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Kin of the Soul
Once upon a time there was Kin of the Heart where Angel and Xander learned to be friends. Now we're working towards something entirely different.Kin of the Soul
Slash: Angel/Xander, Angel/Spike
Rated: ADULT
And now it's time to tell Willow. Yeah, that's going to go well--not!
( Part One ) ( Part Two ) ( Part Three ) ( Part Four ) ( Part Five ) ( Part Six ) ( Part Seven )
Riley was the first to react to Xander's announcement. "It sounds like a good opportunity," he offered with a nod. "I was hoping to tempt you into joining the service, but construction is a great field. Not as good as the military, of course." He smiled and reached forward to slap Xander on the shoulder in a manly show of support. Then he leaned back against the wall, his shoulder touching Buffy who leaned next to him.
"The military? Me?" Xander's voice cracked, probably from the horror and disbelief. "No offense, but I would fit in like a Goth in church," Xander pointed out, the metaphor probably influenced by the fact that a Goth had started coming to the Catholic church, and there were many stares and whispers to be had.
"It might be a little awkward at first," Riley admitted. "But when the others figured out what a good fighter you are and how loyal you are, you would have gotten along fine. I would have put in a word for you to make it into Special Ops."
"Harris, Xander Harris, Double-Oh-Eight," Xander said in his best English accent. It was more cockney than proper English, but at least Riley and Jenny and Giles all rolled their eyes on cue.
"Yes, well, I can't say I'm sorry that you've chosen to avoid that future," Giles said dryly. The look he gave Riley was not all that friendly, but then Giles was dealing with his issues over losing Buffy just as much as Buffy was dealing with pseudo-father-Giles issues. Buffy stood by Riley's side and leaned into him, and it looked like she had picked her side. "The military is not the panacea for evil." Giles crossed the floor and stood behind Jenny who was still sitting on the couch. From the sympathetic look Jenny gave him, she understood. And really? Xander was shocked that he understood it, but maybe he was big with understanding because his own heart was being ripped in two by leaving. He could get just how ugly it got when the family group started drifting.
Jenny reached up and patted Giles' hand, the one he had rested on her shoulder. "Xander, I think it's a wise choice."
Willow's back stiffened at that statement, and Oz's eyes darted her way.
Jenny, however, ignored all the unhappy in the room. "It sounds like this school is a good opportunity, and let's face it--those of us who do not have to live on a Hellmouth are far better off clearing the battlefield for those who are fighting." Jenny smiled at him, but the smile felt like a punch in the gut. What the hell had he been doing for three years if he hadn't been fighting evil? Then again, Jenny and Angel had a mutual hate society going on, and she tended to be weirdly distrustful of anything related to Angel, including Xander.
"Xander has been big with the battlefield fighting," Willow blurted, her face wrinkled by a deep frown.
"Right in the middle of the fighting," Oz agreed. Even Riley was frowning.
"Yes, of course, I didn't mean that he hadn't. I just meant that he is not obligated to be part of the fight," Jenny hurried to amend herself. She blushed dark red. "Giles and I were committed to this fight by our families long before we were born, and of course Buffy...." Jenny waved a hand in her direction.
"Yes, the point is," Giles offered as he patted her on the shoulder, "that some people are obligated to remain in the fight. We will be here until the world ends, I suspect, at least those of us who have made a lifelong commitment and not just signed a contract for a four-year tour." Giles glanced at Riley. Oh yeah, Riley had won over Xander's role as most Giles-hated member of the group. But then again, Riley was doing what Xander never had--he was stealing Buffy away from Giles. Weirdly, Riley didn't even look bothered by the Giles' nasty expression.
Giles removed his glasses, a gesture that Xander half-suspected that he used when he didn't want to look at them, to see how they were taking his words. "There is a certain cadence to most fighter's lives. Their dedication to fighting demons ebbs and flows, but being on a Hellmouth, you are locked into a constant battle and never allowed time to rest or to mentally regroup. It's why I recommended that Wesley leave the Hellmouth if he was determined to become a demon hunter. I know you have proved invaluable more than once, Xander. I am grateful for that. I am equally grateful that you are moving off the Hellmouth where you might have some sort of balance in your life."
Giles finished. For long seconds, he stared down at his glasses, not even cleaning them. Silence filled the room, right beside shock and disbelief. That had almost sounded like Giles was worried about him.
"We worry about all of you," Jenny said softly.
Willow blurted out, "We still would worry if he was in Los Angeles. They have demons and vampires AND gangs and all sorts of not nice people who show up on the news all the time. Every time we turn on the news there are people in LA with guns and weirdness going on that is so weird that it has to be demonic. There's even more reason to worry about him if he's down there."
"Willow," Oz said quietly.
"No!" Willow burst up off the couch, pushing Oz's comforting arm away. "This isn't okay. The three of us stick together, even when there's really big stuff pulling us apart, like Spike killing Kendra. We stuck together after that!" Willow looked around the room, and Xander flinched--not at the reminder of Spike's demonic traits but at the way she had just neatly left Oz out of the inner sanctum. Oh yeah, as the inner sanctum reject himself, he so knew that had to hurt. But instead of showing his hurt, Oz just leaned back and watched Willow, his face concerned.
"Will, I hear you, but this is a good opportunity for Xander."
"I gave up Stanford to keep us together." Willow was going from hurt to angry at a pretty good clip. But instead of reacting, Buffy just folded in on herself, retreating to Riley's arms. Riley pulled her close and watched Willow with eyes devoid of any emotion. When Spike got that expression, things tended to get ripped apart, but Riley was just watching.
"Willow, we are all aware of the sacrifices you have made," Giles said.
"How could you?" Willow demanded, her anger collapsing under the raw pain as she faced Xander. Xander would way rather deal with angry Willow. The pain in her eyes was gutting him faster than a knife. Before Xander could answer, Willow ran for the door.
Oz immediately got up to follow, but Xander took a step toward him. "Let me?" he asked permission. Oz was her boyfriend, but Xander liked to hope he was still her friend. He'd made this mess, and he needed to clean it up.
Oz nodded and slowly sat back down. "Um, if I'm not back in an hour...." Xander gave a rough laugh, as if this were all a joke, but no one laughed with him. Buffy and Riley stood by the kitchen door, Jenny just looked uncomfortable, and Giles had his hand resting on her shoulder, and Oz watched him with a barely veiled threat in his eyes. Xander knew full well that part of Oz wanted to just beat the shit out of him. He was just lucky that Oz's zen nature overrode the werewolf. Turning away from the group, Xander followed Willow out into the night.
She hadn't gotten far. She sat on the low wall around Giles' apartment complex, the light from the street lamp leeching the red out of her hair so that it looked mousy. Silently, he sat next to her, watching a stray cat slowly pick his way down the street. He stopped to sniff every drain as he worked his way south, tail flicking. For long minutes, Xander waited for her to say something, but she was stubbornly quiet.
He sighed. "Okay, this is feeling much with the weirdness."
"Then fix it." Willow's voice was tight with emotion, but she kept her tone steady.
"If by 'fix it,' you mean stay and don't have a life, I'm voting no. If by saying 'fix it,' you mean make a really stupid joke, I have one about a priest and a rabbi. You wouldn't think a priest would be big on priest jokes, but Father Peter is oddly fond of them." Xander grinned at her. She was not grinning back.
"This is not funny."
"And I'm agreeing with you. I just wish I could make it funny."
For a second, she just stared at him. "You're leaving. You're leaving, and you want me to laugh at a stupid joke?"
"Technically, I haven't told the stupid joke yet."
"Xander." She said his name in a tone that people usually reserved for curse words and Hitler and Spam, and other things big on the grody scale of life.
Xander ducked his head, waiting for the rest of her condemnation. Once she got it out, once she told him off, they could move past it... hopefully. At this point, he was starting to worry about the lack of moving onness. Instead of speaking her mind, Willow went silent again. Silent Willow was never a good sign. Silent Willow meant that she was channeling her parents and their wacky-wacky need to have a perfect home and a perfect child and a perfect marriage and a perfect life. It led to fake smiles and a perfectly painted house and a real lack of love. They were the poster children for 'If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all,' and after seeing the poster, Xander would not be going to that movie. It was a sad way to live.
He sighed as the silence lingered. "Willow, do you remember how in third grade that new girl showed up?" he asked.
"What?" Willow looked over, the pain replaced by annoyance with a hint of confusion. Yep, her parents and even Giles may have tried to create pod-Willow, but his real Will was still in there.
"Amanda, she of the nerd in third grade," he reminded her. "You two geeked out over Einstein."
After a second, the confusion faded, replaced by a fond expression. "Jonas Salk," Willow said softly. "He's Jewish, you know."
"I stand geekily corrected."
Willow poked her finger at him. "You are changing the subject, mister. We are not talking about Salk or Amanda. We're talking about how you're running away."
"I thought I was moving away."
"Moving and running are both active verbs which suggest you're leaving." Her look dared him to contradict that logic.
"This I know." Xander cringed as she gave him a death-glare. "Okay, can you just give me a second to explain because your Willow eyes are short circuiting the brain and going straight to the guilt complex."
"They should."
Xander shook his head. He loved Willow, but there were times when he wasn't all that sure he liked her. Of course, that didn't mean she wasn't family. Angel and Spike and Willow and Buffy and Faith--they all had parts that Xander was not big with the liking, but he loved the hell out of all of them. Right now though, he focused on Willow. "When you met Amanda, that was exciting for you because Jesse and I were in our mud pies stage, and you were never a fan of mud pies."
"Not when you two threw them at me." For a second, either annoyance or amusement made her mouth twitch--maybe both.
"Okay, that might have been a little rude, although to be fair, we just liked seeing you run and scream. We didn't actually try to hit you with the mud."
Willow glared.
"Usually," Xander added. "But I have a point going here, a really pointy point. You were friends with Amanda because you needed someone to geek with. And then, when Buffy came to town, Jesse was off on his girl-chasing stage, and I was starting with the girl chasing, although at the time I was more in the holding a book in front of me when I walked stage. They're closely related stages. But that is one stage you will not be going through, so Buffy was way more stagelike for you."
"You're jealous of Buffy?"
"No!" Xander paused. "Not usually. Okay, so when she first showed up, I might have been a little jealous besides being intermittently horny. I'd lost Jesse. I watched you turn to Buffy, and I was just so damn angry. And honestly? Angel got most of the fuzzy end of that lollipop because I regularly made myself feel better by verbally torturing him."
"Then let him leave town. You can say here with us. Buffy and I were talking, and there's this architectural program that you would love." Willow sounded just so damn hopeful that Xander wanted to just give her what she wanted and make her light up with that joy that seemed to bubble out of her sometimes. He just couldn't this time.
"No, no, actually I wouldn't. I don't like designing buildings. I like taking an old building and scraping down the paint and finding the original carvings that some workman made. I like screwing in drywall and watching a pile of materials turn into a room that someone is going to live in. I like tracking down a short in a wiring system and ripping the old wires out. I don't want to be an architect."
"But--"
"Don't go there," Xander warned.
"What is wrong with you? Don't you want a good future? I swear, I don't know you any more Xander. College would be a chance for you to make something of your future." Instead of bubbly happiness, Willow oozed out a righteous indignation and fury that made Xander want to cringe.
"No, college would be a chance for me to make my future look like yours, which is where the whole staging stuff comes in. I don't want to be college-boy. I wouldn't ever get through the math."
She leaned in, her hand resting on his leg as she got her earnest-face on. "I can help you. You know I will always be there for you, and we can set a date on Tuesday nights, and we can just work through it together."
"And when I get a job as an architect?"
She smiled brightly. "You'll be really grateful that went to college."
"Actually, I'm thinking I'm going to be worried about the bosses figuring out a big old fraud who can't do his own math. Or maybe you think you'll follow me to work and do my math for me there, too."
"Xander! You don't need to be mean." Willow pulled her hand back.
"No, I really don't. However, right now being mean is feeling slightly good." Xander struggled to shove down his own frustration that she was just so willing to tell him how to live and just expect him to go along. "Willow," he said, his voice artificially calm, "I don't want to go to college."
"Then don't go. I didn't say you had to go. Did I say you had to go?"
"You implied."
"I'm not implying, I'm just saying there are choices out there that you're not considering because you see yourself as someone who isn't as good, and that is so not fair, and sometimes I really hate Jesse, and that makes me feel like a horrible person because he's dead and I'm hating him, but he said all these things to you. He used to make fun of you and beat you in all the races and call you stupid, and you just let him be mean. And now it's like you're being the Xander that Jesse and your father used to tell you that you were. And I was there too. I was always telling you that you were good enough and strong enough and smart enough, but I wasn't ever enough. You had to believe them." She stopped as though out of air, and her eyes glistened, even in the low light of the streetlamp.
Xander blinked, more than a little blindsided by that admission. "Okay, maybe I got confused mid-babble, but do you think that I think that I'm not any good at shit?"
"Language," Willow said softly, but Xander was guessing it was habit or maybe a need to change the subject, because Graham had said way worse and she never commented on his language.
"Willow," Xander sighed her name, but then he stopped, not sure what to say. Yeah, he and Jesse had been engaged in a war of insults most of their life, but so were Angel and Spike and Spike and Riley and Giles and him and Riley and Graham. Actually, mutual insulting seemed fairly guylike, right up there with spitting and farting and belching.
"I love you, and yeah, I know I really messed things up there for a while because my hormones confused love and love." She got a sour look on her face. "I know that, but I still love you, and I want to cry when you sell yourself short, and now you're leaving?"
"You didn't mess things up."
She looked at him incredulously
"Okay, so you made things a little weird there for a while because you're the closest thing I have to a sister, and sisters and..." Xander let his words trail off, not even wanting to go there in his mind.
"Sisters and smoochies are unmixy," Willow finished for him.
"Very. Unmixy like lead-based paint and toddlers unmixy. But I do love you too, and I am not running away because of a lack of self-esteem. If I were having self-esteem issues, Angel would so drag me back to therapy. But the fact is that you're off in the college stage of life with Buffy and Oz and Riley. And that's cool. That's a good stage."
"It could be your stage," Willow offered, her voice whisper soft and trembling, as if she were reining in her emotions and starting to fail.
"It could be," Xander agreed. "But I don't want it to be. I don't like the idea of college. I like the idea of a vocational school and fixing things and building things. And you watch... you're going to think this is not a good idea until Buffy tries to flush some demon goo that totally backs up all your toilets, and then you will be calling me and my mighty snake."
Willow giggled. "Your mighty snake?" Her laugh turned into a snort and then something that might have been a sob before she finally got her breathing back under control.
Xander gave her a crooked smile. "And by snake I mean the thing you use to unclog drains, although I have it on good authority that I'm mighty in more ways than one."
"Xander!" Willow punched his arm, her fist little more than a tickle against his bicep.
Xander nodded wisely. "I'm mighty with the drywall and the wiring, and I've started doing some carving, and I'm showing some mightiness in that way too."
She looked at him out of the side of her eyes, her mouth still a tight line. "You've been around Spike too much," she finally announced. Then again, if he was making mighty snake jokes around Willow, he probably had been.
He shrugged.
"You could be mighty around here," she offered softly.
Xander looked up and down the quiet street. "Not much building going on around here, Will. And face it, most of the buildings get blown up way before they need renovating. LA has a great school for construction, and Angel bought this really cool old hotel that needs about a million hours of renovation."
"He bought it for you?"
"Well, that and it's big enough that we won't have to know what Faith and Spike are doing." Xander frowned as he thought about that one. If Spike was dating Cordelia, he had no idea how any of that was going to turn out, other than he seriously intended to avoid any and all nuclear fallout caused if those two ladies started fighting. And with Spike and Angel definitely still doing the nasty, he figured he would have craploads of damage to fix once all the shit started hitting the fan. Willow had wrinkled her nose at the thought.
"Besides," Xander said as he threw an arm around her shoulders, "I still have to find someone to have happily ever after with or the vengeance demon is going to turn me into Catwoman's love slave." Xander schooled his expression into a lustful leer. "Explain again why I'm trying to avoid that fate."
Xander genuinely smiled when she backhanded him in the stomach. Slowly she let her head sink down until it rested against his shoulder. "I love you, Xander."
"I love you too, Will. I always will."
"Always?" Her voice sounded so small that Xander wanted to promise her that he'd stay, that he'd make her pain go away. If Angel hadn't already spent an ungodly amount of money on the hotel, he might have even done it. Instead he just tightened his arm around her.
"Always. You just let the world try and end, and you'll see how fast I come running," he promised.
When the sniffles and the ragged breathing started, Xander didn't say anything. He just sat on the low wall and watched the moon slowly track across the sky and held on as Willow cried in his arms. It might be time to move on, but she would always be family.
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