old you." He quickly launched into an explanation when he saw her glare, "People are creatures of habit, and I'm willing to bet that in every new place you went to you looked for parts that were like your old haunts and had people like your old crowd, right?"
Faith shrugged. "It's where I fit in."
"Yeah, but it's also the reason why you have to deal with the same problems over and over. The type of people you hang with are the ones that cause the problems, so going to places where they hang out just guarantees going through the same shit over and over. At least it does if you occupy the same role."
"How do you mean?"
"People judge by appearances, because really, what other choice is there? Unless you're a telepath you have to judge by appearances and that means clothes, body language and accents."
"Accents?"
"Yeah, its why you don't see any brain surgeons with southern accents. Thanks to movies and stereotypes, anyone with a southern accent is immediately deemed a hick and twenty IQ points are deducted. So to avoid being labeled as a hick, they develop an accent based on whatever doctor they respect the most."
"Whoa!"
"It's also about vocabulary, in the hospital all the candy stripers and a few of the nurses seemed to think amnesia and brain damage equated to the same thing. So I borrowed a dictionary and a thesaurus from the hospital library. It only took two days to change the way I spoke and get them to stop treating me like a child and more like a ticking time bomb. I'm relatively sure that everyone in Sunnydale knows about vampires on some level, which explains why trying to change yourself here is met by fear and derision. First impressions are hard to shake, but in Sunnydale they're impossible."
"It'd take more than a couple of days with a book to get me speaking like to, I ain't a MENSA candidate here."
"Faith, you've understood everything I've said. At no point in this conversation have I had to dumb anything down or explain a single word. That means you have the vocabulary, you just don't use it."
"It would sound dumb coming from me," she said, not even looking in his direction, instead staring off into the night.
"Ah," Alexander said knowingly. "You have the voices in your head."
"What?!"
"Memories of people telling you; no, impossible, can't, couldn't, those voices tend to stick with you, dragging you down, and keeping you from doing anything new. You want to know a secret?"
"Yeah?" Faith said, half looking like she was going to bolt.
"Those voices are from people who wanted to keep you down, because they were afraid you were better than them. I'm willing to bet the people those voices belonged to always laughed when you failed at anything. So, why would they discourage you from doing anything that they could get a chuckle over? I'll tell you why, because they knew everything they said you couldn't do, was something you could and they were afraid to try themselves," Alexander said fervently.
"Damn, you put a lot of thought into this didn't you?" Faith asked, stared at him.
"Since I have no friends, I have a lot of free time... So I read some books and figured some things out. When people close their eyes, they hear the voices of everyone that ever said can't at them and if they're lucky they have a good number of voices saying can from people who have encouraged them to balance it out. But do you know what I hear when I close my eyes?"
"What?" Faith asked, spellbound.
"Not a single solitary thing. From what I've seen of my life, losing those voices was worth losing my memories, because I've got nothing holding me back anymore, and I'm guessing Xander had a whole lot holding him."
"Yeah," Faith agreed, thinking about the way his "friends" had cut him from their lives in some twisted plan to save him. "Didn't the principle and the teachers say you couldn't pass those tests?"
"Yeah, but people telling you that you can't walk after a five mile run can be ignored. The voices can only get in when there is some doubt involved."
Alexander stood up and grabbed his bag as the bus arrived. "It's been nice talking to you Faith, if you ever decide to come to LA – well you'll probably never be able to find me, since even I don't know what my new name is going to be, but if you did, I would welcome the company."
Faith called out as Alexander climbed on the bus, "Yo, Xander!"
Alexander looked back at her questioningly. "Alexander. Xander sounds like I'm five."
"Anyone ever tells you that you can't do anything, ignore them because Faith says you can!"
"Right back at you Faith, you can do anything as long as you don't let them hold you down."
She stood there for at least ten minutes after the bus had left, thinking about LA and how hard it would be to find someone there if you didn't even have a name for them.
AN: Same writer and the typist (who insured you actually got to read it) as always!