Friends with the Monster
(the Same Old Flame Remix)
by Aadler
Copyright September 2017 (finished December)

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Disclaimer: Characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer are property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Kuzui Enterprises, Sandollar Television, the WB, and UPN.

This story is a remix (done for Round 7 of the Circle of Friends Remix) of “the Monster”, by DragonsPhoenix.

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Life had a rhythm, and that suited him. Day after endless day he sat in the unfurnished cabin and watched the sun come up, watched it sweep over the tree-line and across the grassy meadows before fading finally behind the ridgeline. Sometimes there were storms, short and sharp and fierce, or days of gray, drizzling rain. Sometimes he walked out into the woods and sat, settling into stillness, and gradually the life around him would resume its own tempo in disregard of his presence, birds and small creatures (or the occasional badger, deer, or bear) crossing his field of view without taking notice or alarm. Every month or so he would pick out clothes that were relatively unrumpled, and walk into town to have a root beer and a slice of pie in the solitary local diner. He didn’t speak with anyone, past the bare minimum of giving his order, but a part of him still welcomed — still craved — hearing and letting himself soak up the conversation around him. The semblance of human contact.

Human. Right.

He paid with the single debit card he still carried. Somehow, despite the Magic Box going defunct, Anya had managed to leave a ton of money in their joint bank account in the weeks before Sunnydale’s collapse. Sometimes he wondered where it had all come from. Mostly, he didn’t think about it, as he put considerable effort into not thinking about anything, ever. That made it all easier, or at least as easy as it could get.

He needed nothing, took and gave nothing, made his existence — except for the occasional spasmodic trip to town — as closely as possible a matter of not existing at all.

Life had a rhythm, all but empty, all but meaningless, the very next thing to nothing. That suited him.

It couldn’t last, of course. That, too, was his life.

*               *               *

He heard the sound, and didn’t want to pay any attention but did anyhow. Though never seeking him out, people came out this way now and then, passersby in ATVs and rattling pickups and four-wheelers. This one was a motorcycle. Without his will or desire, his hearing focused on it: a working machine, built and used for rough service rather than for any extremes of speed or performance. It could use a tune-up, and one of those valves would be a problem within a few thousand miles. Most significant was the pattern of acceleration: not gunning across the countryside, not screwing around cutting doughnuts or using the rolling swells of land as jump-ramps … no, this was controlled, systematic, purposeful. Like a search.

Searching for him? He hoped not. Anything like that would call for a response, and he didn’t want the annoyance. The whole point of being out here was to be alone: detached, disconnected, undisturbed, remote. He simply wanted to be alone, and anything that disturbed it roused a reflexive, unwilling resentment.

He didn’t want this. Not-wanting it didn’t stop it.

He left the cabin and moved in the direction of what he could hear. Speed didn’t matter, because there was no urgency; if the interloper left before he could catch up and intercept, problem solved. He just wanted to get it settled, done, over with and behind him so he could return to the near-nothingness in which he had so carefully cocooned himself.

No such luck. The search pattern of the distant motorcycle held steady, the sound sometimes farther and sometimes nearer but always falling within the same general area. Gradually, in fact, drifting faintly toward him. He walked steadily, orienting toward the rough midpoint of what he could hear. Just as he was unconcerned with speed, so with concealment. His solitude had lasted for so long, he simply couldn’t bring himself to care about details. If the search was for him, he wanted to know; if not, likewise. What he would do in either instance … well, he hadn’t thought that far ahead. It simply wasn’t important enough.

He reached a point, and stopped. The motorcycle was just on the other side of a low hill, and moving in his direction, barely seconds away. He waited, the first vague stirring of actual interest beginning at last to manifest. What he would see, he didn’t know. Whether or not it would matter in the least, he didn’t know. It would be done, though, one way or another. There was that, if nothing else.

It came into view, veering wide to give the rider at least a few seconds to react to anything (such as himself) waiting unseen, and he took in all the details in the first glance. The bike was a workhorse, loaded with packs and saddlebags; a short rifle was secured in a scabbard along the right side (one of the AK models, from the shape of the stock), and protruding up from the left side was the handle of a sword, similarly secured (claymore, maybe, or a bastard sword allowing a two-handed grip). The rider was female, in jeans and a denim vest, aviator-styled sunglasses, and the inevitable red bandanna folded into a headband. She wore a pair of holstered pistols, and a strap across her chest was almost certainly the sling for another weapon behind her back, perhaps another sword but more probably a pistol-grip pump shotgun. A woman, alone, loaded for battle and on the hunt, all the things that together all but automatically meant “Slayer” —

— but not this time. Because of the outfit and the partial concealment of the sunglasses, recognition was delayed for an extra part of a second, but no more than that. It was Dawn — Dawn, here — and she had seen him in the same moment, braking with one hand while the other fell to the handgun on her left hip. Identification was almost as quick for her, though; the hand stopped, remaining on the pistol but not drawing it, and her mouth set in a hard line.

“Xander,” she said, as if the word tasted bad. And then: “What the fuck are you doing here?”

There were new creases in her face, looking to be more the result of stress and anger than age, but even so it took time for something like that to get set, how long had it been? And, though he would have thought his repartee reflexes to have been atrophied to nothing by now, he heard himself saying, “Oh, just hanging around, chillin’. How about you?”

She glared at him, making no move to take off the sunglasses. “You left us, you son of a bitch. We thought you were dead!”

It was too long since he had dealt with people in any depth, normal conversation too complex and bewildering for a mind honed to solitude. ‘Left’ he could understand, that part was totally and unambiguously true, but the rest of it … He studied her where she sat astraddle of the bike, and ventured, “So — demon-hunter, huh?”

Dawn’s face might as well have been a mask. She took her hand from the pistol and returned it to the other hand-grip of the motorcycle. “This is not you and me talking here,” she told him flatly, and then gunned the bike away from him, roaring across the grass of the undulating prairie in a long, sustained burst of acceleration rather than the methodical approach she had used till now. He watched her until she was gone behind another of the low hills — yep, pump shotgun, all right, and she had her hair back in a Lara Croft braid — still working internally to adjust to this unexpected turn.

Dawn. Older, harder, more competent. Anger, rather than fear or revulsion. Here, now, and following business of her own rather than seeking him out or even having any notion he was anywhere near.

It was just too much, his mind didn’t know where to begin to take hold and work at it. In the distance, he heard the motorcycle slow to an idle, and a minute later it resumed the same deliberate, systematic pattern as before.

With a sigh, Xander began walking again toward the faraway sound.

It didn’t take as long this time to catch up with her. First, because she hadn’t really gone that far; second, because she had returned to her earlier practice and was on a basic scouting grid, doggedly checking out places of possible concealment and pausing at vantage points from which to survey the surrounding areas. And, though he made no effort to hide his approach, she stuck to her predetermined course, stubbornly refusing to veer away either to approach or to avoid him.

In its fashion, it was another form of rejection. It was a form that allowed him to approach her, though, so he’d accept it and be glad. Once he was close enough, he broke into a light run that brought him alongside her. She ignored him, and from the side he could see enough of her eyes to tell she was still checking out various terrain features (he didn’t yet know for what). “You said everyone thought I was dead,” he said. “Why did they think that?”

She still didn’t look at him, or answer, and at first he thought she would just pretend he didn’t exist. After several seconds, though, she finally said, “The First came to visit Buffy. As you, to taunt her with one more person she hadn’t been able to save. And … we had already found your arm.”

Oh. Right. The arm. That had taken months to grow back — well, maybe only weeks, he hadn’t actually been watching the calendar around then — but it was so long ago by now, he’d forgot all about it. Frowning, he said, “The First? I thought Buffy waxed his demonic ass when she brought down Sunnydale on top of him.”

That drew an exasperated pfaah! From Dawn. “It’s the First Evil, Xander. It’s older than the human race, and it’s incorporeal, you can’t just kill something like that.” She braked the bike again, swung in the saddle to face him. “What you pulled, though, that almost killed Buffy. You let her think you were dead, you let her think she killed you.” Her mouth twisted like she wanted to spit on him. “Faith … I thought we were going to lose Faith. She had the crazy idea that she owed you, that she’d failed in a debt to you by not having your back when you needed it. That’s what you did to us, you bastard!”

This was more conversation than he’d had in total over the last however-many-years it had been. Disuse tangled his tongue, he had no idea how to respond. The best he could manage was, “I’m sorry.”

“I hate you,” she said in reply. Then she gunned the motorcycle away from him again … and, again, after some seconds of hesitation, he moved to follow.

He had never considered what the Sunnydale survivors might have thought of his rather violent disappearance. He had worked hard not to think about it, banishing it from the forefront of his mind as ruthlessly as he had removed himself from their lives. They weren’t really his friends at all, simply because he wasn’t the person his lying memories tried to insist he was. He had made it work, he had shut it all away and put it behind him … but now the wound had been opened again, and he couldn’t let it go until he had at least a bare minimum of answers.

Not that he deserved anything of the sort. He still was going to pursue it till he had it.

Once more Dawn let him come up on her as she rode, disdaining his presence even to move away from it. For a minute or two he jogged beside her, watching as her eyes searched ceaselessly for any sign of … something. He wanted to ask about those so-long-forgotten people who still mattered to him (even if that concern was only an illusion), but couldn’t find the words. Instead, he said, “So what are you looking for out here?”

And, again, there was a long silence while he wondered if she would continue to ignore his words just as she didn’t deign to look at him. At last, however, grudgingly, “Pikorieff. Small group of them, if reports still hold true.”

Pikorieff. Xander thought about it. “Can’t remember ever hearing of that one.”

“They tend to keep to themselves.” Dawn’s tone was brusque, clinical, and low enough that Xander wasn’t sure strictly human ears could have made it out over the thrum of the bike’s engine. “And they’re usually nocturnal, so it’s easy not to notice them or know about them. This bunch, though, rumors are that they’re willing to hire out as mercenaries to other crews. We don’t need that right now.”

Which made it sound like something was starting to heat up somewhere. Xander didn’t ask: because the effort to frame the question was more than he was willing to spend, because he feared letting himself be pulled back into something he had put far behind him, because — when you came right down to it — he wasn’t entitled either to the information or to take part in the larger cause. Frozen away from what he wanted to say and couldn’t, he went with, “I really am sorry.”

Her lip curled, and the side-eyed glance she gave him was scornful. “Don’t pretend you care,” she said to him, stony-voiced.

He did care, that was the problem. No: the problem was that the ‘he’ who cared wasn’t the person she acted like she was speaking to, wasn’t the person he remembered being even if he knew better. He wasn’t Xander. He didn’t even know for sure when he had become not-Xander.

In all likelihood, he had killed Xander.

*               *               *

From that point on, they barely spoke; Dawn continued to guide the motorcycle in the pattern she had chosen, with Xander trotting more or less beside her. Several hours in, she gave him a brief glance, then turned her head back to look more closely. “You’re not sweating,” she observed; then, “Do you sweat?”

Xander actually thought about that. “I probably could if I needed to,” he finally said in answer. “But I haven’t needed to.”

She considered that. “Why would you need to?”

He shrugged. “To pass for normal.”

She nodded at that, just a bit. “Do you even get tired?”

“Not so far,” he replied. “At least, not for as long as I’ve known what I am.”

She took off the sunglasses for the first time. He had forgotten just how blue her eyes were, but her expression revealed exactly nothing. “So what do you think you are?”

There were any number of answers he could have made to that. Imposter. Replicant. Human-demon cyborg. Monster. “Adam,” he said. “The 2003 model.”

She started to say something, then cut it off and went back to her search grid.

She kept at it till the sun dipped below the horizon: not full dark, but once visibility fell below a certain threshold. Maybe she needed a specific minimum of light to make out the necessary detail, maybe she just felt like she’d been at it long enough. Regardless, she picked a spot on the bare plains and stopped, took down a roll of cloth strapped above the saddlebags, and opened it out to reveal a collection of pickets: thin plastic rods nearly a yard long, like the kind of driveway markers that usually supported a red reflector, only these were topped by what looked like small, inscribed copper coins. She began placing them around the motorcycle in a radius of about fifty feet, so Xander figured they must be basic mystical alarms of some type. “I have a place,” he said to her. She stopped to look back at him, and he went on. “Not that far from here, actually, you’ve covered a lot of ground but it wasn’t straight-line travel.” He shrugged. “Not much to it, but it’s a roof.”

Dawn shook away the suggestion. “This is good enough.”

She laid out a bedroll. She made a small fire. She pulled out provisions, but didn’t bother heating them over the fire. Halfway through the first part of whatever it was, she glanced over at Xander. “Do you still eat now?” she asked.

It seemed more like an inquiry than an offer. “I still can,” he said. “I still like the tastes sometimes. I don’t seem to need it, though.”

Dawn accepted that without reaction, and went back to her meal.

The pattern they had fallen into was that she ignored him unless she actually had something to say, but didn’t try to pretend he had no existence. That was workable. Xander waited till she had finished eating, waited awhile longer while she sat silently, looking into the fire; she didn’t seem to be worried about losing her night vision, so apparently she felt the warning pickets would be sufficient. “So,” he said at last. “How’s everybody doing these days?”

She didn’t respond immediately. He knew full well that she might not answer at all. At length, though, she said, “We got over it. We lost people — and then you — but we coped. We had to.”

“Okay,” Xander said, and then waited again.

“Buffy’s doing better at the leader thing now,” Dawn went on, after another long pause. “Still gets a little preachy sometimes, but I got used to that growing up, and she really is doing better.” She sighed. “She had a girlfriend for a while — a really short while, but then she’s really short — but I guess that actually was just a phase, ’cause she’s totally back in Het-Land now.”

A bit surprising, but not stunningly so. “Okay,” Xander said again.

“And, speaking of girlfriends, Willow broke up with Kennedy about a month after Sunnydale came down —”

“Yeah, I think most of us saw that coming,” Xander observed.

“— but then they got back together. And then broke up again. And then got back together.” She shook her head, still looking at the fire rather than at him. “The last I heard, they were split again, but that was a couple of weeks ago, so it’s anybody’s guess as to what’s on right now.”

Xander felt his face wanting to form a smile. It was an unfamiliar sensation. “That actually sounds a lot like me and Cordelia.”

“Oh.” Even though she was in a seated position by the fire, Dawn’s body language visibly changed. “We … we got reports from Los Angeles. Cordelia is dead. I’m sorry.”

At first the words didn’t register, and then when the meaning sunk in, it was like a contradiction of reality. Cordelia … it should have been impossible for all that life, all that force of personality, to ever go out of the world. He floundered for any kind of meaningful response, and what came out was, “You mentioned something about Faith.”

“Right.” Some of the tension went out of her. “Like I said, we coped. She coped. She actually seems to have it together now. And —” She hesitated. “Okay, this part isn’t even gossip, just a weird little feeling I’ve been getting, but I think … I think there might, just possibly, be something going on with her and Giles.”

There was a sustained silence. Then: “Faith and Giles, I just can’t see it. But Faith and Ripper … well, that doesn’t seem so impossible. Scary, yes, but not impossible.”

“Yeah,” Dawn said. “That was pretty much my thinking.”

And he knew he was pressing into the danger zone here, but he had to know. “What about you? How’s it all been for you?”

By the light of the campfire he could see the masklike immobility return to her face, and the words came out quiet, level, and devoid of anything that might ever have been mistaken for warmth. “None. Of your fucking. Business.”

Okay, not unexpected, even if it felt distinctly strange to hear that kind of language from ‘Little Dawnie’. Even without the Sarah Connor tactical kit, it was clear that she had changed almost as much as he had —

All right, not even close. But, yes, changed.

He hoped her current, entirely merited fury didn’t mean she was unhappy in the other parts of her life.

There was another hour with neither of them speaking. By now he was thoroughly accustomed to silence; silence while in someone else’s company, not so much. At last Dawn pulled off her boots, then unzipped and opened out her sleeping bag. Without looking back at him she asked, “You don’t need sleep anymore, do you?”

“I sleep,” Xander answered. Pretty much every day, something to do when there was nothing to do. “But you’re right, I can go without for a long time. I don’t even know how long.”

“I don’t want you here,” she said matter-of-factly, still not looking his way. “If I tell you to leave, though, you’ll just go out a bit, park yourself there, and sit up all night keeping watch on this camp anyway.” It wasn’t a question. “Go, stay, doesn’t seem to make much difference. Just don’t watch me while I sleep. That’s creepy.” She worked her way into the bag, re-zipped it, and settled herself onto her pillow.

“Sorry,” Xander said yet again.

“You should be,” she shot back. “Asshole.” Then she turned onto her side with her back to him.

Obediently keeping his gaze from her, Xander sat motionless in the deepening night, watching and listening but not truly on any kind of alert; if she trusted the alarm pickets, she probably knew what she was doing. She had been right about him, though, he couldn’t simply leave her unguarded, even if by all appearances she had ample experience in taking care of herself.

The impersonal notice she had taken of his present capabilities … that had disquieted him. He knew some things about himself by now, just from having noticed over time, but he hadn’t devoted any thought to the matter. In fact, not thinking about it had been pretty much his primary imperative over the last several … well, by now it was definitely years. The strength was obvious: kind of hard to miss, in fact, after what he’d done to Caleb when that grinning maniac had tried to gouge out his eye. Sure, Caleb came back after a power-boost from the First, amped to the point where Buffy’d had to go all Ginsu on his crazy ass to keep him dead, but Xander knew he’d broken some of the man’s ribs, and maybe an arm as well, when he threw him off that first time —

— and Xander had kept it all to himself. At first, he’d had trouble believing it had actually happened, and then he hadn’t trusted that this new, brute power would remain, and wondered if there might be an unknown downside (boy, howdy!) … It wasn’t till long afterward that it had occurred to him to wonder if some hidden programming might have compelled him to keep the secret for just a while longer.

Whatever the cause, the secret had pretty much vanished during the second raid on the winery. No regrets there, because there was no way of knowing how many girls would have died if he hadn’t been there, or if he hadn’t cut loose against the Turok-han besieging their stumbling retreat. All the same, when Buffy arrived to reinforce and protect their escape, she had seen what he had done — what he could do — and that had changed the game from there on out.

Maybe it all would have gone differently if the truth had come out sooner, if there had been time for Willow to mystically test him in depth or for the group to talk out various possibilities. Buffy had achieved some momentum in dealing with the First, however, and she wasn’t about to lose that by slowing down now. Besides, he’d already been through so many transformations by then — Hyena Xander, Soldier Xander, Frat-house Not-Really-There Xander, Syphilis Xander — that Sudden Slayer-Guy Xander was perhaps not as alarming or even remarkable as it otherwise might have seemed. (And there was the additional possibility, never investigated but still glowering in the background, that his altered physiology might have had a few “no problem, nothing to worry about here” spells layered into it.)

There just hadn’t seemed to be time to stress on details, and so much that had to be done. And so Xander had gone with Buffy and Faith and Spike and the Potentials, gone down into the massive cavern below the Seal, gone as an extra supernatural powerhouse to maybe tip the balance while Willow worked up the Slayer activation spell. Gone, and known at a glance that they were totally hosed regardless of any spell. Dozens against thousands … who was kidding who here? even unpowered humans could have rolled over them in those numbers, overwhelming the small party by sheer mass. And none of that mattered, they were committed beyond any possibility of retreat, so he just threw himself into piling up enough bodies to keep any from making it through to get at the unpowered rear-guard Buffy had set up to deal with stragglers.

Xander had killed before: accident, supporting role, desperation, even that terrifying exhilarating night when he had picked off Jack O’Toole’s zombie bombardiers one at a time. This was different, this was simply all-out slaughter, endless and horrific. He felt no pain and hadn’t a spare moment to think about it or even to recognize it, he felt no weariness or fear or doubt or hesitation, there was no time, his body was just a pitiless engine of smashing tearing crushing ripping kill and kill and kill and kill. His sword had been immediately snapped and torn away by the pure awful force of the demon horde hurling itself against him, and in moments he was reduced to fighting them with themselves, using Turok-han bodies as dead or dying bludgeons against other Turok-han, a self-replenishing resupply that showed no sign of faltering.

It still wasn’t enough. All the girls were fighting now, fighting as only Slayers could (touchdown, Wil!), and unbelievably Vi — Vi! — was wreaking more carnage than Faith or even Buffy herself, but the odds they faced were just too obscenely lopsided, they could inflict a thousand casualties to one and still lose. Then rays of dazzling light lanced out, searing through the ranks of Turok-han more terribly than any sunlight — more as if they were being touched by the surface of the Sun itself — and in a millisecond’s glance Xander saw that it was Spike, the amulet Buffy had given him had come to life and was wiping out the demon army like some horrendous (but selective) cleansing flame.

Buffy had almost given the amulet to Xander, he had seen her wavering on that (soul-possessing, but stronger than human? yep, standing right here), but in the end she had gone with Spike. Lack of trust, or willing to hand an untested weapon only to someone she valued less? There was no telling, Buffy loved her friends fiercely but was stunningly inconsistent, and she’d always been just a little nuts in anything concerning Spike. In this instance, though, she’d made a fortunate choice (or not), because a shaft of that light passed over Xander, and he screamed as half his body was seared with excruciating fire and all of him woke up —

— and Xander slammed those sudden new parts of himself back into unconsciousness, instantly, because NO. In that first split-second he had seen that he wasn’t human after all, he wasn’t even really Xander, he was an instrument with a mission and he wasn’t having it, not for one single fucking moment.

If he was a weapon made to kill Slayers, then the Slayers had to kill him. That was the only solution he could allow himself to accept, and so he had tried to put it into effect as soon as the Sunnydale survivors were out and safe.

That hadn’t worked out, they had refused to recognize that their friend was gone and the thing with his face and form was a deadly threat. And, when he tried to convince them of the threat by launching an actual attack, the unholy fury he had felt rising in him (when they still wouldn’t believe it, wouldn’t strike a killing blow!) had frightened him so much that he had used the chaos of the refinery explosion to just plain vanish.

Now, according to Dawn, he had hurt them with that. Hurt them badly, it would appear. In the last analysis, though, however much continuing pain they might still feel, just meant he hadn’t actually killed them, and he could live with that.

Or whatever it was he was doing.
 

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