Xander watched as the house came into view. He had never seen it before, usually Buffy and Dawn came to visit Sunnydale, but somehow he knew it belonged to the Summers' women. He drummed his fingers against his cast, white and only a little stained despite the fact he had had it for a month now.
They had woken him about an hour and a half ago, startling him from a dream he hadn't even remembered the moment he opened his eyes. It had taken him a moment to realize where he was and who he was with. Didn't wake so well when he was touched, often found himself bolting away from the hand that had woken him. Giles was usually good about calling his name to coax him out of sleep, but Willow was another case. He remembered he had once fallen asleep in history and she had tried to jostle him awake. He fell out of his sleep, proclaiming, 'I didn't mean to!' The class had laughed at him. Willow had looked horror-stricken.
After a quick run into a convenience store, and a rather amusing potty-dance from Willow as she hopped and skipped inside, his best friend had hustled into the backseat and he had taken watch in the passenger seat next to his guardian. The hour and a half on the road had been quiet. Xander made jokes about the billboard signs, and making faces out of the signs for curves and construction.
It was sometimes sad how easy it was to pretend like nothing happened, how easy it was to just glance over the fact that his arms was still broken, and his ribs had been fractured, and that his father had beaten him until his mother had come down to yell at him, not because her husband was kicking the daylights out of her son. No, because her husband had woke her. It was easy to just pretend like these last two months had been his life forever.
Selective-amnesia-boy, that should be his title.
As the car pulled up along the curb, and Giles seemed to pull a never-ending amount of levers and buttons, Dawn came shooting out of the house, looking eons older than she had last time Xander had seen her in February. She crashed into Willow, who had scrambled out of the backseat to meet the younger girl. Giles and Xander stayed in the car for a moment or two, as Joyce came out of the front door, only pausing to yell back into the house, Xander guessed calling for Buffy.
"It'll be alright, you know," Giles said quietly.
Xander nodded, as Joyce came down to join Dawn in her greetings. "Of course it will, G-man." He tossed a flippant smile over his shoulder, trying to look like his gut wasn't churning with anxiousness, fear, and guilt. It was just Buffy and her family, he reminded himself. Buffy and her family who had never known his father hit him, that his mom would too if he said the wrong thing to her in the wrong mood. No one had known. Some part of him suspected that Willow might have had her doubts and concerns, but he had hidden it. Always hidden it.
He knew Giles felt bad for never having figured it out sooner, because since he had come to live with the librarian, Giles had never protested to being called 'G-man.' However, the older man sighed from behind him, and he could practically hear him wiping his glasses. "Perhaps you should exit the car then…before they haul you out with bodily force."
He nodded. "Yeah. Okay, here I go. This is me going…" He grabbed the door handle, but hesitated.
"It'll be different," Giles said after a few moments when Xander didn't go, despite him saying that he was. "But it has to be. Things have changed and it may very well take them a few days to get used to the alterations."
He almost wanted to gripe that he didn't want it to be different. He wanted it to be the same, for everyone to just glance over the fact that he wasn't the same, that he had a cast, or that if he was woken he would just as quickly smack his head against the wall as he would scream in a fit of terror and disorientation.
"I'll get out first," Giles said, opening his door. By then Buffy had joined Dawn and Joyce, and a young man in a black leather duster stood on the porch with a cigarette hanging from his lips and his arms crossed over his chest. He looked impressive and a little intimidating, but Xander swallowed against his own discomfort as Giles waited with his door open for him to make his move.
He pushed his door open, levering himself out of the car, he braced himself as Dawn launched herself into his arm, screaming, "Xander!" He made sure to keep his casted arm out of her python-like embrace, but it proved to be almost useless since he stumbled back into the car with the force of her momentum.
"Dawn!" he heard Joyce and Buffy shout simultaneously, before Buffy continued, "Be careful with him!"
"Yeah, Dawnie, I'm all delicate and weak. The Xanman is not up to full strength."
She eased her grip but didn't let go, instead chuckling into his chest. When she finally did step back, he had but a moment to gasp a breath before he was pulled into Buffy's shockingly strong embrace.
"I missed you, Xander," she breathed in this shoulder. "I'm sorry I wasn't there for you."
He somehow managed not to tense beneath her arms, chanting repeatedly in his mind what Giles had only just told him. 'It's going to be different. It's going to be different. It's going to be different.' He hugged his friend back until she stepped away from him with an effulgent smile that made her blue eyes glitter like the sea.
Giles was speaking with Joyce, close to the trunk of the junker Giles refused to give up. Dawn and Willow were heading into the house with bags in hand. When Buffy and Xander arrived at the back of the car, Buffy reached in and grabbed the two remaining bags with a quick, peppy, "I've got it covered, Xander." And then she flounced towards the house as well.
Xander followed behind after several long beats. "I can feel my manhood shrinking to microscopic sizes," he muttered to himself as he set off after Buffy. Luckily she hadn't heard, but it seemed to him as if the dark-clad blond had.
Of course, that was only if his amused smirk was anything to go by.