TITLE: Faithless Bitch

AUTHOR: Polly Burns

WEBSITE: http://rednotebook.tripod.com/polly

SUMMARY: The First tries to get in some more quality time tormenting Andrew, but Andrew’s already doing its job for it.

SPOILER WARNINGS: “Conversations with Dead People”, “Never Leave Me”, “Storyteller”, references to events of “The Pack” and “Villains” through “Grave”.

RATING: Loose R, for references to m/m sex (including Andrew/his brother) and possibly disturbing images. And bad words, obviously, as you can tell by the title.

DISCLAIMER: Oh, just for fun, let’s pretend that I did make up these characters. Ooh, yeah, that was fun. Now, back to reality- you’re all smart people out there, everyone and their mom already knows that Andrew, Xander, etc. are all the sole intellectual property of Joss Whedon and that I don’t write for the damn show. Cos if I did, I think that it would be turning out quite differently…

And The Simpsons obviously belong to Matt Groening.

NOTES: This is the homely middle sibling in my ‘Xandrew’ series. It’s a fairly sedate affair- no Tori Amos lyrics, no incest (well, not much), no graphic, acrobatic sex (I know, I miss it, too), no dead sociopaths walkin around like they’re people… Oh, and I don’t know if the First can read minds, but it can in this story. If it can’t, I bet that it wishes that it could.

Faithless Bitch

Bile, the lemon-quarter tastes like, close to its peel. Its peel is like a shell, like the covering of a kind of an aquatic animal, something prehistoric… Largely defenseless… Andrew sucks at the lemon-flesh, though the juice has mostly already been extracted. Most people don’t like lemon on its own, but Andrew does.

Dawn walks by, makes a face. “How can you stand that?”

“Dunno, I just like it.”

Shaking her head like a pony, “You’re weird,” Dawn laughs. Her voice is like perfume, light on the air, so sweet it couldn’t possibly be natural. She is without malice when she speaks to him now. Silently, Andrew loves her for it.

Lately, he’s been feeling like he did that time that he fell down the stairs and landed on his tailbone. For about ten seconds, he hadn’t been able to make a sound, but once he recovered his voice, he’d let out a wail the likes of which he still has not heard again. And Andrew’s heard a lot people make some awful sounds. Lately, he’s been feeling like he did in the days after the fall, like he can almost feel himself healing, his own body putting him back together. It… hurts.

He tosses the exsanguinated lemon toward the trashcan, misses, bends over, picks it up, drops it in with the rest of the garbage. Idly, he leans backwards against the counter, tries to put all of his weight on his hands and lift his feet off of the ground. Can’t. Downstairs, the mini-slayers are practicing headstands and back-flips and lots of other things that Andrew can’t do. Sometimes, he finds himself impaled on envy, envy works him like the spindle against Sleeping Beauty’s finger. Envy is stuck in him all the way through and turns him- Sometimes, honestly, he wishes that he were Buffy. Not because she’s a girl- well, not entirely, but that is another unhappy problem- but because she can do something, something that matters. The most Andrew can hope for is to be killed in a useful way, that one of the Bringers will be distracted by him and fail to decapitate Buffy, or one of the Potentials, or Willow, or Xander or Anya or Spike. Obviously, this is cold comfort; Andrew likes his head. And he’s pretty sure that when he dies, he’s going to hell. No matter how much he wants to make amends for all of the horrible things he’s done, he still doesn’t want to go to hell. He doesn’t want to die.

So he does the opposite of dying, he moves. He pushes away from the kitchen counter, he walks, he walks into the living room and sits, he sits down next to Xander.

“Whatcha doin?” he asks Xander, who doesn’t seem to be doing too much of anything.

“Enjoying the silence.” He closes his eyes and smiles with his lips together in a way that does something to Andrew’s stomach.

“You can still hear them, in the basement.”

Xander opens one eye. “Yes, but I like to pretend that I can’t.” He closes the eye.

“Should I go?” If he were serious about not wanting to disturb Xander, he would have just left, but what Andrew really wants to is to be told that he can stay right where he is.

And Xander’s eyes, both of his eyes, open; he sweeps his eyes over Andrew and says, “No, you’re all right.” There is such unspoken sympathy, there, that Andrew wants to throw himself on the floor and weep for it. “Anyway,” Xander continues, “The Simpsons is on in, like, ten minutes, so it would be good if you stuck around. That way, if the Potentials get done training and want to watch something, I figure that we may not be able to overpower them, but we can certainly die trying.”

If Andrew has to die, he wouldn’t mind so much if it happened while he is next to Xander.

“Dude, you have got some serious problems,” says a voice in his head, bent, as all of the voices in his head seem invariably to be, into the shape of Jonathan’s. The voice isn’t so much in his head, though, as right next to him. The First Evil, in its Jonathan suit, is standing by the wall, trying its damndest to look as though it’s casually leaning against it. Andrew knows that the First can’t lean, being incorporeal, and that’s humorous to him, somehow.

“Yeah, that’s real funny,” snorts not-Jonathan, and Andrew wishes that this thing didn’t know how to read minds. “You know what else is funny?”

No, Andrew says to himself, knowing that the First can hear it. He turns his head the slightest bit, to see if Xander somehow knows what’s happening. He doesn’t appear to.

“You. You’re so fucking predictable.” Sadly, the First shakes its Jonathan-looking head.

What do you mean?

“First Tucker, then Warren, Jonathan, that guy in that Gangs of New York movie,” the First raises its Jonathan eyebrows in a tickled show of incredulity, “now Xander- get a new type, Andrew, this one’s obviously no good for you.”

Type? He looks toward the First and then back toward Xander.

“Don’t play dumb, I know that you know what I’m talking about. It’s so… pathetic, that’s what it is, watching you get hurt over and over again, want to get hurt over and over again. You’re like those women who date men exactly like their abusive fathers. Not that I’m complaining, cos, hey, people getting hurt- good times.” First Jonathan gives him a winning smile.

Andrew is silent.

Sighs the First, “I know that you’re just trying to find Tucker again. I mean, buy a clue, Andrew- dark hair, pale skin, likes to be mean to you, that’s Tucker and that was Warren and that was Jonathan and that’s Xander, too.”

Xander’s not mean. Even Andrew knows that this isn’t true. Sure, he’s being nice now, letting Andrew sit by him, but Andrew knows that at any time, he’s only a hair’s breadth away from being called an idiot, or a murderer. Nobody in the house has let him forget what he did, because they can’t let themselves forget it. Nobody gets off easily in that place- except possibly Spike. But it looks like the answer to the unasked question, Who do I have to bang to get some redemption in this place? is Buffy. And Andrew’s not even certain how he feels about the idea.

“He’s not going to love you,” continues Jonathan, no, the First- Andrew has to remember who it is that’s really speaking. “Just like Tucker didn’t really love you. And you know that Warren didn’t. And Jonathan, he couldn’t, could he. Nobody could love you, and do you know why that is?”

Uh-uh, Andrew gives a slight jerk of the head. Xander’s turned on the television.

“Because you’re sick, because you’re a parasite, you’ll cling to anybody or anything that will make you forget yourself. Because you don’t even like yourself,” First Jonathan’s voice flattens to the tinny whine that Andrew remembers very well, “You’re rotten on the inside, worse than people like Willow and Spike. At least they killed out of genuine feeling or need. You knew that it wasn’t Warren asking you to kill Jonathan, but you did it, anyway. You’re just a killer, that’s all that there is to you.”

Andrew lowers his eyes and sucks his upper lip into his mouth. He whispers, “I know.”

“Huh? What did you say?” Xander’s looking at him, expectantly.

“Nothing.”

“Some of us prefer illusion to despair.”

Xander laughs openly; his laugh actually sounds like ha ha ha ha ha. Andrew’s quiet. It’s strange hearing yourself come out of the mouth of a cartoon. As Nelson takes back his picture of Snow White, Andrew can’t help but think of Warren. Hair as black as coal and lips as red as fresh blood and skin as white as snow. Slyly, he folds his gaze dime-thin and looks toward Xander. Hairasblackascoallipsasredasfreshbloodandskinaswhiteassnow. Maybe the First is right, maybe he is just looking for his brother again, both to remake and to undo that initial mistake. Maybe memory’s a glass coffin, and he’s always just standing by, looking into that face, deadened by time—

Sometimes, Andrew honestly cannot stand his own thoughts.

When night, earnest, formal night, comes down, he’s sleeping close to Xander, half by accident and half by design and half by- But, no, that’s three halves. Our chief weapon is fear- fear and surprise. Sometimes, when Andrew’s in the grip of that kind of suicidal mirth that brings him another degree closer to cracking like a candy Easter egg, he thinks of the Bringers as being a less-funny version of the Spanish Inquisition sketch. Our chief weapon is fear- fear and surprise…

But he’s lying close to Xander, so everything seems a shade less frightening. It’s completely irrational, but he feels safe next to Xander, when he can hear his breaths become long and slow, weaving themselves into a silken train. He has deranged fantasies about Xander’s body against his-- holding him. After all of the things that he’s done, all Andrew wants is to be held. What does one call that? It’s maybe more perverted than anything else he could think of. Cos sex is just sex, it doesn’t have a meaning unless you give it one, but holding somebody, the way that Andrew wants Xander to hold him- that is the meaning. Even in his mind, he’s cautious; Andrew tries not to breathe all that loudly.

In the nights, when he’s naked and defenseless against his thoughts and his memories, he just gives up. Memory’s spindle. He remembers Tucker’s hands on him, skin soft as the inside of a shell, when you rub at it enough. Being turned this way and that, molded like a breath. Being kissed on the mouth, which seemed dirtier than all of the rest combined. Hands flat on Tucker’s shapeless hips as he sucked him off.

It’s not because he’s a murderer that he can expect never to be loved- well, not only because of that, anyway. There are some things worse than murder, Andrew’s coming to understand.

That feeling, like something inside of him has sprung a leak, been ruptured, that feeling of internal seepage. Of liquefication, that he’s breaking up on the inside. That he’s breathing liquid, something thick like honey. It’s sweet like honey, that raw pain, it leaves the same full sting as honey does in the back of his throat. When he thinks of Jonathan. When he thinks of Mexico.

At first, they’d just been trying to pass the time- or that’s what they would have told anyone who asked, anyway- if they were able to get over the shock at being caught doing what they were doing. But, no, there are lots of things to do to pass the time before it occurs to two people to take off their clothes and fuck. It wasn’t a boredom thing. Their lovemaking came out of something more insidious even than smoke-thin, black boredom, it came from fear. When you’re a thousand miles away from everything that you know, and you think that you could die at just about any minute, the number of things that you just. will. not. do. becomes smaller and smaller. It only took a month in Mexico before Jonathan and Andrew were doing each other.

The cloying, the honeyed pain in Andrew’s ribcage is like Jonathan’s sweetness turned, fermented, rotted. Like at least part of Jonathan is buried inside of Andrew. The thought is disturbing to Andrew in myriad ways. He turns onto his other side, so that he faces away from Xander.

Andrew remembers the back of Jonathan’s neck, he liked to brush his lips against one place in particular, over and over again, become hypnotized by the velvetness of Jonathan’s skin. Tequila-scented kisses, tequila so cheap it tasted like rubbing alcohol. The blaze of contact that seemed to cauterize Andrew’s every nerve. Jonathan with his tired, cocoa scent and grayish-sounding sighs.

Kinda makes plunging that dagger into him take on a whole new kind of nastiness. Slick, that particular memory coats Andrew’s mind. It’s almost tangible, that mental film, so much so, that he begins to feel ill at the thought of it. That scent of stagnant water.

Ungainly in the dark, he pulls himself up, already tasting bile and the melange of everything he had for dinner. He sprints to the bathroom, which is miraculously unoccupied- I swear, some of these girls have bladders the size of jelly beans, Anya had sniped, that morning-- There, under florescent light that has the texture of pulverized glass, he vomits. And chokes and hacks. And vomits some more. Letting go of a liquid sigh, he falls to his knees in front of the toilet. The corners of his eyes sting.

There’s a soft tap against the door.

“Just a minute,” he says dry-throated, then drinks tap water from his cupped hand, spits.

When he opens the door, it’s Xander at the other side. His sudden appearance makes what just happened worse, somehow. Feeling ashamed, Andrew looks at the division between carpet and tiles.

“Are you all right?” Xander whispers.

Weakly, Andrew raises his head to indicate the affirmative. Xander nods toward the inside of the bathroom and Andrew steps back so that Xander can pull the door closed.

“Did you throw up?”

Eyes closed, Andrew shakes his head, yes.

“Are you sick?”

“I don’t think so,” he ventures. His throat feels like Spike just used it as an ashtray.

Before he can stop him, Xander places the back of his hand against Andrew’s forehead. “You feel kind of hot.”

“I’m all right.” Suddenly, he’s all fidgety. As much as he likes Xander touching him, this doesn’t feel right. He wriggles away from Xander, toward the door.

“If you want to talk about something,” he says to Andrew’s back, “You, I mean… I’m here.” Crushing his eyes shut for a moment, Andrew stops moving, then turns around slowly.

“Wh-why?” then, what he’s been wanting to say since the beginning, “Why do you care?” Absently, he places his hands on his hips. “Why do you make me stay here, even though you all hate me? Why don’t you just let me die?” As soon as he expels all of the words, he’s very sorry. Tearing and hot, his eyes unfocus.

“I don’t know about anyone else,” Xander says gently, “but I don’t hate you. If you think you’re the only person in the world who ever did something that they regret, you aren’t.”

Andrew has nothing to say to this.

Xander laughs, but somehow Andrew can tell that it’s not at him. “When I was sixteen, I was possessed by a hyena spirit and I attacked Buffy, I tried to eat Willow. Anya’s killed more people than I’ve known in my whole life. And you know all about what Willow did.”

“Yeah, but,” Andrew makes a helpless sound, “it’s different.” His voice flattens and shatters like new glass at the end.

Xander shakes his head. “It’s really not. You made a mistake. Obviously, you aren’t going to make the same one again. I’m not saying that what you did was all right, or excusable, or something like that, but I don’t hate you for it.”

“Why are you being so… nice to me?” Andrew whines. Sometimes, he honestly hates the sound of his voice. He swallows hard against all the salt and water that want to flood out of him.

“Because,” Xander shrugs, “That’s just the kind of guy I am, I guess. I can’t do what Buffy and Willow do, so this is what I do. I’m understanding-guy. Or something.”

For a second, Andrew sees what Xander was like when he was younger, before he had any way of fathoming all the crazy shit that happened around him everyday.

And because Xander’s so adept at dealing with crazy shit, that makes it all right. When Andrew puts his arms around him, he doesn’t even twitch. Andrew doesn’t feel himself begin to weep, but he must have started because his face is wet and the place where he pressed his eyes into Xander’s tee shirt is wet, and he can no longer breathe through his nose.

“I’m sorry,” he says, wiping his eyes on his sleeve.

“It’s okay,” Xander tells him, in a voice that is to Andrew like all that is good and right distilled into sound. He hands Andrew some toilet paper. The way that he holds it makes it look like a rose.

After Andrew blows his nose, Xander pulls him close anew. It’s not right- he knows that he doesn’t have any right to feel… absolved, or whatever it is when you stop feeling like the sum total of all of the shitty, mean, horrible things that you’ve done in your life. Cos he still hasn’t paid for a damn thing, just shed some tears, which in the currency of penance is pocket change. So he begins to cry again, because he really doesn’t want to die. And spills as much against Xander’s sodden shoulder.

“You’re not going to die, Andrew,” he says as though it were common sense, and pats the back of Andrew’s head.

“No, but I have to… He loved me, and I killed him.”

Now Xander twitches. “You mean Jonathan?”

“Ye-yes. Or I think he did- I don’t know,” he wails. Hopefully, nobody heard.

Xander doesn’t say anything for a moment- it’s just a little moment, but it’s stiff and still as eternity. Then, “We all hurt people that we love.”

Wet, “That’s not good enough.”

Xander makes him lift his head. “It has to be. You can’t go through life feeling this way all of the time. You just have to do your best, try to make up for it. Nothing just happens all of a sudden, there’s no big punishment, and that’s it. Sometimes it’s just living…”

Andrew nods, because he wants that to be true. He doesn’t want to go to hell, even though that’s probably where he should be.

“Good,” Xander says, his voice made of the same satiny mercy as the night air. Before Andrew can blink, he presses his lips to his forehead. When Xander pulls away, then he blinks. “Do you feel better?”

“Sort of.” It’s not so much that he feels better, just that now, his entire life is pinned to that kiss.

Xander pats his cheek lightly. There’s so much behind that gesture, real or imagined, that Andrew feels himself swimming with it. While he can only stare, mouth slightly ajar, Xander smiles at him tells him to go out first- I still have some business to take care of.

Somehow, Andrew gets back to where he lay earlier; his steps and movements are swallowed up by the seconds that pass so that he can’t recall walking from the bathroom to the living room. It’s wrong, he knows, for him to feel so… if there were a word for it, it wouldn’t be like ‘happy’ or ‘sad’, it would be like velvet or Morocco, a sound you feel and not just hear- But, at any rate, it’s wrong for him to feel anything but the burning morass of his own guilt and wretchedness. He just can’t help it, though.

And, now, there’s this new thing. The closest he’s able to come to describing it is that it is like the third time Warren kissed him. The first time, he’d been too freaked out to enjoy it, and the second he thought might be the last, but the third was perfect. It’s like that, like the moment before, when it was just him and Warren and there was no madness or horror standing between them. That’s perhaps the closest that he’s ever felt to innocent. It hurts, with a new kind of pain, because he feels like he lost something, gave something up. Thinking of Xander kissing his forehead stabs into him as surely as thinking about what he did to Jonathan- Seems like he can never win. Since he’s screwed no matter what-

He lifts himself off the floor again, when he hears the far-off Shhh of the toilet flushing, and he’s standing in the hallway when Xander exits the bathroom. Xander doesn’t say anything to him, and they just stare into each other’s faces in the dark. It’s easier because of the dark, in which Xander’s brown irises are sections of night in heavy syrup and his breath is the sound of footsteps on grass and his mouth opens soft against Andrew’s and his hand is against Andrew’s neck.

The darkness around them is as soft as carbon, as a kid glove, as the breath, the forgetful passage of time.