Faking It

Home : Stories by Author : Stories by Aurora : Faking It

Summary: The journal of one Xander Harris.

AUTHOR: Aurora
EMAIL: girl292@hotmail.com
RATING: R
PAIRING: Xander
SPOILERS: Season 5, Post 'The Gift'
DISCLAIMER: All due goes to Joss - - bless his twisted little mind.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

18 June 2001

I can’t believe that I’m actually doing this. Anya thought that maybe having some place to write things down would help me clear my head. Actually, she said, and I quote:

‘Xander, if you don’t stop pacing and sit still for more than 3 seconds you are going to drive me crazy and make me pull all my hair out and then I will be bald and ugly, and you won’t want to marry me. Which means I’ll have to summon a vengeance demon to curse you, which could be a good thing because then maybe she can get you to sit still for more than 3 SECONDS!!’

Then she grabbed her keys and mumbled something that I didn’t quite catch, but from the way the walls rattled when she slammed the door, I’m guessing it’s a good thing I missed it.

So it’s just me, the empty apartment, pen, wrinkled paper, and a full hour to kill before I have to meet Will and the gang for the nightly patrol.

Ooh, look only 59 minutes to go now… that wasn’t entirely pathetic or anything.

I don’t know why An thinks that this is going to help, though I guess it’s a step up from her constantly worrying that I’m not talking to her, or maybe it’s a last ditch effort on her part to keep sane amongst the emotional train wrecks the rest of us still are.

Well, the rest of THEM really.

I think ‘emotional’ is the last choice on Anya’s list of ‘words to describe Xander’s current state’ these days. I can’t help it, it’s the truth. I don’t feel anything except empty and is feeling nothing actually feeling something, or is it the other way around?

And why can’t she see that I’m trying?? I WANT to feel bad. I WANT to cry and scream and wail like Dawn. I WANT to feel pain and loss like Willow. But I CAN’T and I can’t tell them that. I can just see how that conversation would go:

‘Hey guys, I know Buffy died to save humanity, and she was one of my best friends and all but really… do we have to be so glum about it all the time??’

Yeah, I’m thinking even Dead Boy Jr.’s chip wouldn’t stop him from getting in a few good bruises, and maybe a broken nose, before he was rendered unconscious from the army issue electro-shock therapy implant in his frontal lobe. Besides, he’d have to get in the ‘let’s beat Xander into a bloody pulp’ line behind me.

Alright, so maybe I lied. I *do* feel something, it’s just not a normal sort of something.

I’M ANGRY.

I’m not angry at the world, or the fates, or God, or even Buffy. No, it’s nothing normal and simple and relatively sane like that. This is a million and one times worse than all those stacked together.

Take the amount of frustration and rage I felt when I heard about Joyce’s death, multiply it by infinity and maybe you could come somewhere near the ballpark where my anger plays. And I can tell you, it’s going to take punching a whole hell of a lot more than just a wall to make me feel relief for even a moment.

Maybe if I cut my arm off… but I’m thinking that, beyond the whole logistics of not being able effectively do my job with one arm, seeing how construction work is usually a hands on sort of deal, *HANDS* being the key word, though there was that one guy, Patrick I think his name was, he was missing a few fingers on his left hand, but still… fingers are insignificant compared to an entire arm. And even if it actually distracted me from the anger that’s currently tying my insides into knots of pain there’d still be that whole one-armed-man thing to consider… whoa, I was certain I had a point just a second ago.

Oh right, the anger. What fun.

So yeah, I’m fucking angry… I’M ANGRY AT MYSELF.

You know, Anya is wrong, this is not making me feel any better at all. In fact, it’s just making it worse. Writing all this out is making it real, and I want to go just one second - JUST ONE - without feeling the guilt crawling underneath my skin. Guilt because it’s all my fault. Buffy’s death was all on the XanMan this time around.

I’ve gone over it a thousand and two times in my head already. Play by play, with and without the colorful commentary, even in slow motion, and each time it stays the same. Each time my error costs Buffy her life. My own special brand of screwing everything up turned lethal this time, and it’s the supremest irony that it wasn’t me who bore the consequences.

If I had made sure that that demon – that Doc – was really dead before Spike and I left his place, Buffy would still be alive right now. The fact that she actually succeeded in keeping the psycho hellgod at bay would have been enough.

If I had just gone that extra step beyond sword + stomach = dead and done something like cut his head off or stab him again… that creepy, lizard-y freak wouldn’t have been able to get to Dawn and start the ritual. No blood flowing = no portal = no blood stoppage needed to close it. It’s simple math, even for me.

It’s just so fucking ironic, like one of those cheesy horror movies come to life. How many times on patrol have we had to re-kill some big ugly that we thought was dead after the first round of slicing, dicing, and dismembering?? Is it really too much to ask that just once something turn out the way it was supposed to? You know: stab demon, demon dies, demon STAYS dead.

Isn’t that the way things are supposed to turn out?

I refuse to believe that this time they actually did go as planned. I love Anya, and I know she was only trying to help the other night when she said that Buffy *had* succeeded in her duty as the Slayer, and that dying *was* her duty. I know that on some level she’s right, so the cold, silent glare and storming off to get drunk with a creature I despise in his hovel of a crypt (though, he does have a nice supply of liquor on hand these days) was merely immature, macho, offended bullshit on my part, and I paid for it (in more ways than one) the next day.

But it felt good at the time.

Getting wasted meant that I didn’t have to let Anya’s version of events settle into my skin. Meant that I didn’t have to acknowledge the fact that maybe Buffy saw it that way too and that all of us – me, Willow, and Giles – were just being cruel when we tried to convince her she could have, or even deserved, a normal existence outside of slaying.

Because it didn’t matter, none of it mattered, because she died anyway.

I can close my eyes and see it again. Can see her body just hitting the ground, not knowing what had happened until I carried Anya closer to the others and saw the unnatural way Buffy’s body was twisted, the way her always expressive face was slack. The way she was so freakishly still.

It wasn’t until I noticed how still she was that I realized what had happened. I just stood there, held Anya close, and kept expecting Buffy to moan and wake up and ask if we won. Kept expecting her to smile when we told her we’d averted the latest apocalypse. I can play it all out in my head… the way it should have gone.

Buffy sighs in exhaustion and relief when we tell her it’s over and she makes some half-hearted quip about being in serious need of a long shower, before dusting herself off and heading back to the Casa de Summers for some post-world-saving snackage. But it never happened.

Instead, she just laid there. Silent. Still. Dead.

And this time it was for keeps. This time CPR wasn’t going to cut it.

This time, instead of saving her life, I killed her.

And it’s the most fitting punishment in the world that every single night I have to see her face looking back at me on patrol.

If I didn’t already hate Spike beyond reason, each time the BuffyBot looks at me, or says something that almost sounds like the REAL Buffy I would hate him for certain. But, judging from the look on his face and the way he acts around the Bot whenever one of the bugs that Willow didn’t quite get straightened out causes her to revert to her ‘original’ programming and hang all over him being gushy and very UN-BUFFY, I’m guessing that any mental torture I might be able to devise would be a welcome respite to whatever personal hell he’s un-living through at present. And there’s no way I’m going out of my way to ease his suffering one ounce, he deserves it. Undead, evil, bastard guy.

I should stop thinking about this, really, it’s not helping in the slightest. All it’s doing is reminding me of everything I’ve been trying so hard not to dwell on and now I am in serious need of pummeling something or ten to death. But I’ve still got 27 minutes and… 16, no 15 seconds before I have to meet the others at the Magic Shop for patrol. Maybe if I leave now I can catch some random vamp unaware and at least take the edge off while I wait for another night of futilely trying to make up for Buffy’s loss to begin again.

These authors spend lots of time to write these stories. If you took the time to read this PLEASE take the time to give them some feedback. Happy writers write more ;-)

Aurora - girl292@hotmail.com