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Slow
by Benaresq
Slow
Slow. Xander is slow to learn.
He has come to accept that: he's been taught the same lessons many
times over, been beaten on his scars. He never figured out the way
to make it stop.
He used to think it was some kind of test, like the math problems
that bored and dismayed him at school. Six apples plus four oranges
equals how many pieces of fruit?
Lots, of course, you could arrange them in a big pointy pile, like
Willow's house where there is a fruitbowl, with fruit in it. He liked
apples: Willow fed them to him. She'd been deeply shocked at his
non-fruit-eating habits.
Fruit was very good for you. You had to eat it every day or you'd get
curvy.
You'd get what? It didn't sound bad, Xander thought, thinking of
racing cars and the deliriously excited voices from the TV, screeching
about taking dangerous curves over the vroom. VroooooOOOOOOMM. MMMM.
Curvy, said Willow firmly. All your skin falls off. And your hair.
Xander, responsive to threats, obediently devoured his apple. Luckily
he liked the taste. He wondered if Uncle Rory had curvy. He had no hair,
and maybe no one had told him about apples. Xander watched him anxiously
for a while, but his skin, although very pink, stayed on, so he forgot
to worry about it.
Six apples plus four oranges makes your skin not fall off ever ever.
Xander wondered if he could eat all that at once, if it would make Willow
happy if he did.
Six apples plus four oranges. He knows the answer, it's ten. Six plus
four, he has learned the magic words. But they don't mean anything. He
counts the drawings suspiciously, and one two three four five six seven
eight nine ten.
But he doesn't trust them, who knows what the numbers are doing now he's
stopped counting? Tomorrow they could change it, so what's the point in
learning anyway? Tomorrow 6+4 could =11.
Xander drew a smiley face on one of the oranges, and then a sad one on
an apple, to make it even. Wilow said it wouldn't change, that six and
four would always be ten. They couldn't change it, she tried to tell him.
Xander knew better. They changed the rules all the time. You can't trust
them. Sometimes they're nice if you fall down and hurt your knee and other
times they hit you for tearing up your clothes. Sometimes they laugh if
you burp loudly at the table, and other times they shake you and yell
swearwords in your face. There aren't any real right answers. He tried
telling that to Willow, about the math, but she got upset.
No... No... Xander, you're just WRONG, she shouted at him in the end.
Xander thought Willow had a horrible surprise coming to her one day,
like the world was saving it up for her. He hoped they wouldn't hurt
her too much then.
He stopped thinking that after a while, when he realized that he wasn't
smart, that Willow was much smarter than he was. This made him think that
maybe Willow was right, that there were rules and you wouldn't get hurt
if you understood them. Willow understood the secret to being good, to not
making anyone angry and shouty with her. Her daddy never hit her at all,
she said when Xander asked. She sounded shocked. Xander had been ashamed
and dropped the subject, not wanting to admit that he wasn't good like
Willow, that he didn't know the right things to do, that he was stupid and
got hit all the time. Willow would be ashamed of him too, then: she wouldn't
want to know him. Xander changed the subject by burping loudly, being
reasonably sure that Willow wasn't going to be cross with him for it,
she'd just giggle.
That was Xander's first lesson in hiding: it was the only thing he'd ever
learned fast. But it had never occurred to him before, to wonder what
Willow was hiding. She was the good one who did things right: why would
she ever need a secret?
And, OK, he knows her mind is sharp like a knife and maybe cold and
dangerous like a knife, and her magic is powerful and maybe-dangerous
like a fucking nuclear warhead, but still. She's still Wills, right?
He's always edited those parts of her out of the picture, so she will
be his comforting familiar friend, his Wills. The parts of her he
couldn't touch, he didn't touch, and how had he not noticed *his* Willow,
how she was drowning, dying all the time inside the mystery girl? He of
all people to not notice something like that. He wants to blame Tara, but
can't: he approves of Tara. Sometimes he watches her touching Willow, and
gets a little wistful. Xander may talk a lot, but he gets Tara in that
way: the really important things are the things you say through touch.
He thinks the time he lost Willow was after the thing with Cordy and Oz,
and Spike and concussion and lips, that's when they stopped touching
each other. But Willow has Tara now, to touch and comfort her, to keep
her properly in the world when the spaces inside her own mind are so vast
and easy to get lost in: it's like him with Anya, warming the cold inside
a person, maybe submitting to them a bit because you want to love them
as much as you possibly can, and then a bit more. They're kind of similar,
really, and if Tara couldn't keep Willow in the world he wouldn't have
done much better himself. Tara would have done anything for Willow, she
worshipped her the way a part of Xander still does, and Xander had always
thought that was exactly as things should be.
Knows better now, of course. When you worship someone you can't see their
faults, you can't worship someone and know that they're... turning evil.
He'd just assumed she was right, doing what she did. She always had been
before. Is Xander already too late? He's so slow to see things. And now
it won't be his Wills he has to chat to, the one he'd thought would always
be there, the one he hadn't even seen disappearing. It will be Witch-Willow
defensive in her magic fortess, evil queen with all her spells.
--Wills, can I talk to you--
--Wills, hey, how are you. Stop using so much magic.--
--Wills, if I soften you up first with some babble about old times, will
you promise not to zap my brain?--
No. No good. Xander will be shouting up into the battlements, he has no
way in. Nothing left, any more, to batter the door down with. Not just
weaponless but also defenseless, while she with her magic... And he knows
it with certainty: he's going to have this conversation, and it will make
her angry. And then his Willow that he loves will lose control, and *hurt* him.
But hey. That's just the price for being slow.
End
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