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Friends with the Monster
Disclaimer: Characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel: the Series are property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Kuzui Enterprises, Sandollar Television, the WB, and UPN.
Part II
Dawn woke up just before … well, dawn … with the sun still below the horizon but visibility nearly at daylight levels. She came up on one elbow, glanced around, and turned her head back and forth a few times to loosen her shoulder muscles. Then she unzipped the sleeping bag, pulled on her boots, and stood up. “Look somewhere else,” she called to Xander over her shoulder as she headed for the picket barrier she had set. “I have to pee.”
Xander obediently turned his face away from her, along with tuning his hearing down to merely human sensitivity. She was back a few minutes later, and made a quick breakfast from one of the meal packets, again not bothering to heat it. Xander waited without speaking, keeping her in his field of view but not actually oriented on her lest it feel like he was staring. When she was done, she repacked her bedroll, belted on the pistols and slung the shotgun, and walked the perimeter gathering and bundling the warning pickets, which she likewise secured before mounting the motorcycle. Pausing with her hand on the throttle, she said, “I don’t need you here.”
“I know,” Xander said, and she shook her head, started the bike, and pulled out.
She followed the same pattern she had used the day before, with Xander pacing her in the same manner. By now it had long become clear that she was not directly searching for the Punxtatawney-
whatever band but for any sign of their having passed through the area. He looked, too, sweeping with his more exacting vision for any details she couldn’t discern with human eyes, but leaving the search to her aside from that. She focused unrelentingly on her chosen task, just like yesterday, and Xander found himself wondering if this total concentration was normal for her now or if it was a way for her to shut him out. About two hours in, she eased the bike to a stop. Still looking straight ahead, she asked, “Why?”
She could have been referring to any number of things, but it wasn’t that hard to narrow it down to the most likely. “You mean, why did I leave? or why did I … attack them, in the first place? or why am I hanging around now?”
Dawn snorted. “Oh hell yes why did you leave. And why did you push a fight with them when you didn’t really mean it, and why are you hanging around now if you don’t care, and if you do care then why did you fucking leave?”
The surprise wasn’t that she was asking, but that it had taken her so long. Xander sighed inwardly, because he had known this was coming — he had made it all but inevitable by his choice to come along with her — and even though he could explain his reasons, there was no way she would find them sufficient. Even so, she deserved the answer. “I left because I didn’t want to kill anybody. I tried to get them to kill me because I was afraid extra programming would kick in if I waited, and make me kill them … only they wouldn’t do it, they were fighting defensively and trying to talk me down and I was starting to get mad. I mean the kind of mad that turns into berserk rampage, and I really didn’t want to kill anybody, so I left.” This time the sigh was literal and audible. “And I’m following you around because I do care, even if the me who cares isn’t really Xander. I know I shouldn’t, I know I’ll have to let go of you eventually, but I’m … just not ready yet.”
“Why not?” she demanded scornfully. “You already did it once, it should be getting easier.”
“It was never easy,” he said. “And it isn’t now, either.”
Following the established pattern, this was the time for her to snarl something at him and then accelerate away. He saw her hand tense on the throttle, but instead she sat where she was, and after a minute she said, “Willow analyzed the arm.”
Xander smiled at that. “Yeah, she would. So you know I’m telling the truth on that part: demon-
human- cyborg, not Xander.” He shook his head. “I remember you. I miss you enough that it hurts. But the memory isn’t mine, it’s an add-on to your basic customized assassin. You should keep that in mind. It’s what I’m trying to do, I’m just not having much luck there.” Dawn studied him searchingly. “Assassin,” she repeated. “Is that what your … your programming, tells you?”
“Don’t know.” Xander shrugged. “I felt the routines starting to come online, and I shut them right the hell down. But what else could it be? I told you I have Xander’s memories, and those memories don’t mention any Etrigan/
Deathlok upgrades. So there I am, planted right in amongst the good guys, looking like Xander so they’re not on guard, believing I’m Xander so I don’t give myself away. The perfect sleeper agent, ’cause I don’t even know I am one.” His tone was flat, remote. “Maybe they killed Xander so they could plant me in his place. Maybe I killed Xander, and then auto- erased the memory so I could start thinking I was him. Either way, I’m not your friend, I’m the reason he isn’t around anymore.” Dawn’s expression hadn’t changed, but her mouth was so tight, she was white around the lips. “And after you tell me all this, I still should let you follow me around while I try to work?”
Xander shook his head without looking away. “No,” he said. “You shouldn’t.”
Minutes passed as Dawn sat without speaking, eyes unreadable behind the sunglasses. “I told you,” she said finally. “Willow analyzed the arm.”
“Yeah, well, it grew back, so that by itself tells you ‘not human’.”
“Not only human,” she corrected. “You’re right, there were all kinds of things in there, Willow said it was more like a chimera than Maggie Walsh’s graft-
and- stitch approach. But the base that everything else was added to … it wasn’t just human DNA, it was Xander’s DNA.” “Sure,” he said, shrugging again. “Use the guy’s cells to force-
clone enough spare parts to make a Xander- shaped murderbot. Recipe’s not important, what matters is that he wound up with something that needs to be kept away from anybody Xander cared about.” One eyebrow went up. “Like you’re keeping away right now.”
“Look, I know it’s dumb, I’m just saying —”
“Never mind, that’s not important. The main thing that stuck with me, Willow said the degree of telomere foreshortening meant the original cells were old. Like ninety-
some years old, a ninety- plus- year- old Xander. Nobody could figure that out, how it happened or what it meant. It bothered us, but we thought you were dead so we just … let it go.” “Good,” Xander said, nodding. “That’s what you should have done, and what you need to do now.”
Dawn made an ugly sound in the back of her throat. “You are so full of shit, you slosh when you walk. You’re all ‘I’m so unclean, I’m so dangerous, you shouldn’t be anywhere near me’ … but you won’t leave!” She spat on the ground between them. “If you really believe you’re a threat to me, then go away. If you won’t do that, then shut the fuck UP about it!”
Once again she hit the throttle, spurring the bike away from him. Once again, after a few hundred yards’ distance, she slowed to her former speed and resumed the dogged search.
And once again, after a long, long hesitation, Xander moved to follow her.
* * *
Dawn kept going well past what would have been a normal lunch time, but she did stop eventually. After the most recent disagreement, Xander had trailed her by fifty feet or so rather than jogging next to her, and he waited now at a comparable distance while she pulled out provisions and began her meal. She ignored him at first, but once she had eaten and settled back to relax for a bit, with occasional sips from a canteen, she gestured impatiently in his direction and said, “Don’t be such a douche. Get on over here.”
Xander complied, and as he sat down next to her he said, “I figured I wasn’t really welcome.”
“And you weren’t wrong,” Dawn shot back. “But enough’s enough. So, what’ve you been doing over the last two years?”
Xander thought about it. “Walked until I didn’t feel like walking anymore,” he told her. “Fought whenever some big ugly just had to have a fight, or when I wasn’t willing to let some civilians die. Found a place where people left me alone, and stayed here.” He had been speaking to the distance, but he looked at her now. “I don’t need anything. I don’t want anything. So, mostly, I haven’t been doing anything.”
Dawn’s nostrils flared briefly, but she didn’t say anything immediately. At length she observed, with ominous steadiness, “You know, you used to have a reputation.”
Not me, he thought but didn’t say. The guy you’re remembering, not the guy dropped into his life. Aloud he answered, “What, the magnet-
for- mystical- women business? Because that was never as big as —” “You’re not the one talking here,” Dawn interrupted. “That’d be me. I’ve got a point to make, so you need to get your mouth to do that not-
moving thing.” Xander shrugged, nodded, and waited. Dawn watched him for a moment, then continued. “So, Xander. The guy who’d put his life on the line in a split-
second if he thought somebody he cared for was being threatened. The guy who faced off against supernatural killers, Slayer- level threats, and not only kept surviving but actually beat them maybe one out of every five. The guy who was always there with a doughnut or a quip or a rom-com video or whatever it took to get you through whatever was wearing you down.” She raised her eyes to meet his. “The guy who, if you rubbed him wrong, would rip you to pieces by saying something totally vicious, totally horrible, and totally true.” Alarmed, Xander protested, “I never did that to you.”
“Maybe not, but I remember it, and you’re about to get a taste of your own medicine.” Dawn regarded him with a flat, pitiless gaze. “Okay, you decide you’re a danger to everybody you love. So first, you try to get them to kill you, ’cause that wouldn’t be the worst thing you could ever do to them. Then you pull away from everything, you try and kill yourself by pure zoning-
out, by not- being. And you sit alone in your little shack, out here in the ass-end of nowhere, obsessing about how you’re not human and you don’t deserve to live and the whole world would be better off without you …” She stood with explosive abruptness, and glared down at him in blistering contempt. “You’re acting just like Angel, you dumb shit!” Xander gaped at her, discovered his mouth was hanging open, and closed it. “Oh, Dawnie,” he said quietly. “That is low.”
“Fuck you,” she snapped back. “What he did to Buffy? you did that to everybody with your noble, self-
sacrificing, shitty grand gesture, and now I’m supposed to be all understanding because you were thinking of us when you did it, it was for our sake, and you can absolutely kiss my ass!” She leaned down over him, eyes seething. “I believe you care for us. I believe that. But you did what you did because it was easier than staying and dealing, and that was Not. For. US.” She was completely disregarding the reality of what he was, and Xander couldn’t blame her for that. He could manage it within his own mind, but talking with her here, now … his memories of her were Xander’s memories, and so he responded to her as Xander, making a muddle of both perspectives (Xander-
as- Xander, Xander- as- replicant) without anything vaguely resembling consistency. “Taste of my own medicine, huh?” He gave her the mildest hint of his old grin. “Gotta say you delivered on that one.”
“You deserve it.” She looked away. “You deserve worse.”
“Yeah, well,” he said. “You gotta remember, I haven’t exactly been myself lately.”
Dawn let out a little involuntary half-
choking laugh that turned into something more like a sob, and then she reached over suddenly to jerk the sword from the motorcycle scabbard and wheeled to strike down at him in a lightning continuation of the draw. It couldn’t have hurt him — might not even have broken through his skin — but Xander didn’t want to see the blade damaged and so he pushed it out of line with the palm of his left hand, saying, “Dawn, hey, hey, take it easy —” She used a twist of her body to bring the sword back around in a reverse- loop, and even though he was quicker, she hadn’t given him a chance to get his feet under him, so he just ducked and then came back up outside the arc of her swing. She struck backward at his face with the sword’s pommel and this time he didn’t bother to dodge, taking hold of the blade with his hands even as the hilt smashed into his cheek. He was still talking, trying to calm her, but she wasn’t paying any more attention to his words than he was, she let go of the sword and snatched the pistols from the holsters at her hips, leveling them and pulling the triggers at point-
blank distance. This was bad, ricochets might kill her, and Xander had already grabbed her wrists and turned the weapons outward so that the first bullets went past him, “Dawn, for God’s sake, chill, you could get hurt here!”, and she used his own grip to yank herself toward him so she could drive her forehead into his face in a ferocious head- butt. He let go, horrified by the impact he had felt, and she dropped stunned to her knees, the pistols falling from her slack fingers. Xander swept them off to the side with one foot and knelt next to her, steadying her while he looked for damage, this had been like that claymation Celebrity Deathmatch spoof that had Fiona Apple attacking the Blues Traveler guy, only what was funny on TV was no joke when it was Dawn slamming her head against fake-
Xander’s cyborg skull. Her eyes were blank as he turned her face toward him, and then they came into focus and awareness. “Are you okay? Jesus, Dawn, you took a hell of a knock there.” And then, anger springboarding from relief: “What’s the matter with you? What got into you? Have you lost your mind?” She stared back at him, still shaken physically but defiant and unapologetic. “I tried to kill you,” she said.
He brushed that away. “Doesn’t count, it never woulda worked and you knew it.”
“I still tried,” she insisted. “I didn’t give you any warning, I came at you when you weren’t expecting anything like that, all you could do was react.” Her gaze hardened into a glare. “And your reaction was defensive, just like you said about Buffy and Faith and the new Slayers. Everything in you, everything you had no time to think about, was about not hurting me.” She looked away from him. “You can’t hurt me. You could never hurt any of us, not by trying. No, you hurt us by walking away, letting us think you were dead, leaving us, and the whole thing was in your head.” Her voice fell to little more than a whisper. “It was for nothing. All of it was for nothing.”
It was nowhere near as simple as what she was saying, but that didn’t mean there was no truth to it. Xander looked for an answer, came back only with what had already proven inadequate. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Whether or not you believe it, I really am sorry.”
Dawn was still looking anywhere except at him. No anger in her voice now, only weariness, she said, “We spent two years grieving for you. ‘Sorry’ doesn’t take that away.”
She stood up, moving cautiously and visibly monitoring her own balance and stability. Xander watched with carefully masked concern; she’d hit him with the structurally strongest point of her skull, but that head-
butt had been serious business, and he’d have to keep an eye out for concussion. She recovered her pistols and re-holstered them, retrieved the sword and returned it to the motorcycle sheath. “I’ll be done with my checks by the end of the day,” she told him, swinging one leg over to mount the saddle of the motorcycle. “I’ll spend one more night, and then I’ll be on my way.” She started the engine, her face still stubbornly turned away from him. “And you … you can go to hell.” Xander nodded; another night would provide enough time for him to be decently sure she wasn’t carrying any lasting damage. Of course, her departure would also require him to make a decision. She might choose, for her own reasons, to not tell anyone about chancing across him, but realistically he had to assume that she’d pass the word upstairs. So: move out when she did, find a new place to try and preserve the isolation he had so long maintained? or just sit and wait for the inevitable, because there wouldn’t be anywhere TO hide once Willow knew he was still alive …?
He didn’t want to think about it, so instead he looked for a different subject. “I take it your Pikachu guys are allergic to trees?”
Dawn turned to frown at him, a substantial bruise already showing on her forehead. “What?” she said.
He couldn’t understand the blankness of her expression: not incipient brain trauma, just genuine honest incomprehension. “Well, you’ve been quartering the prairie for two days now, but you never bothered with the woods just half a mile east of my place, I’d have heard if you’d gone that way —”
Dawn’s eyes changed. Still not looking at anything, but focused now, where they hadn’t been a moment before. “Son of a bitch,” she said, and opened the throttle to zoom away, the drive wheel of the motorcycle spraying dust and sod in her wake. Xander followed, cursing, he could outrun a Slayer but it took him a bit to hit peak accel and Dawn was already breaking seventy, with only a few miles’ distance he’d be no more than a couple of minutes behind her but a hell of a lot could happen in very little time (as he knew far too well from hard and mortifying experience). He powered after her, head down and arms tucked to his sides, feet beating staccato on the crisp, dried grass.
The shots started a full thirty seconds before he reached the woods.
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