The hospital, round two;

He wakes up again, and the soft bed and smell of antiseptic helps to place where he is, again. He has no idea that anyone is with him until he flexes his fingers to feel a hand in his. Suddenly it starts and pulls away, and he grabs at it too late. “Willow?” he asks, and his voice is hoarse.

“No Xander, it’s Anya.”

He winces, and the pain in his back is blinding. He can actually *see* the pain, a bright flash, which has got to be some sort of hallucination or something.

“Are you alright? Should I call a doctor? You were stabbed, and if you keep moving around like that you’ll open it up again, and there will be blood everywhere and they said that there was blood in your lung and I don’t know what to do and I wish I didn’t care!”

She’s hysterical by the end of it, and he finally gets a hold of her hand and pulls it to his face. “I’m sorry.”

“Well you should be, I’ve been here for hours, and you left me and I shouldn’t have to be worried about you like this, you *made* me care about you and you keep getting hurt and it’s very unfair of you!”

“Shhh, I know, I know. I’m sorry, An.”

“Your friends are outside. They only let one of us in at a time. It’s communist the way they treat people here! We are paying customers, and with the amount of money we’ve given this place over the years, they should treat us like kings! Well, queens, anyway.” She hesitates for a second, and he can feel her pulling away. “Do you want me to send Willow in?”

“No, ‘my friends’ aren’t just outside. I’ve got friends here, too.” He kisses her fingers, “Thank you for staying with me. Thank you for worrying.”

“Well, now you’re just being mushy. Clearly they are using more of this pain medication than you need. I’m going to tell them to use less, save you some money…”

“Please don’t.” he pleads with a death-grip on her hand, but things go sideways again, and it seems like he just loses focus for a second, but when suddenly it’s cooler in the room, and her hand is gone…

He reaches out, and bumps into someone, “An?”

“No Xander, it’s me.”

“Giles? Oh God, not this.” At first it’s overwhelming, until it all settles into place. He pulls his hand away. “I know Giles is dead. You can’t play me anymore. I *saw* you scared. I’m not scared of you anymore.”

A sharp blow on his hand startles him out of his resolve. “I’m not the First Evil, Xander. The First Evil couldn’t slap your hand. And I’m certainly not dead.”

“I stabbed you Giles. I heard you fall down.”

“Well yes, it was certainly a shock, but you didn’t hit anything important, and Rhona had the presence of mind to dial 911 and keep pressure on the wound until the paramedics arrived.” A strong hand, but thankfully only a humanly-strong hand, grips his then in a warm grasp. “I’m not dead.”

He can barely breathe, and Giles has to repeat his next question. “I need you to tell me exactly what you’ve been experiencing since… since your injury. It’s very important Xander.”

He feels light-headed, like he’s going to fade out again, but he knows he has to stay here for Giles, has to focus past whatever’s pumping into his veins, whatever’s been crawling around in his mind…

“It started with dreams. Buffy and Willow were… evil. The dreams were awful, Giles. Every bad experience I’ve ever had with them, turned up to 11 and made a thousand times more awful. Everything anyone said was twisted, to make them seem like… monsters. Oh God, what if all of those Bringers are like this? What if that’s all they see, what the First shows them, the world all twisted, people as monsters and monsters as heroes?”

“I think the First hates women, Giles. It made the girls look sexual and disgusting at the same time, made every word out of their mouths sound monstrous, but it never made *you* look awful.”

“What about the vineyard. You saw something there, something that you said scared them.”

“There was an axe or something, stuck in a rock. It was glowing, and I could see for a second, and Buffy was glowing, and Faith was glowing, and they looked *beautiful* Giles. I’ve seen them both, so much of them, but never like this. I could see where they were hurting, and I could see how determined they were to do the right thing, and I could see Caleb, cowering like a little boy, and the First was just a cloud of blackness, churning around like smoke, like the light was burning it, and then I blacked out or something…”

“And then a Bringer stabbed you in the back, Faith held Caleb off long enough for Buffy to get the axe, and use it to kill Caleb. He’s dead, Xander.”

“Thank God. I can’t think of anybody in this world who deserved it more. Did we… did anyone die?”

“Not this time. The Bringers lost the will to fight. Some ran away, others just fell over and haven’t woken up since. They’re restrained, ‘for their own safety.’ We gave the hospital staff a story about how they’d mutilated themselves, some sort of cult thing, but they haven’t woken up.”

“Giles, I need to talk to Buffy and Willow. And I think you need to be there. I saw things, not just the things the First was showing me, but things when the axe got uncovered. I’m not the only one the First has been playing…”

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

Buffy is quiet. She hasn’t said anything, and he can imagine her standing with her arms crossed. Willow is fidgety, he can hear that much. She’s fluttering around, and Giles finally asks her to sit down.

“Okay Xander, everyone is here.”

“I’ve been seeing stuff guys. The First showed me all sorts of stuff, and it’s all lies, but it’s lies we have to know about. The First can make itself look like Buffy.”

“We knew this, Xander.”

“What? No, it can only look like dead people!”

“What do you mean, ‘we knew this,’ Buffy?”

“I told you guys! Don’t act all surprised.”

“You most certainly did not ‘tell us.’”

“Guys! Chill. The First has been playing us. It’s appeared as Buffy and told people things that Buffy *never* said. It gets in your dreams. For all we know, Buffy *did* tell us, and the First made us hear something else. It appeared to Chloe, as Buffy, and told her she was worthless and convinced her to kill herself.”

“Oh, God. I was so frustrated that Chloe would let the First get to her like that…”

“It’s not your fault, Buffy. We had no idea that the First could look like you. You had no idea that we didn’t know. It’s been running through the house for the last month feeding us lies, turning us against each other. Everyone can look at me and see what the First has done, can see that I can’t see things anymore, but it’s doing the same thing to *everyone.* Buffy says something to one person, and at the other end of the house, something that looks like her is saying something awful about someone else, turning them against each other. Spike’s downstairs in the basement, and a completely different Spike is upstairs telling me that I’m a burden and that you’d be better off if I’d died…”

“Fine, it’s been playing all of you. Good info. Happen to see how we could *kill it,* Xander?”

The voice comes as a shock. He had no idea that Faith was in the room.

“No. Only that it was afraid of the axe thingie.” He knows he must have looked surprised to hear her. “And I’m glad you’re here, Faith. You definitely should know all of this, too. Everyone should. If the First can get to us, it can get to Anya and Dawn and the others.”

He can hear Buffy and Willow whispering in the background, comparing notes it seems, to see if anything they’ve said to each other lately has been real. “Hey, guys.” He snaps his fingers to try and get attention. “We need to be more careful.” He holds out his hand to where he remembers Giles being, and a warm hand clasps his. “We need to hold onto each other. The First wants to tear us apart. It *hates* that we love each other.” He feels Buffy take his other hand, and he hopes everyone has taken someone’s hands. He doesn’t want anyone to be left out. “It *hates* that we can touch each other, that we can hold onto each other, ‘cause it can’t ever have this.”