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 III

He broke through the outer fringe of trees to find a scenario well short of “worst possible” but definitely bad enough. The Pocahontas-something demons, he knew them even if he hadn’t known the name, he’d tangled with them before, and they were domesticators; like a medieval baron with his hounds and falcons, they trained clawed, bat-winged mini-gryphons and troupes of scuttling, badger-like ground creatures to attack on command, plus they threw foot-long darts with less range than arrows or even spears but an uncomfortable degree of accuracy. Not especially formidable in demonic terms (a squad of human infantry would have mopped them up with little effort), they had the advantage of Dawn in plain numbers, and the interference of the trees meant she had to expend her ammunition on the charging attack-beasts coming at her from every direction while their masters remained mostly concealed. He had already heard her empty the magazine of the AK in a sustained burst, probably to break the first charge, and then the shotgun, both now discarded, and was using her pistols (firing accurately with either hand, he noted approvingly) to hold back the onslaught. Even with combat reloads she could easily run dry before running out of opponents, and then it would be just her and the sword against multiple attackers —

Xander had taken in the situation in the first split-second glimpse, and his entry flowed into assault without a break in motion.

Disadvantages: his prime goal was to protect Dawn, and he couldn’t do that against so many enemies, not in this environment; he was quicker than a Slayer but not as nimble, and the trees slowed and impeded him; he hadn’t seen or worked with Dawn in years, their operating teamwork right now was at zero baseline. Advantage: these assholes couldn’t hurt him, not really, and he wouldn’t have cared anyway, so he could focus completely on the immediate mission.

Okay. Couldn’t shield Dawn from attack, so end the threat right damn now, and he dodged around the larger trees and smashed through the smaller ones, finding and killing the Pokemon-types lurking in concealment. Two gone, five, nine, with the number of hawks-and-hounds there had to be dozens of masters, and he forged through the shadowed undergrowth like a homing thunderbolt. Twelve, sixteen, nineteen, darts failed to penetrate his skin or hung in his clothes and then one caught him in the eye and motherfucker that hurt!, he blinked away tears and blood and kept up the relentless blitzkrieg. Targets getting thinner now, he spared a moment to rush back into the semi-clearing where Dawn had been fighting alone, and shattered badger-things with lightning kicks and bludgeoned gryphon-things from the air, a bullet clipped his elbow and Dawn snarled, “Shit!” (not, he bet, because she’d hit him but because she’d wasted a shot on not-an-immediate-threat), and then he was back into the brush, seeking out and extinguishing the remaining beastmasters.

None left, and he’d heard something there, and back into the clearing in time to see Dawn cleave the sword through the collarbone of the last Portapotty and down into its chest, the falling body nearly dragged the sword from her hands and she went down on one knee. Two others lay dead a few feet from her, they must have tried a last desperate charge while Xander slaughtered their fellows in the underbrush … and, on cue, the last nine of the attack-beasts leaped at Dawn with now-purposeless ferocity, and Xander killed them all in a hair under three seconds.

In the new quiet, he looked back to Dawn. She was still on one knee, leaning on the sword; side-tendrils of her hair had escaped from the braid and fallen across her face, and she was sucking in air in huge gulps, seemingly exhausted from the exertions of the last few minutes. “You okay?” he asked.

“I’m just fuckin’ perfect,” she gasped back. “Thanks for waiting this long to give a shit.”

It had bothered him before, but now he felt a sudden sharp anger: did she think this new, bad language meant anything except that she was coarsening herself with bad language? Flatly he said, “That was really dumb, tearing up here without me. You should have waited till we could come in together.”

“We’re not partners,” she said after a few more gulps of air. “I don’t owe you jack shit.” She seemed to slump a little over the prop of the sword. “But, yeah it was dumb. They must’ve had some kind of notice-me-not thing over where they were clustered together — pheromone-based, maybe, or even a minor enchantment — and I guess when you made me realize I’d been suckered, I lost my judgment in the backwash.” She sighed. “Not to mention I’d just finished banging my head against yours. Which I’m not sorry for one bit, but still.”

Xander’s anger faded as quickly as it had come. “Well, all right, then.” He looked around at the bodies littering the small clearing. “I don’t hear anybody running, or trying to sneak away, so looks like we got them all. You can check off a big ol’ MISSION ACCOMPLISHED and get back to … I don’t know, whatever.”

“Something like that.” Dawn took off her sunglasses, used a sweat-sodden sleeve to blot other sweat from her eyes. She didn’t seem to be in any hurry to push herself to her feet. “I’ll get on that in just a minute.” She sighed again, and sagged a little further over the sword. “Or … or maybe you could come over here and check this thing sticking out of my back.”

Xander stiffened. “What? What the what? Oh, crap!” He rushed to her side, circling her anxiously, afraid to touch her until he knew — Okay, yes, there: on her right side, just below the opening of the denim vest, one of the darts slanted downward-inward. Part of him was gibbering terror, the rest drily clinical, almost casual. No more than maybe five inches penetration, good (must have lost some velocity getting past/through the ribs), angle and depth just about guaranteeing a pierced lung but not enough (probably not. almost certainly not.) to break the pericardial sac. Heart would be bad, abdominal perforation less bad but much messier and more liable to cause complications … “How’s your breathing?” he asked. “Are you having any trouble, or are you just still coming down from, you know, the fun­thrilla­palooza of all-out battle to the death?”

“Right now, about half and half,” she said with just a bit of wheezing. “Hurts like a bitch, but I’m only a little short of breath. So you think it’s just the lung?”

Xander shook his head. “I wouldn’t want to bet my life on that,” he said. “Much less yours. But yeah, that’s what it looks like.” His mind was already spinning out to assess the larger implications of the situation: he didn’t know if there was even a doctor in the nearest town, and functioning surgical facilities were another matter entirely; he might need to transport Dawn an unknown distance, to an unknown location, with a wound of unknown severity; the motorcycle was not the best mode of travel under those circumstances, but it was the only one available just now —

“Saddlebag,” Dawn grunted. “Get the first aid kit and the blue pack next to it.”

Xander did as instructed; first aid wouldn’t be enough, but she sounded like she knew what she was doing. The ‘blue pack’ turned out to be a denim handbag folded over itself; still on one knee and still leaning on the sword, Dawn opened it and laid out three items, then took gauze pads, antiseptic ointment, a set of blunt-tipped scissors, and surgical tape from the first aid kit. One of the blue-pack items was a small tin of salve, which she rubbed onto her forehead and the backs of her hands; one was a bottle of murky liquid, which she upended and swallowed; the last, a cloth band, she had Xander tie around her neck while she muttered a quick incantation. “Okay,” she told Xander. “Use the scissors to cut away my vest and top.”

Xander obediently started in with the scissors, but couldn’t stop himself from protesting. “You’re going to try and treat it here? C’mon, Dawn, you need an ER team for this.”

“Yeah, well, don’t see one of those around anywhere, do you?” Dawn coughed weakly, spat out a bit of blood and sputum. “The potion kicks off quick healing, the ointment dials down the pain. I’d do this myself if it wasn’t in my back, and if you weren’t here I’d find a way regardless. You almost done?”

He was, the trickiest part having been cutting to and through where the dart protruded from the cloth, and he pulled the garments away from her now. She wasn’t wearing a bra, which made him feel a bit weird but meant he wouldn’t have to try and work around one. “Look, you’re wanting me to pull this out? I’m not sure that’s a great idea. If it’s holding a major blood vessel closed —”

“Then I’ll heal or I won’t.” She coughed again. “The neck band, it’ll send out a spell flare if my heart stops, and Willow will boom-tube here thirty seconds later. Mainly, I can’t stand having that thing inside me for as long as it would take to move me somewhere else. Get a good grip, okay?”

Xander took hold of the dart, four inches above where it jutted obscenely from her naked back. “I really, really hope you’re right on this. So, what, you want me to pull it out on three?”

“Three,” Dawn wheezed, and leaned far left-forward, the dart coming clear as her body tilted away from it. Xander gulped and cast the dart aside, snatching up gauze to blot the blood that welled from the ugly puncture. “Slather that with betadine,” Dawn gasped, “then lay a pad on it and tape it down. God, that hurts!”

“Well, no shit!” Xander blurted. “What did you expect? Damn it, Dawn!” Flustered and frazzled as he was, his hands moved with deft certainty, and the bandage was secured in under a minute. “Look, I’m all about respecting the whole ‘grll powr, tuff chik’ deal, but you were taking a huge chance there.”

“Done is done.” Using the sword as a prop, Dawn pushed herself up to her feet. “Hoo-o-oo, I think I’m starting to feel that magic-potion rush. Or else I’m about to pass out from blood loss.” She stood where she was for a moment, swaying slightly. “No, I’m totally tripping balls. Hey, can you look through my stuff and grab a spare t-shirt? It’s getting a little nippy out here.”

It took Xander only moments to find a shirt, which he passed over to her. “One, I invented that line. Two, I’ll admit it has more punch coming from you. Look, we still need to get you to a hospital.”

“No, not really.” Dawn wriggled into the t-shirt, flinching as she pulled it down over her right side. Finished, she turned to face him, and put her hands on his shoulders as she staggered a little. “I a’ready told you I’m covered by the magic pick-me-up. ’Sides, any hospital’d go apeshit if they tried to test the stuff zippin’ through my system right now.” Her eyes were not only unfocused, but very slightly crossed. “Nah, I’m jus’ tired. Jus’ need some place ta lie down.” She looked around at the bloodied clearing. “Don’ like it here. Wanna lie down.” She sagged abruptly, and Xander put his arms around her, holding her to prevent total collapse. Eyelids fluttering, she murmured, “Zoomy.”

He measured her pulse rate, found it somewhat accelerated but steady. Even if he didn’t entirely agree, her insistence actually made things easier. To transport her any appreciable distance, quickly enough, would have required securing the two of them together somehow and taking the motorcycle. Getting her back to his cabin, on the other hand, simply meant carrying her.

So he did.

It wasn’t far, he could have made it in under a minute unencumbered, but he didn’t want to chance opening her wound so he went smooth and slow. Dawn lay slack in his arms, either semiconscious or content to float in a happy, buzzing daze. During the brief trip, she only spoke three times.

In the first, she stirred vaguely and mumbled, “Warm. I loved you so much, you were just so warm.”

Okay. Xander had no idea how to respond to that — it was by no means certain she even recognized that she had spoken — so he made no reply, and she subsided into her previous silence.

In the second, this time without moving, she said blurrily, “Kyle. Not Ernie, Kyle.”

Fine. Good for Kyle.

In the third, he had actually reached the cabin, and was only a few feet from the door, when her body started shaking, and with her words he realized she was crying. “Sorry, so sorry,” she keened faintly, while tears ran down her face (sideways, from how her head was turned) and dripped off her ear. “Should’a been me, ’stead’a Anya. I’m sorry.”

Damn it, Dawn!

He got her inside, settled her into the bed he still occasionally used. He’d brought along her bedroll and saddlebags, and now he unzipped the sleeping bag to lay over her as a cover. Even though he didn’t know the mechanisms of the healing spell she had activated, it seemed a good idea to keep up her fluid volume, so he fed her a bottle of Gatorade from her supplies, she swallowing the small sips he gave her but never fully waking. When that was finished, he put his hand on her throat, thumb resting on the right jugular and fingers over the left carotid, and centered all his awareness on her breathing, pulse, temperature, the hydration and galvanic resistance of her skin, the water-vapor content of her exhalations, anything that might carry the least significance.

She moved now and then in the bed as she slept, as the hours passed and the sun went down. He never did, except to maintain his contact with her and his focus upon her.

*               *               *

Traditionally, the long-awaited let-out-your-breath-in-relief awakening was supposed to happen after the night was over: maybe just before sunrise, maybe after, maybe well after, but daytime one way or another. Symbolism, circadian rhythms, whatever, that was how it was supposed to happen. Naturally, Dawn came awake around three in the morning, moaned, and leaned over the side of the bed to vomit on the plank floor.

Xander wasn’t alarmed, exactly — there’d been no temperature spike or blood-pressure plummet to announce disaster — but that didn’t mean he felt no concern at all. “You okay?” he asked. “Do we need to be worried?”

“Water,” Dawn croaked. He gave her the canteen; she took a belt from it, swished it around to rinse her mouth, spat that out, then took five or six long swallows. “Spell hangover,” she told him, a bit too clearly to qualify as a mumble. Her voice was deathly. “You get used to it. Usually doesn’t hit me so hard, but then I usually don’t get stuck so deep.” She worked her face for a bit, as if trying to decide whether or not to throw up again. “What time is it?”

“Oh-dark-thirty,” Xander answered. “Few more hours till sun-up. You can sleep a little longer if you want to.”

“Maybe I will,” Dawn said, but she took hold of the headboard of the bed and pulled herself up into a sitting position. Halfway up, she seemed to feel the wound catch; she stopped, then finished out the motion, more carefully, assessing. “Better,” she announced. “Breathing’s better, too. Probably gonna live, then.”

“Kinda looking that way,” Xander agreed. “You need anything?”

Dawn picked up the unzipped sleeping bag and wrapped it around herself like a blanket, took another few swallows from the canteen. Then she looked down at it, frowned for a moment. “You brought my stuff?” she asked him.

“Some of it,” Xander said. “What I could carry, along with you.”

Dawn nodded understanding. “So, not the bike.”

“No. Sorry.”

“Could …” Dawn bit her lip. “Could you go get it for me? I mean, I doubt anybody’s going to steal it from the middle of the woods in the middle of the night, but I’d just feel better if everything was here.”

Xander considered. He’d been following her condition for hours, without noting any danger signs; Dawn was awake, aware of her inner state, and apparently satisfied with it; he could be back with the bike in less than ten minutes; and, she was still wearing the neck-band to send out a Willow-alert in case she had one of those Help, I’ve died and I can’t get up! moments while he was gone. “Sure,” he said, standing. “Be right back. You just rest, okay?”

It wound up taking him the full ten minutes: only a few extra seconds to find and secure the sword and shotgun, but more than that to work out the operation of the motorcycle. (Clutches had never been his friend.) When he got back, Dawn was sitting in the cabin’s only chair, still huddled in the blanket. “All gear present and accounted for,” he reported to her. “Feeling any better?”

She shrugged. “Tolerable.” Her earlier angry attitude seemed to be on indefinite hold somewhere; she looked tired, and solemn, and much younger. “I … it’s probably as much psychological as anything else, but I could really go for some chicken soup right now.”

“Sure thing,” Xander said. “I mean, that’s if you have any in your supplies. Yeah? good. And I’ll have to make a fire to heat it up, so that’ll be a little longer, sorry.”

Dawn shrugged again. “I can drink it cold if I have to, but yes, I’d rather wait for hot.”

Her camp kit, while minimalist, was inclusive enough that he had no problem in preparing the soup. He brought it to her, watched while she sampled it and then began to eat in small spoonfuls. Her color was good. Everything seemed to be good. She did, however, appear to be not particularly eager to look at him.

“That last day in Sunnydale,” he said. She glanced up at him. “When we set everybody in place so we could start the big showdown. We had a reason for putting you and Anya where we did.”

Dawn’s mouth set, her nostrils flaring slightly. “Oh, hell. I said something, didn’t I? I was hoping I’d hallucinated that part.” She shook her head. “So, what was it? What did I let out when I didn’t have any better sense?”

“You said you were sorry about Anya,” Xander answered. “And you mentioned somebody named Kyle, and somebody named Ernie.”

“Er–…?” Dawn stopped. “Oh. Oh, I get it. And that was out loud?”

“Only a few seconds here and there.” The part about how much she’d loved him — assuming she’d been talking about him at the time — didn’t really need to be mentioned. “The thing is … we needed everybody, couldn’t spare anybody, but we still had two reasons for where we set the two of you. The main reason was the one we told you: last line of defense, hopefully enough to take out any stragglers that made it past the other lines.” He drew a breath. “The other reason, though, the one Buffy and I never said — but we looked at each other and we both knew that we both knew — was that it was the best chance we could give the two of you to make it out alive.”

Dawn’s eyes brimmed with unfallen tears, but her voice was steady. “And I did,” she said. “And Anya didn’t. And … I’m not going into details here, unless you want me to, but she died saving me.”

“Good for her.” Dawn looked at him in startlement, and he went on. “I loved Anya, and I miss her, and I still hate myself some for all the time I lost with her by being stupid. But, if it had been her who lived, and you who died —” He couldn’t explain it, he knew it was true but he couldn’t find the words, so “That … that would have been worse.”

Dawn weighed that, and blessedly didn’t ask for clarification. She only said, “It doesn’t stop me from feeling guilty.”

Xander nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “We’ve all got something.”

Something happened with her face, and Xander was afraid she would actually start crying, which would infuriate her and make all this harder. Instead she yawned hugely, suddenly and literally trembling with exhaustion. He helped her get back to the bed, and swaddled her in the sleeping bag, and (again, and contrary to her orders from the night before) watched while she slept.

Well, except for the brief time he spent cleaning the section of the floor where she’d thrown up, because come on.

It was far into the morning when she woke the second time: well short of noon, but still far enough along that she needed more than the chicken soup she’d already had. She prepared and ate the meal without paying him much attention, not ignoring him but focused elsewhere. Likewise, Xander found himself with nothing to say. Their time together was about to end, and there was no avoiding it but he wasn’t looking forward to the return to solitude, no matter how much that was how it had to be. Finished eating, Dawn inspected her equipment and supplies, repacked some things and resettled them on the motorcycle (the sword and shotgun, for instance, were concealed rather than placed for ready access, and likewise with the pistols in their holsters).

“Okay,” she said at last. “That should leave enough room.” She looked at him directly for the first time since rising. “You’ll have to sit in front, though, which means you’ll be driving.”

What?

“What?” Xander said. Then, “I … I don’t know how to work a motorcycle.”

“You got it back here, didn’t you?” Dawn dismissed his protest with a flick of one hand. “We’ll build on that. Get real; you can’t keep running alongside me, that’s okay for the boonies but eventually we’ll be passing through civilized territory. And I’m not sitting up front, with you hanging on behind me and twisting yourself into a pretzel to keep your hands from getting within three feet of my boobs. So that means you drive.”

“Dawn … that can’t happen.” He shook his head. “I can’t go back. You know why, I’ve told you why.”

“Yeah, and I’m calling bullshit on all that.” Dawn fixed his eyes with her own. “It wasn’t Ernie, Xander.”

“I know,” he said. “Kyle, not Ernie. I got that.”

“No, I mean it wasn’t Ernie.”

“Makes no difference to me,” Xander said. “I don’t know who those guys are.”

“Yeah, you kinda do.” Dawn sighed. “After you … after we lost you, we couldn’t really talk about it. Those of us you mattered most to, it just hurt too much. Andrew, though, he kept coming up with theories to explain it, or explain it away, or just plain rewrite reality. Crazy stuff, straight out of Star Trek and comic books and all the different ways to make somebody not actually be dead anymore. And then when Willow got what she did from cellular analysis of your arm, well, he basically went berserk on that. Started going on about this old X-Men storyline, ‘Days of Future Past’ —”

“Yeah, I remember that one,” Xander said. “Back in the Claremont days, when Kitty Pryde was still pretty new; future-Magneto got future-Jean Gray’s daughter to send future-Kitty’s forty-five-year-old mind back into thirteen-year-old Kitty’s 1981 body to stop this big, looming disaster …” He shook his head. “Not my sitch at all.”

“Well, Andrew basically used that as a jumping-off point,” Dawn said. “I didn’t know that at the time, though, because Willow flat told Andrew to cut it out. Drop the subject, leave it alone, just stop talking.” Dawn seemed to draw into herself slightly at the memory. “She didn’t go veiny and black-eyed, nothing like that, but Andrew could remember back when she was like that, so he shut up. Last year, though, he and I were partnered on something, and he worked up the nerve to tell me he’d meant to compare the ‘Days of Future Past’ thing to a different story: a little sci-fi short about a man who sent his older, beefed-up body back in time for his younger mind to wake up in, so he’d be strong enough to save his wife from an accident that hadn’t happened yet.” Dawn gave Xander a raised eyebrow. “That’s the kind of explanation Andrew was trying to offer us, before Willow shut him down.”

“Sounds like Andrew, all right,” Xander agreed. “Except what we’ve got here and now isn’t a more muscular Xander, it’s a mechanical-biological patch-up, and sorry, popular culture offers a better example of one of those going back in time to change the past —” And then he stopped.

“And now he gets it,” Dawn mused. “That’s what I’m saying. You’re not the Terminator, coming back to doom the future, you’re Reese, coming back to save it. Kyle, not Arnie.”

The thought was stunning, seductive, dangerous. Xander shook it away. “My killer-cyborg body says otherwise.”

“Right, the thing that does a Jim-dandy job of killing demons and never kills anything else.” She leaned toward him. “Ninety-plus-year-old DNA, now, that’s the clincher. Somewhere in the future, an old, old Xander reworked his whole body so that what he sent back could kick the crap out of the First’s Turok-han army: save the world, and — probably more important to any Xander anywhere — save Buffy. If anybody, anybody could be that dedicated, that dogged, that obsessed, that purely damn stubborn, it’d be Xander.”

He opened his mouth to argue, but he couldn’t think of any argument, couldn’t think of anything to say, couldn’t think. His mind was blank, and full of whirling thought, full of fear and yearning and disbelief and a terrible need to believe. He’d shut it away for years, refusing even to let himself recognize the desire, but now there was no escape.

“That first day,” he said to her. “Out on the prairie, when you rode around that little hill and I was waiting there … you told me the First showed up as me, years ago, to jerk people around some more. Why didn’t you think I was the First, when you saw Dead Xander standing there looking dopey?”

Dawn’s expression went blank, and then shifted to intrigued. “Huh. You know what, it just plain never occurred to me. How about that. So, are you done stalling? you ready to go yet?”

Xander shook his head. “You’re not going to give me a choice on this, are you?” he asked, almost despairing.

She let out a little not-quite-hysterical yip of laughter. “You never had a choice in this, Xander, not from the first moment I knew you were still alive. Face facts here: you’ll come with me now, or Willow will come and get you herself as soon as she knows. And she would know, I couldn’t hide it from her if I tried, she’d know as soon she saw me. You cut yourself out of our lives, like a big dumb-ass, but now you’re back, and that’s not changing.”

Xander’s shoulder’s slumped. “What if you’re wrong?” he asked quietly. “What if, as soon as I’m among Slayers again, the targeting radar comes online and I start killing?”

“Then we’ll kill you,” she said promptly. He stared at her, and she shrugged. “We won’t need to, though, because there’s just no way Xander, any Xander, would ever let anybody hurt ‘his girls’.”

He wished he could have her confidence, but she was right about one thing: it was inescapable now. Fate had come calling, and it wasn’t about to take no for an answer.

“Well, okay, then,” he said at last.

“Right.” Dawn gestured at the motorcycle. “You’re in front, like I said. We’ve got a ways to go, and I need to be thinking about how I’ll tell everybody we’re on our way in. We don’t want to spring this on them without any advance warning, but letting them know what’s coming …” She tilted her head to one side, eyes narrowing in speculation. “Yeah, that’s going to be tricky.”

Xander moved as directed, straddling the motorcycle. A moment later, Dawn nestled in behind him, arms around him to overlap across his chest. The touch was shockingly intimate, but how else was she going to hold on? (And again she’d been right, he’d have gone insane trying to find a safe place to put his hands.) He hadn’t the vaguest idea of what route they would follow, but he knew where it would end —

He was resigned to doom. He was on fire with joy. He was exhilarated. He was terrified.

He was going home.


– end –

Questions? Comments? Any feedback is welcome!
 

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