ethrosdemon ||| Buffy & Angel

Fulfilment

by ethrosdemon HRH

Email: naturallycalm@yahoo.com
Distribution: You don't want it
Disclaimer: Joss made it up, too bad he is an incompetent ninny. Mutant Enemy and others own the rights. No suing please.
Rating: R soft
Pairing: X/R
Dedication: To Lar my partner in crime.
Note: Yes, I really wrote a Riley fic. Me. Kill me now.

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Xander is a godsend. When I think things like that now, I have to stop and wonder if I mean that literally. Did god really send Xander to me as consolation for everything else that has gone wrong? If not God with a capitol then maybe my god with a little g. The one who is assigned to watch over my sorry ass. That god, who pulled the Sunnydale reject duty, stuck Xander and I together because he's lazy and that solved two problems. Xander has no male friends who aren't twice his age or somehow not human, and I have no one who I can claim as my own friend and not just one of Buffy's friends who tolerate me.

It started that way with Xander too. He was just trying to be "nice". Invite me over, hang out, order pizza, drink some beers. Talk about anything that would pass for normal and not involve demons or killing.

Sure, he felt sorry for me, but I knew it, so that takes some of the edge off the sympathy. I felt sorry for him in my own way too. He rarely gets credit for being a man. I didn't know the person who fell in love with a Praying Mantis or almost got turned into a fish, so we are more or less on equal footing. Man to man.

Along the way the beer drinking and sports viewing became steady, and I was looking forward to it at the end of so many days where Buffy didn't have time for me, or Dawn gave me "out of the mouths of babes" insights into my own love life.

Xander had become my friend, not Buffy's friend who I knew and tolerated my presence.

So, I confessed that she didn't love me.

So, I wanted to tell him my secret as soon as it became one.

But, sometimes it was too much, and I was too tired from the blood loss and the self-recriminations to see him. To have to face his pure pleasure at seeing me. Having people care for you is a burden. And even thinking that when I spent so much time begging my little g god for someone to give two shits makes me that much more of a worthless person.

But, then he called, and I realised maybe my new hobby was getting away from me, and I needed to try to be, well, there for Xander and let him be there for me if he wanted.

At Xander's, in my personal zone on his couch. ESPN and Bud-light, and the badness that I touch most nights is somewhere that isn't here.

"OK, I don't care if I sound like a girl, I have to ask you. Riley, are we breaking up?" His look is a little too earnest to be kidding, so, oh fuck. This is about not calling, not coming by, and I get the breaking up thing, but it's too much to deal with when we are supposed to be just hanging out and letting the serious things sort themselves out.

"I know we've been drinking a while tonight, but did I miss a crucial part of the evening?" Play it off with a joke, and Xander will let it slide back to down time.

"Sorry, too much time with Anya. What I mean is, is everything OK?" Pause. Sip of beer for courage. "Is there anything you want to talk about? You know, man to man, guy to guy?" Genuine desire to help me. And, really, isn't that what I want, for him to send down the rope and pull me up, or at the very least to fall down this hole with me and keep me company as I slowly die? Can't do it to him, though. If I hadn't found out about the friend he had to slay, maybe, but not after that.

"I'm fine, really. Just, you know, still compensating for the whole Government issue drug addiction thing, I guess." Don't meet his eyes, and look interested in the television, and he won't press it.

Slamming his beer down, and this is not going to just go away.

"Look, Riley, I think we're past the point of being formal with each other. I know you only come over here because the rest of your reindeer won't let you play their games anymore. But I think we get along really well, and it's great to be able to watch a game and not have to explain why the man with the whistle keeps stopping everything."

My jaw is starting to ache from the stress of the situation, and I can see him out of the corner of my eye working himself into a state over what he must see as his intervention.

"So," Xander continues, "I really think it's kind of my job to tell you that you're full of shit."

And boom, I feel the anger hit me straight in the chest. The anger at the situation I have brought myself to honed finely into a need to exact revenge on Xander in lieu of myself. Let him stand in for me, and take all the pain and outrage out on a body that I can see from scalp to toes.

As soon as it gets a hold of me, I let it go. Not what I want, to piss him off more. "I don't need this from you!" Make a break for the door, almost trip over his huge feet stuck out in front of me. Feels like my bladder is going to explode from the stress when I realise he has a hold of my sweater, and the look on his face is directly tied to the place where my skin is exposed to his eyes.

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

All the easy to reach psychoanalytic explanations for my behaviour are dead wrong—spending so much time with Xander has developed my pun- sense.

Buffy never loved me. She has no time for me now that her mom is sick. I'm lashing out by hurting myself in retaliation. That might have fit when I was in tenth grade, and maybe even shades of it are still true, but not the whole thing.

I want to show her I'm more than just an overeducated farm boy down on his luck. Another miss, since I'm not secretly hoping for a confrontation with her.

Lives, even mine, are way more textured than that. Do we always know why we do something at the time it happens? Maybe the spiritually advanced can claim that knowledge with every decision, but the Dahli Lama or Giles I am not.

I'm still down here on the average mortal plane, moving by instinct and half-glimpsed desires. And the whys of motivation are just as complex as the whys of purpose. Why did I ever leave a bar with a vampire? Why did my life totally collapse in on itself all at once?

The first time, with the vamp-babe in Willie's, I chose to go with her the exact second the agreement left my lips. Spur of the moment stupidity, that's all it was. I intended to relieve my tension with her in a way that didn't pan out. The situation took on a different perspective when we got alone, and I rolled with it.

Bitter sting, unmistakably of teeth digging into my flesh, the pull of blood through the wounds that caused my entire body to burn with liquid fire to escape. But just the right level of alcohol had been consumed that night that I waited the two ticks it took to gather my body into one collective whole, and in that time, the next part began. The closing of the connection.

The flow doesn't just go one way. The vamps flow back into me. Their thoughts flow into me. I guess not just me, into the people they feed off, but I haven't asked around about it. Not something I could canvass about, even though I assume there is a large survey pool here in Sunnydale.

The pain fades and their lives start to parade through my mind, into my body. Pictures and sensory recall. Like a personal slide show with textile accompaniment. The images, smells, sounds, are different each time. And that's what I go back for, the stolen memories. They leave a little bit of themselves with me when they fall to dust. A little bit of them living on in me.

Once I knew, I couldn't shake it off. I tried my damnedest, and my liver could tell you the tale. Or Xander could tell you, because I would show up on his doorstep night after night to try to touch that thing I was building between us before this all started. The two scenarios warring in my mind as I sat on his couch and watched football, basket ball, whatever was on: why couldn't I just turn time back or why couldn't Xander just read my goddamn mind?

They have memories, feelings, desires, dreams, hopes, wishes. Everything the same as me. As Xander, Buffy, Willow, Giles, Tara.

And every night we kill them. They would kill me if I were one. Buffy told me Xander killed his best friend when he became one.

It's all a lie.

And I have to tell him, because what we have between us is more than a few laughs and a beer. It's real and it's warm, and it's almost all I have now besides the knowledge I never wanted.

These reflections are cut off immediately when the victim I choose for the night finds a clean spot on my neck and starts the movie of her life. Blue skies and sun burns. Gold, sepia, rust colored leaves glowing on an autumn afternoon. They always think about the sun when they drink.

Suddenly covered in dust, head spinning and thoughts are coming from some place too far for clarity. Xander is here. And talking. Talk back, or I don't, can't focus beyond Xander being there, screaming his lungs out and then hugging me. Might have gone a tad too long with that last chick.

Come back fully to myself sitting on the toilette seat of my bathroom, Xander making some joke about orange juice.

My secret isn't so much a secret anymore, but it's just Xander, and I wanted him to know anyway.

The question is, can I tell him the rest, or can I ask him to spend the night here with me so I don't have to be alone with myself?

Go on to Part III: Palimpsest



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