Over a Cardboard Sea

by
Savoy Truffle

Part Five

He checks out an hour early—can’t stand to sit in the room or the bar, has nothing to do but go to the airport, so takes the elevator downstairs, settles with the desk and steps out to the curb. The taxi driver takes his bag and loads it in the trunk while Xander slides into the back seat.

“Airport?” the driver asks as he takes the wheel and pulls away from the hotel.

Xander means to say ‘yes,’ but finds himself pulling the scrap of paper from his pocket instead.


For all that he couldn’t have found it on his own in a million years, barely recognizes it as the taxi pulls up outside, once he enters the building, Xander knows the way. Drawn though the halls as if on then end of a string, he finds himself standing outside Spike’s door before he’s even figured out how to say ‘hello.’

He doesn’t knock, but the door opens and Spike is standing there staring, not speaking, looking exactly the same and Xander glances down at his own hands and wonders if he looks as old as feels.

Spike is leaning in the doorway, barring the way and Xander finally holds up his left hand, palm in, presenting his empty ring finger.

Spike steps aside. “Would’ve let you in anyway,” he says.

Xander crosses the threshold. “I have to catch a flight.”

Spike nods. “Just stop by to let me know, then?”

Xander doesn’t have an answer and his lack of answer leaves a silence that rings, stretches, weighs on them and Xander imagines a big, heavy rubber bell, almost smiles.

“I didn’t know her at all,” he says. Surprised or confused, maybe bitter. “It’s like it didn’t even occur to me that she was a person.”

“Happens,” Spike says.

Xander crosses to the other side of the room in four long, quick strides. “God, she must have hated being married to me. I didn’t see her. I mean, I was always there—always right there—and I never fucking saw her.”

“Xander, you—”

“What is it? Am I just this huge racist? But I saw Lucien. We were always—I mean, we still are friends. Or like maybe I’m sexist, right? But Willow’s always been twice the person I am. I’ve always wanted to be her, you know? And Buffy… well, Buffy’s Buffy. They’re real to me, but then… I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

They’re still standing in the living room, but they’ve drifted closer again, close enough to touch.

But they don’t.

And Spike looks like he could listen forever, which scares the hell out of Xander because if he let’s anything more out, it might just keep coming and coming and it might not stop until he’s empty—emptier. But then Spike speaks.

“What about Anya?” Spike asks and Spike is right there, facing him, but it’s like being shot in the back—the words are swift, powerful, unexpected, searing holes through Xander’s guts.

“I’m such an asshole,” Xander says.

Spike is shaking his head, but Xander nods. Drifting up from the street, the faint sound of a driver laying on his horn.

“I should go. I have a taxi waiting.”

“Don’t want to miss your flight.”

Xander snorts. “’Cause I’ve got so much to get home to.”

Spike reaches out his hand. “Give me your wallet.”

Xander looks around the apartment—entertainment center, leather living room set, carpet deep enough to fuck in. “Thought you were all hooked up these days.”

Spike’s look reminds Xander that Spike’s hand is waiting. Xander pulls the wallet from his back pocket and lays it in the outstretched hand.

Spike flips past the credit cards and finds what he’s looking for, studies it. “She looks like you,” he says.

“Fuck you,” Xander says, but Spike doesn’t flinch.

“It’s in the way she holds herself,” he says. He places the open wallet back in Xander’s hand and Xander studies the picture and thinks Spike might have something there and it makes him smile.

“She’s fifteen. The same age I was when I met Buffy.”

The horn starts up again outside.

Spike walks over to the door, opens it. “Go home, Xander.”

Xander crosses the room, but stops in the doorway. “I just… I wanted…”

Spike cuts him off with a kiss. Short and firm.

“You know where to find me,” Spike says, before closing the door in Xander’s face.

Part Six

By the time his plane touches down, Xander’s convinced himself he’s an idiot. Or maybe that’s not news, but an idiot plus, then.

It was one weekend.

Twelve years ago.

It was a good weekend—hell, a great weekend—but just a weekend.

The flight is a redeye and Xander’s eye is red and sore and the two people waiting for him near the baggage claim are a sight for it—his daughter and his ex-brother-in-law/lover. It’s too early on Saturday morning and even after everything, home really is home.

The three of them go out for breakfast and Farida yawns at her pancakes and orange juice and Xander tells her she could have stayed in bed, but she shakes her head even as another yawn stretches her mouth, and Xander thinks he may have done a few things right after all.

When Lucien pulls up to Xander’s apartment, Farida gets out, too. Her overnight bag is sitting in the trunk next to Xander’s. She stays the weekend and spends most of it in her room on the phone with her door closed, but it doesn’t matter. Xander goes to the store for milk and cereal, orders pizza and makes peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with the crusts cut of the way she used to like them.

He drives her home Sunday night because she’s got school in the morning, talks to Amina for a few minutes standing in the doorway of the house he bought, and picks up some beer on the way back to his apartment. He reports to Giles on Monday, asks if there’s anywhere he needs to be sent, but Giles tells him to take a few days.

He takes the first day to think, the second to drink. He picks up the phone that night. It rings twice.

“Yeah?”

He thought he had something to say, but he doesn’t.

“Hello? Anybody there?”

It’s a fair question, but he’s not certain of the answer.

“Bloody hell. Xander?”

It’s creepy that he can’t even hear breathing on the other end of the line. A few more seconds of the eerie sound of his own breathing and Xander hangs up.

He drinks for another day, then goes back to the thinking. The next time he picks up the phone, he’s sober and he has something to say.

“Yeah?”

“I loved Anya.”

“Never said you didn’t.”

“I mean, maybe we weren’t… Maybe I never… But I loved her.” He means it. “I just wanted you to know that.”

“I do.”

“Are you humoring me?”

“No.”

“Oh. Okay, then.”

“Okay.”

And again with the creepy non-breathing, which makes Xander feel loud. Xander holds his own breath so that the silence is absolute, hangs up when his lungs start to burn.

A week passes. Spike seems to have programmed Xander into the caller ID.

“Hello, Xander.”

“I didn’t have affairs.”

“You’re like a cryptic stalker who’s playing hard to get.”

“I fucked around—a lot, you know—but it was anonymous, one night or less. No affairs.”

“I get it, Xander. I’ve always gotten it.”

Xander feels his heart pounding, holds his breath, then: “Well, I didn’t. I never got it. I thought I did, but I didn’t. I had it all wrong.”

“You did your best.”

“My best?” Is that supposed to make him feel better? “How can you say that? You don’t even know what I did. You don’t know a fucking thing about my life, about my marriage. The only thing you know is that I fucked around.”

“I know you. I know you did your best.”

“And what if I did? Some best. How is it that doing my best always seems to mean making everyone, including myself, fucking miserable?”

“Not always.”

“Yes, always. Or at least always enough.”

“So it’s black and white, then? Always or never? Right or wrong? Good or evil? No shades of gray today?”

Xander sighs, closes his eye and regroups. “No, of course not. That’s not what I meant to say. I fucking know it’s complicated, okay? I know. I… I only wanted to tell you that I had this line, you know? That I wasn’t going to cross and…” Xander swallows.

“Yeah?”

“And if I’d ever come back, it would have been an affair.” Xander pauses. “Wouldn’t it?”

Silence and then: “Yeah.”

Xander hangs up before he has to admit to Spike—or himself—that it already was.

Part Seven

Fifteen years.

Three and twelve.

He remembers how the three passed—in a whirl, a rush, without time to question or reconsider. He remembers how Amina was like a child—couldn’t go out, couldn’t speak, couldn’t feed herself without Xander’s help. He remembers teaching her to use the microwave.

A new house, with room for a family, and she kept it spotless though she didn’t touch half the cleaning products he put beneath the kitchen sink. And doctor’s visits that scared him, but that she took in stride and she was so calm when Farida came and he was a mess, but then he had two children depending on him for their very survival.

And then Lucien, who learned it all so much faster and easier, and Maman, who was pretty much too old to learn any of it at all, and three years passed just like that before his household was finally running itself on the money from the Council, which he finally starting earning again with more than a few token hours at the desk tucked away in the house’s oversized closet, which he liked to call an office.

He earned it with days at the office and business trips, which offered more time and more space and more men. Always men—since the first six months when he thought he could, should be stronger—but more men just before L.A. and more men after.

The three he remembers; it’s the twelve he can’t believe. He knows a few of them by their disasters—the year the basement flooded, the year Farida broke her arm, the year he took her to another girl’s birthday party and saw that clown—and the rest as vague eras—the time he was traveling too much, the time Lucien had that lawn care business and, most traumatic, the time Farida spent in middle school.

It’s hard to imagine there were really twelve of them. Hard to imagine that each contained the standard twelve months, fifty-two work weeks, three hundred and sixty-five days. Hard to imagine that each day had a full twenty-four hours and each hour had sixty whole minutes.

It’s hard to believe they’re all gone.

It’s been three weeks since his fortieth birthday. He has to wait two days for the flight. He spends five hours in the air and thirty-nine minutes in the taxi. It takes about twenty seconds for Spike to answer the door.

“I’ve been thinking about time,” Xander says.

“Yeah?”

Xander steps forward, reaches out and curves his palm around the side of Spike’s neck. “Yeah. And I’m tired of wasting it.”

So they don’t. Xander doesn’t tell Spike the place is looking nice. Spike doesn’t offer Xander a glass of water or a beer. It’s hard to hold a conversation when you’re trying to devour each other. Xander’s duffel bag falls from his shoulder as he kicks the front door shut and pushes Spike toward the bedroom. Or maybe Spike is pulling him there.

It doesn’t matter.

The minutes feel like hours, but they’re really seconds. By the time the backs of Spike’s legs hit the edge of the bed, they’re both naked. Spike falls back on the mattress, pulling Xander down on top of him.

Xander isn’t looking at his watch.

Part Eight

“She was the one having an affair. That’s how it ended.”

Xander knows it’s not what he’s supposed to be saying.

“The day that I saw them together, I almost didn’t recognize her. She was so happy, so… talkative. She was smiling, she was laughing, her whole body, it was… it was like she was free. She was this woman I’d never met.”

He knows this is a time for sighs and soft murmurs, satisfied smiles and the slow slide of skin against skin.

“At first, I was mad. I mean, how could she be happy when I was so fucking miserable? I gave up everything, and she…”

He knows you don’t lie in bed with your lover and talk about the woman you wouldn’t leave for him, but it’s like he can’t stop the words.

“I went to Lucien and asked him how long. He said over a year, but it may have been more. I asked him why she didn’t just… I don’t know. He said she was scared. The guy, he’s an immigrant, too. I guess he doesn’t make much. So I talked to a lawyer and had him draw up papers. The house, alimony, child support, college—everything they could want, in writing, as if I wouldn’t have taken care of them anyway, no matter what. I mean, Christ. And the paperwork for an uncontested divorce.”

He can’t stop the words. He can’t even control them. They come in fits and starts—minutes pass in silence between the outbursts.

“She cried when I showed them to her, when Lucien explained it to her. She cried and she thanked me and she seemed so relieved and I felt like such a fucking asshole. I could have given her so much less and it would have been so much more.”

That’s the worst part. The part that drives him crazy. The part he can’t understand. The part he has to find some way to explain—if not to Spike, then to himself.

“She needed me, but she never needed the myth. She just needed help, but I couldn’t give it to her without making us both miserable. For no fucking reason.”

Xander feels the movement of the mattress as Spike climbs out of bed, but doesn’t look. He hears the click of the lighter, the exhale—smells the smoke.

“You want to treat her like a real person? Let her have some of the blame.”

“What?” Xander does look at Spike now, naked and smoking. His memory of Spike like this is well worn and frayed around the edges, like the favorite picture in a magazine you keep under your bed.

“She stayed, didn’t she?”

“She didn’t have a choice.”

“Everyone has choices,” Spike says, “whether we like ’em or not. You both stayed and one of you found a way to be happy.”

Xander watches as Spike takes him time finishing the cigarette, stubs it out in an ashtray on the nightstand, looks down at Xander.

“It’s creepy when you’re wise,” Xander says.

Spike shrugs.

“So now what?” Xander asks. The world feels strange and open.

“Up to you. You can keep beating yourself up… or I can order pizza and we can see what’s on the TiVo.”

And somehow it’s not so hard when you think about it the right way. “Pizza,” Xander says.

“I can’t stay here forever,” Xander says three days later. Three short days of being someone—someone fun, someone who laughs, someone he hadn’t seen in twelve years and thought was gone forever—someone he missed. “Farida has a soccer game on Thursday and I promised I’d be there.”

“Like a good dad.” Spike is smoking in bed, making another picture for Xander to treasure. He seems to have a thing for Spike smoking naked, whether vertical or horizontal.

“Season’s just starting,” Xander says.

“Gonna be hard for you to get away then. You’ll be wanting to stick close to home.”

“I probably should.” Xander squeezes his eye shut for a moment. He opens it again. “You could come. If you wanted.”

“To the soccer game? Lot of sun at those things, yeah?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

Spike flutters the non-cigarette hand over his unbeating heart and bats his eyelashes. “But Xander, this is all so sudden!”

Xander smirks. “I’ve been stalking you for weeks, remember?”

Spike nods, thoughtful. “Well, when you put it that way...”

Xander’s heart wants to soar, but he holds it down. “I kind of suck at this, you know.” Full disclosure.

“This?”

Xander waves his hand. “Relationships. Commitment.” Happiness, he wants to say.

“Whereas I’ve always excelled at obsessive devotion.”

It’s a valid point and Xander can’t stop his heart from soaring just a little. “Think we might cancel each other out?”

“’S worth a try. ’Sides, I could use a change of scenery.”

“You wouldn’t mind leaving L.A.?”

Spike’s hand comes back to his heart and the eyelashes flutter. “I grow weary of this Hollywood lifestyle.”

There’s definite soaring going on now. Xander looks around at the luxury apartment and smiles. He’s got so little to offer. “Come away with me, baby, and I promise not to keep you in the style to which you’ve become accustomed.”

Spike smiles back and then his face goes straight for a moment. “Same to you, luv. Promise.”

The End

Feed the Author