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Zen and the Art of the Open Road
by Lar
Email: lar@obsessedmuch.net
Rating: R
Notes: Set post Graduation, during Xander's cross country trip
Spoilers: S1, S4
Disclaimer: All the fun that goes with being in the Jossworld is his.
The other stuff, that's my brain AN #1 - Written for Isilya's Literary
Fiction Challenge Question: If a tree falls in the forest, and there is
no one around to hear, does it then make a sound? Word: constellation
Taboo word: not/'t Fandom to write this in: BtVS/AtS AN#2 - thanks to
Zahra and Bonibaru for fast beta joy.
=====================================
It's dark when he drives. For some reason, Xander has developed this
habit of being on the move when the sun goes down. It has nothing to do
with being able to see the constellations overhead when he leaves the
top down on Uncle Rory's big, obvious, penis-metaphor of a car. He
thinks... no, he *knows*... that it's got everything to do with feeling
safer to be moving forward when the things that go bump are up and
wandering.
Life in Sunnydale teaches you a few things, and teaches them in a way
that makes Drill Sergeants look like warm and fuzzy Carebears. Xander
has those lessons tattooed inside his eyelids and burned into his brain.
He thinks sometimes that if he could get a degree in Survival, he'd be
the one with the shiny gold Phi Beta Kappa key come graduation. He could
be Xander Harris, Doctor of Being Alive, Professor of Avoiding Deadness.
He distracts himself from the blandness of the highway that stretches
out flat and endless in the bright light of his high beams by punching
the buttons on the radio that will never work anytime between now and,
say, ever. His arms are long; he barely has to lean sideways to click
out a staccato rhythm and finds himself attempting a seriously fucked up
version of "Wipe Out" before giving up and sitting straight, back
cracking as vertebrae realign themselves. He suspects that if he lives
long enough, he's going to have a wicked case of arthritis courtesy of
the number of times his bones have impacted with doorways, tabletops,
walls and tombstones.
Xander's head turns far right and when his neck pops, he sighs. He turns
far left to repeat that exercise, and if Willow were here she would
pinch his thigh to make him stop. The sound of him cracking his neck
always gave her the wiggins.
He's grinning at the recollection when he sees it.
His first intellectual reaction - slam on the brakes, get out and help -
overrides the way his body is trying to stomp on the gas and get the
hell away. //There goes the degree in Knows When To Run// The back end
of the car fishtails and he stares at the hand on the road.
Illuminated in the headlights, it's white, palm up and fingers splayed
wide in what Xander knows was a prayer for help. His heart is beating
hard his vision pulses with it, and that's all fine because there's no
spit in his mouth either so nothing is working right. The hand remains
still, pale and dirty, and with that mostly unwanted percepto-vision
that an adrenaline rush lends him, he sees that there's a streak of
something dark on one finger.
He knows it's blood. He hates that he knows this without really trying.
It's attached to an arm, and that arm is attached to a shoulder, a whole
body just outside of the reassuring bright circles of light that his
headlights cast. Xander's fingers that were sure and steady enough to
attempt to play a tune on the radio buttons just minutes earlier find
themselves stupid and clumsy as he tries to keep his eyes on the
unmoving hand and reach for the latch that will open the glove box. He
pops its and spills out a pile of maps, pens, tissues and one of the
stakes he keeps there. There's another one under the seat, which is
closer, but he knows it means looking away.
And just... no. Looking away is bad.
"Hey... " His voice shakes and he hates that, too. Whatever left that
body there at the side of the road could be standing there just outside
of his maybe faulty percepto-vision waiting for dessert and here he is
about to walk up offer himself like the free sundae with purchase. He
really misses Buffy right now. He misses Faith. Even Angel. And hey, a
Willow spell would be really welcome right about now, too.
He leaves the car running, handy for those quick getaways from whatever
is standing and waiting for him to bend down in what might be a nice
little trap. Xander enjoys the thought of taking the bait as much as he
enjoys the thought of *being* the bait. His fingers pull the cross
around his neck so it dangles against the front of his t-shirt, and when
he bends down out of the arc of light, he sees nothing. For a second he
believes that it's just a hand, and while that's all kinds of disgusting
in a way, it makes him feel relief. Then his vision adjusts and there's
the rest.
Skinny. Young. Mostly bones and tight skin and Xander knows that even
with blood in her skin, this girl would have been pale. Now she's waxy
and the road dust clings to the patch of once-wet blood and settles in
the half-open cup of her eyes. It looks like she was hollowed out and
filled with sand, and he's mildly nauseated at the thought, but no more
than that. Later, when sleep is just a thing he used to have first hand
knowledge of, he'll worry over knowing that he's become that accustomed
to horrible things.
Her other hand is flung out like the one that he first saw, and her legs
are bent at an angle that suggests it let her run a little and played
with her, and then took her down like a deer or a rabbit. Fast would
have ruined its fun, he guesses. What's a party without the panicked
victim pumping all those juicy hormones into the blood before it gets
sucked out of them?
He would really like to go back an hour in his life and make a left
instead of a right, or maybe back further than that, to the day before
this one when he decided that it was time to move on again. Go back a
month to graduation and save a few dozen of those people who were in the
wrong place at the wrong time. Try to make it so no one ended up snake
chow or a broken smear of crushed flesh and bones on the steps of the
high school.
Xander shakes his head and wipes clammy palms on his jean-covered
thighs. He's getting himself into full babble mode with a touch of
hysteria thrown in to make it all the more likely that he'll freeze if
something tries to jump him. He looks over his shoulder, fully expecting
to see the vamp that did this, but there's nothing there. Just his car,
door open and lights on, the engine clicking over loudly, and when he
looks back there's a gust of wind that blows more dirt over the face of
the girl, settling on those freaky, dust-clogged eyes.
He shudders and looks around her for something that will give her a
name. There's no purse, no backpack. For all he knows they picked her up
and brought her here from Vegas, some little runaway from a street that
has no name who would never be missed. As much as he would like to avoid
touching her, he reaches out a hand that shakes way too much for his own
comfort. Xander realizes he's only a few seconds from rabbiting away
from this seriously bad shit he was unlucky enough to find. His hand
wavers above the pocket of the ragged cargo pants she's wearing, below
the bare line of her waist where the shirt is rucked up and torn. He
runs his fingers over it tentatively, feeling for a wallet, keys,
anything and already knowing that there's nothing there. Just the sharp
bump of her hipbone and the far too thin line of her leg.
He drops his head a little until he becomes aware of how vulnerable that
makes the back of his neck and then he stands up, stake held loosely in
his hand as he looks down at the body. He wants to bury her, wants to
make this right for her somehow, but that's really asking for too much.
There's no making this right unless he manages to do the undoable. Turn
back time, like he was thinking earlier, give this skinny no-name girl a
little Sunnydale one on one lesson: strangers are bad. They're worse
when the sun goes down. The monsters are real. Even if no one can hear,
you still scream for help before you die.
Xander walks back to the car, pops the trunk latch and looks inside. His
suitcase is there, the bald excuse for a spare tire, the rusty thing
that someone once called a jack. Nothing he can use to dig with, and he
leans down, hands on the warm metal gripping tight. There's probably a
right thing to do here, something very logical that Giles would point
out while he wiped his glasses on the hem of his shirt. He's sure that
if someone told him, he'd recognize it as very smart and maybe slap his
forehead because it was so plain that she should've seen it all along.
What he's getting though, is the urge to get in the car, turn around and
drive back to Sunnydale. Maybe stop and look for a nice dimensional time
travel thing that would let him be fifteen again and arguing the urgent
questions of life with Willow and Jesse.
//"OK, Wills if you're so smart, then tell me: if a tree falls in the
forest and nobody's there, does it make a noise?"
"Oh I know that one. Yes."
"Yes? That's your answer. Jesse, man, you need facts to back it up."
"Wills can do that part. I'm goin' with yes. Dude, stop hogging all the
gum."
"Actually he's right. Well, he is.
"Hit us with the facts, Will."
"Wait, wait, do you know the one about if God can do anything, can he
make a stone so heavy that even God ... stop staring at me like that.
It's a valid question."//
Xander sits behind the wheel for a long time, until the edges of the sky
turn lighter. The hand stays still. The girl stays dead. He keeps
wishing for that place where he was Knowledge Guy, but even then the
answers to questions about things like this were somebody else's
problem. He could have been really happy just knowing that trees always
make noise when they fall, God might be around watching out for sparrows
and fools, and that taking more than one piece of anything at a time
would make Jesse claim he was hogging it. A part of Xander will always
be looking for the place where he's ignorant of *these* facts - his
friends will die, some of them more than once, and people will still
scream, even if no one is there to hear it.
=end=
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