This story is a sequel to my fall_for_sx 2005 story, They Tell Me it Rained

Thanks, as usual, to reremouse for reading and offering enthusiastic encouragement.

If you'd like to know whether or not this story has a happy ending before you start, click here

Over a Cardboard Sea

by
Savoy Truffle

Part One

He’s a cliché.

He is such a fucking cliché and he should try to be more original about his pain but that’s the thing about clichés—when your life goes to hell, they somehow end up seeming like the right thing to do. They’re there for you when you’re too fucked up to be original. And anyway, why not?

When you get divorced after fifteen years of being married to a woman you never wanted to be married to in the first place, why not bury yourself in work? Why not take every business trip offered and some that aren’t just so you don’t have to spend more than a night or two a week in your standard-issue bachelor-again apartment with its two bedrooms so you can call the second one your daughter’s and fill it with bribes so that she’ll have to still love you when she should probably hate you even though she doesn’t… yet?

And when you look down at your palm pilot one day as the plane is landing in a city that makes your heart pound every time you so much as hear it mentioned and you realize that you’ll be turning forty at midnight, why not go down to the hotel bar at ten p.m. and start with whiskey—because the beer isn’t cutting it anymore—so you can be on your sixth-or-is-it-seventh drink by the time the minute hand joins the hour hand at the twelve?

Why not? Isn’t that the proper way to ring in a midlife crisis?

Xander lifts his glass and tips it in the direction of the clock on the wall over the bar.

A toast.

To the wasting of the best years of my life.

Except that’s not it at all.

Xander has no reason to mourn forty. Hell, he never expected to make it to forty—figured he’d be lucky if the world made it to the day he was supposed to turn forty. But here they are—him and the world—both still around to ring in the big four-oh.

Xander knocks back the drink in his hand and signals the waitress to bring him another. It’ll probably be the last one, but she doesn’t know that and she’s giving him this look like ‘you’re such a cliché’ or maybe it’s ‘wanna invite me up after my shift?’ but Xander can’t tell and it doesn’t matter because he doesn’t want her, though he’d settle for the bartender, who’s a little more his style, in the sense of having a dick if nothing else. But even if he could catch the bartender’s eye, he wouldn’t because this is his last drink and when he gets upstairs, he’s sure to pass out, which is definitely the goal, but tends not to make for what you’d call a “successful” one night stand. And besides, doing the bartender really would make him a cliché.

Because the thing is, he’s not the cliché they think he is.

He’s not drinking himself to sleep because it’s his fortieth birthday; he’s drinking himself to sleep because he’s in LA.

And he’s not afraid that his life is over… he’s afraid it has to begin.

Part Two

Xander wakes the next morning to a sound which is either an air horn in his ear or his cell phone on the nightstand. Sounds like the former, but reason—or whatever’s passing for reason inside his fuzzy head—suggests the latter. Xander gropes the nightstand until his hand closes around the phone, pushes ‘talk’ as he brings it to his unpillowed ear.

“’Lo?”

He doesn’t realize until he hears the wrong voice that he was expecting Farida. The days of receiving daily updates from his daughter—either in person or on the phone when he was out of town—are long, long gone. Gone the way of school and the soccer team and her friends and boys and a thousand other things that conspire to eclipse a father who was once the sun and the moon. It’s the circle of life, or something like that, and Xander understands but it seems that old habits die hard—particularly on the morning of your fortieth birthday when you’re hung over and depressed.

“Happy birthday!” Willow says, in a valiant effort to shatter Xander’s eardrums.

“Fuck,” Xander says. “What time is it?”

“Well somebody woke up on the wrong side of the birthday bed this morning.”

“Will…” Xander warns—growls, really, but that’s mostly because his throat feels like a desert that something died in.

“Okay, okay. Los Angeles time or London time?”

Xander struggles to remember which one’s who. “My time,” he says.

“Eight twenty-two a.m.,” Willow says and it’s annoying that she can rattle off the time in another time zone when Xander can barely remember which time zone he’s actually in or even the date, let alone the hour.

“So, no exciting birthday plans, I take it?”

Right, it’s his birthday, which makes the date not so much of a mystery anymore.

“I’m pretty sure I have a meeting,” he says, because that’s what waking up in a hotel usually means. “Does that count?” Something occurs to him. “Hey, do you happen to know when my meeting is?”

“Ten a.m.”

Xander does something resembling math in his head and decides that he has enough time to bring himself back to something resembling life and maybe even figure out where his meeting is before it starts. Unless…

“Hey, you wouldn’t happen to know where my meeting is, would you?”

“In your hotel.”

Which is definitely of the good. Xander doesn’t know how Willow knows these things, but it can be handy. He likes to think it’s magic, but suspects it’s something mundane and annoying like her actually having her shit together.

But, hey, at least he’s awake.

“Look, Will, thanks for calling, but I think I’d better get in the shower. No one likes to give their rare books or magical artifacts or state secrets or whatever to a poorly groomed man.”

Xander laughs at himself, but his heart’s not in it. There’s quiet on the other end of the line, then:

“Xander, I’m—”

“I’m fine, Will. I promise. I’ll talk to you later, okay?”

He hangs up before she can answer.

Part Three

Xander’s pretty sure no one bothered to tell him his meeting was with Angel. He thinks he would have remembered that. He knows that if he had been told and had remembered, he’d have cleaned up a little better than he did.

And, okay, it’s a more than a little pathetic that, after twenty years, he still cares about looking good for Angel, but pathetic and Xander seem to be BFF lately.

And, oh, not looking good for Angel, looking good around Angel.

It’s a crucial distinction.

And it’s maybe a good thing he didn’t know the meeting was with Angel, because now he gets to look like he wasn’t trying too hard, which is always a good way to go. As opposed to looking like he’s cruising Captain Broody, which would be the wrong way to go—wrong on levels hitherto unknown to man- or demon-kind.

So wrong that not even his thoughts should be going there. Bad thoughts! Xander shakes them off and steps forward to shake Angel’s hand.

“It’s good to see you again, Xander,” Angel says, which is a load of crap.

“Don’t you have people?” Xander asks, because he knows how to be polite, but he just doesn’t want to. This is the one thing in his life he’s never had to pretend about—he doesn’t like Angel, never has, never will—and he’s not about to give it up. “I mean, don’t you have like minions or something to take your meetings?”

Angel frowns for a second like he’s considering being offended, then shrugs. “Well, I have Spike, but he’s not big on the diplomacy—he’s more into roughing people up.”

Which, yeah, sounds like Spike. Xander nods and knows that some kind of look passed over his face at the mention of Spike because he could see Angel seeing it, but Angel doesn’t seem surprised or even curious and doesn’t follow up.

It occurs to Xander that he’s standing before the one person in L.A. whom he knows knows where Spike lives.

“How come I have to do diplomacy? I’d be more into roughing people up, too.” This from a guy who walks up behind Angel—a guy in his thirties with a nice smile, who doesn’t look like he’d enjoy roughing people up, but sure sounds like he would. He's all shaggy hair and piercing eyes on a wiry frame—fucking hot and almost graceful as he steps forward and places a familiar hand on Angel’s shoulder.

The touch and the tone—plus the way Angel slips an arm around the man’s waist and draws him forward—have Xander thinking boyfriend and fighting off a serious case of the wiggens, until Angel says:

“Xander, this is my son, Connor. Connor, this is Xander, from Sunnydale.”

Part Four

Connor, it turns out, is also recently divorced. Xander learns this over beers because the business is done, but his flight isn’t until tomorrow night, so when Connor offers to show him around, Xander figures it beats drinking alone.

It’s apples and oranges, really, their divorces, but both were unexpected—Connor’s because he hadn’t given up hope, Xander’s because he had—and they don’t talk about it, but agree it’s still strange to be alone.

A few more beers and Connor gives Xander the story of his childhood in a nutshell—well, two nutshells, one for each childhood—and Xander thinks a new perfect life complete with happy new memories and a side of superpowers might not be so hard to swallow, as long as you aren’t stupid enough to care too much about the truth.

The memories still blend, Connor says, two threads weaving in and out—the fight against acne and the fight against evil, equally present and equally dramatic—both wrapped around his absolute teenage certainty that the world was out to get him and the requisite angst.

It sounds so familiar, and Xander thinks his own life might make more sense if it were split in two parts—natural and supernatural—but he can’t quite figure out which memories would go where. They seem to overlap.

If you ignore the fact that it’s creepy that Angel has a son nearly Xander’s age, it’s easier to talk to Connor than it’s ever been to talk to a virtual stranger and it occurs to Xander to tell Connor everything he’s been afraid to say out loud for the last few months—or maybe the last fifteen years—but he doesn’t. He just sits with his beer and absorbs the small talk, which feels bigger than usual and takes up a little of the empty space.

The evening stretches and then it yawns and half an hour later, they’re standing outside Xander’s hotel room and one second they’re kissing and the next second they’re not.

Connor smiles and ducks his head. “I still feel like I’d be cheating on my wife.”

Xander nods, but it’s not his wife he’s thinking about.

Connor pulls a scrap of paper out of his wallet and a pen from his jacket, writes something and hands it to Xander. Xander smiles and says goodnight. After he closes the door, he looks down at the paper. It’s a dry-cleaning receipt on one side. On the other, there’s an address and a phone number. They’re not Connor’s.

The word “Spike” is scrawled across the top in capital letters.

Xander pulls his cell phone out of his pocket. He sits down in the hotel room chair and sets the phone on the hotel room table next to him. He stares down at the phone number until it goes blurry.

At some point, his eyes drift shut.

He puts himself to bed by the light of false dawn.

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