"My hands are stained with love, wish I could take it away..."

"I gave my life away, there's nothing left to say."

So there I am, Willow is in my arms, another first, and dead, which makes it less romantic. Also, I killed her, so my bad.

I can hear the Master and his gang a few houses up, and remember that Willow didn’t want to be part of them. She wanted it to be just us. So up in my arms she goes, and she never weighed anything, but now she feels empty and light, just hanging there broken. I end up draping her over my shoulder, since I can figure out a fireman’s carry and feel weird putting my hands all over her like this. I leave out the back, since there is less chance of running into the Masters flunkies that way. Plus it’s the way I always used to come and go at Willows, at the back. Mrs. Rosenberg said it was because I ‘wasn’t just company anymore,’ so there was no need for me to go through the front door, all formal-like, like a guest, I was 'practically family,' but I think it had more to do with my tracking stuff on her rug.

I guess I am really a vampire now, ‘cause that doesn’t really make me sad any more, just makes me idly curious what she will look like dead. I should probably find that more disturbing.

Or at all.

So out the back, over the hedge, to grandmothers, er, Buffy’s house, I go. ‘Cause that was the plan, we’d hook up with Buffy, and have our own undead gang, rather than join the Masters team. Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven, Willow said, except in this case, I guess it should be ‘better to rule in Hell, than serve in Hell.’ It was a better plan than mine, or, would have been, had I actually made one. I think I like the one about lead dogs and views never changing better. Even the Cliffs notes to Dante made no sense...

I make it to Buffy’s house in record time, having been jogging the whole time, leaping hedges and fences and discarded tricycles and an entire family of dead people (even their dog) arranged obsessively in their backyard, like someone was making a picnic out of them, along with other obstacles. I wasn’t even breathing hard when I made it to Buffy’s. The backdoor was locked, and busting it down seemed pointless, since there was the force-field thingie.

Moving around the house, I noticed it sounded empty. I don’t know how a house can sound empty, but it did. Sad even. Weird. I get to the front door, and it has a big crack in the front, like someone kicked it hard, and it is hanging open. I round to the door and end up moving through the doorframe and seeing her before I even realize that nothing stopped me.

I always liked that dress on her. It made her look older, safer, kept me from thinking like, well, me, about her. I’m not even shocked to see Joyce like this, although I feel kind of embarrassed for her, because I know how much she hated for me or Willow to see her with even her hair messed up. Then again, Willow’s not looking so hot right now either. And I still haven’t changed from the clothes I died, and maybe pissed myself, in.

I take Willow upstairs and place her in the spare room, between Buffy and Joyce’s bedrooms, arranging some boxes in front of the window, and then sticking her in the closet, so that no light will get on her. Then I go get Joyce and put her in her bed, carefully not looking at whatever damage has been done to her throat, not because it would gross me out, but because it might make me hungry, and I have no idea if I would stop myself... Besides, it just seems right. She looks tired.

I’m in Buffy’s room, I don’t know why, just poking around, looking for a sign that she has been here, but not seeing any. No bloody clothes, no sign that anything’s been moved or is missing, although her clothes drawers look like a tornado has been through them and I always imagined them being neater somehow, all stacked and folded. Another illusion dies, I guess. She’s a closet slob. I guess I’ll avoid the closet, in that case, so as not to risk it.

I’m just leaving when I feel the breeze behind me. I smell her, because she still reeks of me, and blood, and now, kinda like that tart ashy smell she gets when she’s been Slaying a lot. I’m still saying, “Buffy?” when she has already spun me around and is holding a stake to my chest.

“Xander.” she says, with an excited look in her eyes. Not like, ‘happy to see you,’ excited, more, ‘ooh, I’m going to really get off on killing you’ excited. Doesn’t scare me. Nothing does anymore. I remember being scared, being eminently scare-able, but it’s like nothing matters, like I’m empty inside. But Buffy seems feral, elemental, something, fey perhaps, all wispy and thin in her shredded blood and ash-caked white dress, her overlarge leather jacket (and it’s hers now, he’ll never be back for it), with her face and hair all smudged and streaked with ash.

She’s more beautiful right now than I’ve ever seen her.

“So, you’ve been running around staking them?” my mouth offers the silence. Go mouth, always something to fill the deadly silence. She looks, um, I think, non-plussed, is the word, or maybe taken aback. Which makes me wonder what ‘taken afront’ would be like. Go brain, always something to do with sex. And you still died a virgin, so shut the hell up.

We all did, come to think of it. But she isn’t thinking of it, she has gotten over her taken abackedness, apparently with no disturbing sexual imagery, and has lowered the stake, “Not ‘them’ anymore Xander, us. I may be a vampire, but I can still kill them like nobody’s business.” She looks around her room, seemingly disturbed by something. “I guess we’re not all part of the same club.”

“Willow said the same thing.” I say carefully, knowing that she is looking for something, and that she is going to kill me when she finds it. She looks up, face momentarily bright and Buffy-ish through the grime, “Willow, how…” before catching herself and realizing, “Dead?” “Yeah, she’s in the spare room.” I gesture behind me. Buffy looks lost, and I can see her steeling herself, so it’s now or never, “She said we had to stick together through this, that she didn’t want to be one of the Masters snacks, she wanted it to be just us.” I don’t bother to clarify that her exact definition of ‘just us’ didn’t include Buffy, but I speak without fear of contradiction. Her being dead and all.

Buffy looks surprised, as if she hadn’t considered it. She probably hadn’t. Why should she? “So, what do you say? Tell leatherboy,” an offhand gesture to whichever side of town he is currently eating, “to go screw and form our own super-villain team?”

“I don’t think it’s going to be that easy.” she says, quietly. But hey, still no raising of the stake, so I risk a little ‘getting closer’ action. “Buffy,” she looks up, now wary, “Not ‘Buffy.’ Buffy is dead. I have no idea who I am, but I still like killing them.” 'Still?' Huh, I thought she hated it…

“Yes, Buffy.” I have no idea why my hands move to cup her face. They’ve always had a mind of their own. “Still Buffy.” smudging the ash on her cheek in a vain attempt at cleaning it off, I wave a hand in front of her face, displaying vamp-soot blackening my fingers. “Under here somewhere.” I smile. Good doggie. Nice doggie. Back away slowly and look for a stick.

I deliberately turn my back to her, “I need a shower. I’ve got some spare clothes downstairs that your… um, that were being sewed up.” I finish lamely, remembering that her mother isn’t really going to patch up my clothes any more.

“A vamp got her you know?” she says to the air behind me. I would jump out of my skin, but, apparently no pulse comes with minimal jumpage. Bonus. “I was coming up the path, and the door was open, and he was bending over her in the living room.” Her voice catches on ‘living’ and she snorts, clearly having gotten some special dose of bitter irony at the room where a good chunk of Sunnydale is dying tonight being called a ‘living’ room. “I couldn’t get in. I wasn’t invited, so I just had to watch, and part of me wanted to run in there and rescue her…”

“And part of you wanted to run in there before all the blood was gone.” I finish.

She doesn’t answer, but she doesn’t have to. “I felt the same way with Willow. Best friend ever. And I got to watch myself kill her, and couldn’t even regret it, couldn’t even regret being the sort of person who couldn’t regret it, or something.” Another lame finish for the Xan-man. Now is about the time Willow would be glaring at me and furiously trying to get my attention before I say something more dumb than usual, so I head downstairs.

Clothes, of indifferent quality, but still. Cleanliness, of the sort that’s nowhere near Godliness, but still. Of the good. I see her sitting on her mothers bed, looking at her mom, and leave them alone when I go downstairs to the basement to toss my old clothes in a trashbag, after getting my wallet and 2 dollars and 52 cents in loose change out of them. I'd get my keys too, but I don't have any. My parents don't think I'm responsible enough to have a key to the house, and if everything is locked up, I'm supposed to hang out and wait. Usually I just crawl in a window. I wonder if anything has killed them yet. I wonder if I'll ever care enough to go check.

The sun is starting to come up, and Buffy joins me in the basement, having also changed and hosed the worst of me, and a half-dozen vampires, off of herself. We talk, about plans within plans. About Giles, and Amy, and, unfortunately, Cordelia, all of whom we may need to break away from this nightmare, at the bargain-basement price of their immortal souls. Assuming any of us ever had them. I’m not so sure.

And then we have sex, while the sun burns overhead.

It doesn’t get you warm anymore. The sex I mean. I end up hurting her. She ends up hurting me. We both get angry because we don’t feel anything, and instead of it being tender, loving, gentle, it gets ugly, hateful, angry, as we each blame the other for not making it good, for not making us warm. The hurting was all we felt, all we had, so we made sure that we felt a lot, got our fill of it. It wasn’t making love. It was making hate. It was masturbation, with a partner.

It’s probably how my parents made me.

Basically it sucked, and not in a good way.

In the morning. Or, evening, anyway, Buffy and I are up the stairs like a shot, neither of us really interested in talking to each other, each with their own reason to see if Willow made it. She did. And if she heard the screaming and throwing of things, the blame and recriminations, she decided to be a trooper and not mention it. Pop quiz, if I have no conscience, how come when she looked at me and looked only vaguely disappointed, like she really never expected better, I felt about six inches tall?

The three of us go over ‘the plan.’ Willow is headed for Amy’s, to see what she can salvage from the goodies left behind by her mad magic momma. Buffy is headed out to look for Giles again, and Willow suggests to her to check the basement at the museum, since he and the curator are, friends, or something. Maybe colleagues. I don’t think Giles has friends. And anyway, they have a vault, says Willow, who apparently has been there with him, which might be a good place to hide out a brief apocalypse, or at least drink oneself into a stupor and ignore it. Willow tells me where Cordy’s ‘summer place’ is in Torrance, that her family got out the first night, and that she had called to tell Willow that she was welcome to come up, if she needed to ‘get out of town.’ Which is Cordelia-speak for ‘have nowhere else to go, ‘cause everybody’s dead here and the town is overrun with vampires,’ I guess. I take Joyce’s keys to her SUV. We part ways. Buffy leaves to go find Giles, and I am not shocked, or disappointed even, that there is no parting kiss.

It was that bad. I want to forget it. Actually I want to gut her for taking away any chance of finding out if it could be better while I was still warm. But forgetting it will do for now.

Willow just looks on as Buffy leaves. “So. You two aren’t?” I don’t even look up. I don’t want to see her eyes, because I can’t stand to see how little she actually cares. Who woulda thunk. I want her to be angry, to be hurt. But really, why should she? “No. Definitely not ever.”

She is at my sleeve, smoothing it out. “Don’t give up on us.” She doesn’t say. “I’ll make it right.” She doesn’t say. “It can still be good.” She doesn’t say. Instead she walks away.

“Go get Cordelia. If there is any chance of this working, we need someone that a newbie vampire will instinctively obey, and everyone in our high school is trained to jump when she barks.”