ficlet: wesley/xander
for buffyverse1000, too long for a comment:
after "Hell's Bells", solitary!Xander bumps into an old acquaintance in LA. from a halfwritten project with rubywisp, but this section's all mine

When he wakes the next morning, Wesley's immediate concern is the necessity of getting rid of Xander. He has to be gotten far, far away, well out of Angel's reach. More importantly, however, he worries that without knowing Xander is gone, he won't be able to do everything he needs to do today. He needs to ensure, at this late hour, that he doesn't distract himself.

He knows himself all too well. So he distrusts his crabbed and darkened heart; given half a chance, it will start to unfurl, beat anew, reach towards Xander for another brush with comfort.

He can't risk that. Much as he'd like to, much as he *needs* to, he can't.

Wesley lies there on over-warm pillows, tangled in sweaty sheets, distantly amused that today, of all days, he is more worried about Xander Harris and the needs of his own heart than he is about anything important. About Angel's imminent devastation, about the untold vagaries of living on the run with a baby he adores but fears to touch.

The latter constitute duty -- loathsome and heavy, but eminently familiar. The former, however, are alien even as they are welcome and yearned for.

All the same, the empty apartment, sheets messily folded on the couch, the very fact of Xander's absence: These all disappoint him hugely, surprisingly so. His stomach twists with the pain.

When he finds Xander's scrawled note, tucked under a now-clammy glass of orange juice, Wesley removes his glasses first. He touches the edge of the paper. He's had entirely too much contact with messages and texts in his life. In the past three years. In recent weeks.

So he lets the note sit, paper soft under his finger, preserving for just a while longer the trembling discordance between the familiar and the novel.

WES -- drink yr juice! You'll feel better (hangover).
Went back to the motel (can't leave rental tux to get trashed by housekeeping). Plus you probably have work. But maybe I could come by tonight. If that's OK --
X
ps. thanx. And sorry.

Wesley puzzles over the mention of a tuxedo, wondering what reason Xander could possibly have had to bring it along on what, to all appearances, seemed like a Lost Weekend.

With that nonsensical clue, Wesley feels time split apart. Cleanly and rapidly, it forks and doubles. Right in front of him, just past the far edge of the kitchen table, he can see two versions of the future as clearly as his own face in the mirror.

One, the future that he will make, involves a fretful, stolen baby, long hours on highways and airplanes; forged birth certificates and a grubby apartment on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Connor will grow up, weedy and discontent, as Wesley ages, becoming ever more snappish and misanthropic.
But they will both be safe. Whatever that means.

Two, the future he rejects even as he folds the note and slips in into his breast pocket, involves a voluble, gradually cheering Xander; brief intervals of entangled, mutual joy and an odd sort of domesticity in which they grate horribly on each other's nerves until the arguments pass like summer storms. Xander will grow more confident; if he does not become serious as such, his natural gravitas will emerge and he will wear it with ease, no longer ashamed or fearful of being laughed at. And Wesley himself will unfold -- gradually, with a great deal of sharp pains and persistent aches -- relearning the grace of a smile that is unconscious and sincere.

He can mourn and regret the second future as if it had been lost, but he does not. Whether he has been too long immersed in magic or simply because he accepts the reality of multiverses, he knows that it will persist, developing and elaborating its existence, with or without his attention.

What Wesley prefers -- let alone what he needs -- does not and cannot figure. Connor and Angel are far more important than one near-sighted, neurotic Englishman with something of a martyr complex and an enormous new crush.

It's this vision of what might have been, if deserving and needing meant anything, that accompanies Wes throughout the day. It's there, but it's receding constantly and smoothly, growing smaller and more distant the farther he moves from the kitchen table and the closer he comes to Connor's bassinet.

It flares once -- huge, looming, and *bright* -- when he tries to hush Connor with a lullaby. The threat of it, its loss, shoves him toward Lorne then out to the street as insistently and violently as the fear of being found out. Loss and betrayal blind him, bring his arm down on a friend, snatch the child.

By the time he hits the sidewalk, however, the vision is already gone. Reduced back to a bright pinprick nearly swamped by the darkness.

So it's odd, then, that as he lies here, arms empty of the baby, blood pumping out his neck and soaking his skin in a macabre, warm blanket, that he again thinks of Xander.

He failed, yet again.

He touches the ragged edges of his skin with numb fingers.

Thinks of an earlier failure. Another neck assaulted and marred, again and always his fault.

Dark eyes downcast.

He should have apologized.



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