The backyard;

Buffy tenses up, probably hearing him before he reaches her, and he stumbles into her as she turns suddenly.

“My God! Xander, what are you doing out of the hospital!”, and Xander can ‘see’ her face, not concerned, not tender or sad, but *annoyed* as if he’s just another damn thing she has to take care of. Around the sudden burst of noise from the house as others come rushing out at her exclamation, he can feel her pulling away as Willow is down the porch and at his side asking all sorts of inane crap and tugging him into the house. He remembers he wanted to talk to Buffy about something, but he can feel the hostility radiating off of her and knows that she damn well doesn’t want to talk to him and Willow won’t shut the hell up and let him think...

He lasts less than a minute before he flips out, with what feels like a dozen tiny hands on his, dragging him around. “Get the fuck back! I can damn well get up the stairs by myself!” He stumbles up the stairs, not quite the grand departure he was looking for, but they pull away and let him stagger into the nearest bedroom and slam the door. He can hear Willow, trying to come after him, and Kennedy talking her out of it. Good old Kennedy, making sure to horn in where she isn’t welcome and talking out her ass about stuff that’s way out of her pay grade. So reliable.

Finally, leaning against the wall, he slumps to the ground. His skin feels weird where the girls were touching him, as if he needs to shower, and he wonders if he even *can* shower, since he’s probably not supposed to get the bandages wet…

He can hear them whispering now, outside of the door. Dawn is arguing about going in, making the entirely reasonable point that he’s in *her* room. He smiles. Ah, Dawn. I don’t think I could ever be mad at Dawn.

The voices recede. Whoever was out there with her has convinced her to walk away, which is nice. He could use a few moments without people crowding around and touching him from all directions. He shudders just to think of it, so disorienting, he felt like he was going to throw up when Willow took his arm and spun him around.

***************************************************

He wakes up still on the floor, all stiff and sore, and it’s morning. He knows he dreamed, but the dreams are already fading, to be replaced by the shiny new nightmare that is the day.

Everything is a blur. Willow has gone somewhere, nobody knows where, and everyone pretty much avoids him, which is a blessed relief, since every single fucking word out of their mouths makes him want to kill something.

It feels warmer near the windows, so he tends to sit there, listening to the girls around him, chattering mindlessly when they don’t know he’s there, and hushing up when he shuffles into the room.

It burns deep in his belly, and he’s come to realize that their pity is just another of their tactics to control him. As long as make him feel like an invalid, they can continue to lord it over him, as they have in the past, never mind that they failed to save any Potentials at the Vinyard and he *did* save the one he went to rescue, and got hurt for it, which means he was obviously the only one there that had the strength, or the will, to get the job done…

***********************************************************

“So yer just gonna sit up here and pity yourself, huh?”

Great. It’s still day out, but the bleached wonder has ventured out of his cave and up the stairs and right into his face.

“This day’s been a long time ‘comin.’ You charging in like you have any right to be there, and her worryin’ about it every time. And here you are, her worst fear come true. Someone she’s supposed to be protecting, getting himself hurt. Just bloody throw away everything she’s doin’ here, the only thing in her life that matters, standing between you lot and danger, by leaping in and getting yourself all messed up like this.” He can hear Spike pacing now, and wishes that it was a sunnier day, so that the room would be flooded with light. Help keep the monsters out. “That’s what this is you know. It’s her fight. It’s always been *her* fight. You just got in the way one last time, and now she has to carry that guilt around, too. And take care of you. It’s not like you’ve ever been much bloody use, but now you’re just another burden. Another thing to drag her down, and that’s the last thing she needs right now. Did you think she needed another cross to bear, Xander?”

“Hope you’re proud of yourself, hero.”

*****************************************************************

Willow is back, and she brought a ‘friend.’

He can feel it when Faith enters the room, like a warm wet gust of car exhaust, fouling everything she touches. In his mind’s eye he can see her slinking along like a predator, all lean and confident in her shamelessness, thrusting her tits out like they’re weapons, which, to her, they pretty much are. Just hearing her jeans brush against each other as her legs carry her across the room, he can feel her slick walls sliding along his length, feel her weight holding him down until he feels himself explode inside of her, remember in his bones how empty he felt afterwards, like a vampire’s victim, as if she’d replaced what she’d pulled out of him with some sleep-inducing poison. He’d been so naïve. He’d tried to *cuddle* with the creature that stole his innocence, mistaken this meaningless meeting of skin for some sort of deeper connection between the two of them. He remembers her dismissive words about Anya, about ‘getting there first,’ and realizes that this is all it meant to her, that she’d be willing to use even that night as a weapon to bludgeon and bully those who annoy her.

Oh, and Anya. He wonders if it was Faith that soiled him so badly that he wasn’t fit to hook up with anything other than a demon. How he had fooled himself and pretended that she was human all that time, as she led him further and further into wrongness. No normal woman, no human person at all, could be so insidious, ever nagging and insistent, pulling him deeper and deeper into things he knew were *wrong.* The handcuffs and the safety words and the spankings and the strange positions, all things that no healthy couple could possibly need or want. She made him beg for perversions, and then made him beg for more. Just thinking of some of the things they have done makes his stomach roil, and his treacherous dick twitch, like a dog that’s been trained to hurt people and has to be put down for everyone’s safety. Even now he can hear her downstairs carping in her infuriatingly shrill tone at Buffy for ‘letting him get hurt,’ and he wants to laugh, and he wants to cry. She hasn’t come to see him even once, she doesn’t care for him and never did. She’s just upset that Buffy broke something of hers, the same as she was upset at Willow for taking stuff from the Magic Box without paying for it. She’d probably squeal with glee if Buffy offered her a thousand dollars to compensate for his injury…

But no, he can’t blame Faith for polluting him. Even with Cordelia, both most and least human of his ‘loves,’ he was never an equal partner, never treasured or admired or respected. She used him in the closet, a forbidden bit of naughtiness to defy her so-called station and expected role, and then she wiped him off, looked both ways to make sure nobody saw them together, and went back to treating him worse than dog-crap on her worth-so-much-more-than-him shoes, just to keep up the appearances that she was so much fucking better than him.

No, it didn’t start with Faith. It started at home. His dad would come home from work to find mom sitting on the couch, still not even dressed, watching some game show and already three sheets to the wind, with a dozen burnt-out cigarettes smoldering next to her in the ashtray. Not once was there a meal ready, or the house cleaned. It was so easy to hate him for the words and the fists, but he was just passing it forward, the same crap he had eaten all through his marriage. Carrying her dead weight must have broken his soul, he couldn’t have always been the bitter sullen resentful failure that he’d been by the time Xander was old enough to recognize him as such. He couldn’t have been born that way. He’d been broken surgically, his self-worth and potential and soul eroded away over the years by put-down and criticism and accusation, just as Cordelia and Faith and Anya, and ‘Shut up Xander, I’m so much more goddamn smarter than you’ Willow Rosenberg and fucking perfect Chosen princess superhero holier-than-thou Buffy Summers, had dragged Xander down into the mud, making him feel worthless and useless and less than a man year after year.

God, he could actually identify with *Spike* at this point. Buffy used that bleached idiot that same way that Anya and Faith used Xander. Fuck me and get out. That’s all they wanted. Fucking sluts. But who’s worse, the slut who knows what she wants and takes it, or the slut who crawls back to her on his belly to eat her shit again and again?

This crap was supposed to stop after Dracula, there was a speech, and a plan, and nothing changed. He should have left with Riley, or with Oz, or just stolen Uncle Rory’s car and gone anywhere else, get away from these psycho-bitches. Find a place where a man can be a man, and not have to worry about some 90 lb. chick who can deadlift a car deciding she wants to grind against him until she gets off, or just wring his fucking neck until she gets off, depending on her mood…