Part One: Under the rocks and stones

Even Hell didn't want Sunnydale.

Before the week was out the crater was filling in again, the Hellmouth spewing forth great chunks of the town with the zeal of a Hollywood starlet vomiting up a Spago entree. The geologist guys on CNN had a good excuse for it, something about the elastic quality of the earth. But Xander didn't believe one word of it.

Even more unbelievable was how much of the outlying areas of town had survived more or less intact. True, the surviving neighborhoods bore a striking resemblance to London after the Blitz, but at least the burned-out buildings were still recognizable as such, and the deserted streets navigable by someone with enough determination or stupidity to brave the piles of charred rubble, downed power lines, and National Guard patrols.

After the last few years, Xander Harris wasn't one to be fazed by a little mass destruction, or some green college kid with an AK-47.

Shattered glass crunched and crackled like Rice Krispies underneath the soles of his boots as he slowly picked his way among the remains of what had been, not so very long ago, a very nice apartment. His apartment, to be precise, full of his things, the first and most tangible evidence that Xander Harris had indeed made it out of the dim dark basement of adolescence and embarked on something approaching a workable adult life. A real life, with a serious job and serious responsibilities, the kind of life you weren't ashamed to own up to when you ran into old classmates at the mall or the Espresso Pump or your high school reunion.

Xander stopped in the middle of the piles of broken plaster, splintered wood and shredded upholstery that had once made up his kitschy, comfy living room and smiled humorlessly to himself. The symbolism was painfully perfect: his carefully constructed life, the one he'd tended and mended like Buffy's living room windows, was gone. Made sense that the apartment was gone, too. Of course, most of the classmates who might have been impressed by the apartment or the life were also gone, as was the mall, the Espresso Pump, and the latest incarnation of Sunnydale High School. In the midst of so much death and destruction, maybe it was stupid to worry about your nice apartment, to mourn your vintage orange Barcalounger or wonder if, against all odds, your collection of Babylon 5 limited edition plates might be buried intact somewhere in the rubble. But in the midst of so much death and destruction, maybe it was worry about things like that, or go mad.

A flash of color in the brownish-grey devastation catching his eye, Xander ambled over to a section of the ruins that corresponded, roughly, with what had been his kitchen area. He stooped down to make a closer inspection, and saw to his astonishment a curve of red glass twinkling in the sunlight streaming through the half-fallen ceiling. It was a single intact bulb from the chili pepper lights he'd strung around his kitchen cabinets in a post-first-paycheck decorating frenzy. Thinking he was old enough and solvent enough at that point to actually decide on an aesthetic plan other than "things my parents were too lazy to throw away," he'd been going for a retro/tex-mex look to the place, a Restoration Hardware meets Chili's kind of flair.

"All those red lights make this place look like a Cuban brothel I used to frequent for business purposes back in the thirties," Anya says sharply, wiping a dusty hand across her forehead and crossing her arms in classic pissed-off girlfriend pose. After an entire weekend of moving in, with much fetching and carrying and cleaning but no sex, she's grumpy and spoiling for a fight.

But he's too psyched about his new job and his new place to get into a sparring match. Standing up from the outlet where he's plugged in his latest acquisition, he steps over and grabs her by the waist, pulling her to him forcefully. "Come on, Ahn, you say brothel like it's a bad thing," he says, his lips against her sweaty neck. She smells like lemon disinfectant and frustration. He runs his hands down her slender hips and cups her taut, jeans-clad bottom meaningfully. "Think of the lights as. . .inspiration."

"Like I need it," Anya snorts, but the edge in her voice has softened, and she's leaning into him in that boneless melty way that always sends his blood rushing due south. Whether it's the lights or just three days of pent-up frustration she definitely is inspired that night, the strings of scarlet bulbs adding a rosy glow to her peach-satin skin as she--

Xander stood up abruptly, leaning against the half-collapsed wall and trying to take deep breaths until the iron hand that had closed around his heart decided to stop squeezing.

"You shouldn't do that. Whole place is about to come down on our heads as it is."

Xander whirled, grabbing for the large dagger he'd clipped to his belt before starting out on this futile salvage expedition. The Hellmouth might be closed, and all the ghoulies sent back to wherever ghoulies came from, but he wasn't taking any chances. It would be the supreme irony of his life to survive seven years next to an active portal for all things evil, making it through the apocalypse that shut it, only to get taken out by a random straggler a few days after the fact. It was just the kind of cosmic sick joke the universe seemed to enjoy playing on him.

"Hey--peace, man. It's me. Remember me?" The man standing in the doorway was of medium height, dressed very much like Xander, in jeans and heavy work boots. The faded blue t-shirt stretched across his broad barrel chest read "Plumbers Do It Under the Sink." His blunt, pleasant face was wearing a small, worried smile. He had a large, wrinkled paper bag clutched in one work-roughened hand.

Xander blinked a couple of times, until his sticky mental Rolodex coughed up the appropriate name. "Tito?" he said uncertainly, still keeping his fingers wrapped tight around the dagger.

The man ran a nervous hand over his prematurely balding pate. "Right, you know, the prince of a guy who's been lendin' you quarters for the Coke machine for like, two years now? Who fixed your hot little girlfriend's plumbing for ten percent above cost?"

"Buffy's not my--" Xander said, the response so ingrained and automatic that it was halfway out of his mouth before he remembered that Tito already knew the score, Buffy-wise. You had to hand it to Tito--most people wouldn't have stood their ground and joked with a one-eyed man holding a razor-sharp dagger. Xander shook his head to clear it, sliding the dagger back into the belt clip at the same time. "Sorry man, I'm a little jumpy today. Must have something to do with standing here in the ruins of my life."

"No biggie," Tito said off-handly, but the tense set to his shoulders relaxed, and he took a few steps into the room. "Just come from my place--or what's left of it--up the street. I'm feelin' a little ruined myself right now. Condo's gone, boat's gone, had all my savin's down at the local credit union and since their buildin' and their mainframe computer's at the bottom of a bottomless crater, I can't access a dime of it. I currently got $12.72 cents to my name." He reached into the paper bag and pulled out a few shards of shiny black plastic, his placid expression darkening for the first time. "And my vinyl collection's fucked. Where the hell I'm gonna get another copy of the '78 Dutch import of Abbey Road in mint condition I have no idea."

Tito, besides being a master plumber and one hell of a nice guy, was also the only person Xander knew who had (or once had, he supposed now) a more extensive record collection than Giles. He suddenly felt a little better about his grief over his lost collectibles. But that realization didn't answer the main question on his mind. "What the hell are you doing here, anyway? I thought you got out of town days ago."

"I did," Tito said, packing the broken record back into his keepsake bag. "Headed down to L.A with Terri Ann--there was some New Age Oprah that'd set up shop there she wanted to meet, supposed to help her find her inner goddess or some such bullshit. I knew the whole thing was a steamin' pile before we went, but I figgered a break from Sunnyhell wasn't such a bad idea--vibes around here been weird all year. Stopped off in Camarillo for a couple days to see an old drinkin' buddy of mine, Terri Ann naggin' at me a mile-a-minute all the while, scared she was gonna miss out on her chance to sit at the feet of the Great Mother and elevate her mind. Sure enough, by the time we got to La-La Land, Blossom or Dewdrop or whatever the hell she was callin' herself had already skipped town. You know how these guru types are--she'd prob'ly picked all her followers clean and is kickin' it in the Caymans right now. But Terri Ann didn't see it that way. Ditched me a few days later for some ponytailed geek she picked up at Trader Joe's."

"Wow, uh, sorry." It seemed weird, commiserating with a buddy over getting dumped, the kind of thing you'd normally do over pretzels and beer in a nice seedy bar somewhere, when all the pretzels, beers, and bars within a ten-mile radius had been reduced to so much debris.

Tito shrugged carelessly. "Things ain't been good with us for awhile. Far as I'm concerned, I'm well shut of the crazy Irish bitch. Don't know why I ever followed her out here in the first place." He surveyed the destruction surrounding them with a rueful shake of his head. "This is what I get for thinkin' with the wrong head, I guess. Whole goddamn town looks like Tokyo after Godzilla stomped through it. I came back here to see what I could salvage, but what the 'quake didn't get the scavengers did." His face darkened again.

"So what are you going to do now?" Xander said gently, ready to offer him a room if he needed one. At last count, the Scooby Gang still had something like two dozen rooms at their disposal, even with all the surviving slayers to house until their flights home could be arranged. The Hyperion was a little the worse for wear, but anything was better than pitching a tent in the ruins.

"I'm gettin' the hell out of the State of California, that's what I'm gonna do," Tito said, his downhome twang sharpening a little. "Hmmph--State of Insanity's more like it. Earthquakes, eclipses that last for days, utility bills that look like the GNP's of small Eastern European nations. I'm goin' home to Texas, see if I can get my shit together. Who knows? Maybe Rosa'll even be willin' to give it another go--my brother e-mailed me a couple weeks ago and said she dumped that chiropractor she was all hot and bothered over when I went to see our boy at Christmas. Work's no problem--they got housin' developments springin' up like mushrooms out there. Man who knows his way around a worksite can write his own ticket."

"Sounds good."

"Dude, it is good. Weather's great, people are friendly, and you can order a plate of ribs without some goddamn PETA freak lookin' at you like you're Charlie Manson. Soon as my folks wire me the cash, I'm gone."

"I guess you've got it all figured out," Xander said, not quite able to keep a wistful note out of his voice. Even if he'd had the type of parents he could turn to in a crisis, Anthony and Jessica Harris, like so many Sunnydale citizens, had been missing since everything went boom a week ago. No refuge there.

"Yep, it's like I'm seein' things clear for the first time in awhile. But then it's hard to make stuff out when some little blonde thing's got you by the cojones." Cocoa brown eyes narrowed at Xander appraisingly, taking in his pensive mood. "You know, the place I used to work for, it's one of the biggest outfits in those parts. They're always needin' people, quality people. If you're lookin' to make a change, I could put in a good word for you." He paused, twisting the bag in his hands awkwardly. "Uh, your eye, is that a, um, permanent thing?"

"No," Xander said shortly.

"Great, great," Tito said quickly. "Prob'ly wouldn't have been a problem even if it was, but the bossman at O'Shea Construction's the kinda guy who likes to have all the facts, if ya know what I mean." His broad, blunt features again relaxed into the placid smile that was his habitual expression. "Whaddya say, Xan-man? It's the Land of Opportunity out there."

"Thanks, but I don't think I'm ready to make that kinda decision right now. I'm sorta still at the stage where picking out socks in the morning is a major achievement."

Tito nodded understandingly. "You need some time to get your head screwed on straight, that's cool." He rummaged in his pocket for a minute, pulled out a pencil stub, then tore a piece from the paper bag. "This is my parents' number in Texas," he said, scribbling quickly and passing the paper to Xander. "You decide you've had enough of the Golden State freaky-deaky, gimme a call. I'll hook you up."

Xander glanced down at the grimy scrap in his hand. Below the name and number for Tito's parents was a single strange word, in all caps and underlined.

"Eldorado," he read slowly. "What's that?"

"Not what, where. That's the name of my hometown--means 'City of Gold'. It's from an old story about a magical place of fabulous power and riches where you'd live happily ever after if you could only get there." He gave another one of those careless shrugs, looking a little embarrassed at his brief flight of fancy. "We do have a really nice mall."

Xander grunted non-committally. In his experience, there was no such thing as happily ever after--the only thing real about the old stories were the monsters. Still, it was nice of Tito to make the offer. He wrapped the piece of paper around the chili pepper bulb and put them both in his pocket.

"You got some place to stay tonight, man?"

********

Oddly enough, it was a pedicure that ended up changing Xander's mind about Eldorado. Buffy breezed into the Hyperion with it late one afternoon in early July, looking relaxed and cheerful after spending the holiday weekend at her father's place. Xander supposed that the utter destruction of Sunnydale had somehow jump-started Hank Summers' paternal instincts: Dawn had already moved into his snug Westwood bungalow, and Buffy had spent more time there in the last month than in the previous five years combined. Like many reformed absentee fathers, Summers was making up for lost years with his pocketbook, and Buffy always returned from their quality time a little blonder and better dressed than when she left.

Xander and Willow had spent most of the afternoon in the inner courtyard, collapsed on one of the worn wooden benches scattered there. They had made a few sporadic attempts at conversation, but mostly just sat staring at the thick summer sunlight throwing patterns on the vine-covered walls, and listening to the wave-like whooshes of the cars going by on Wilshire Boulevard. Other than the ever-present sound of traffic, a layer of quiet as thick as the dust in the corners had gathered around the old hotel in the past few weeks. The actual owners of the building were almost never there, busy as they were with settling into swanky new offices downtown: Angel Investigations had apparently succeeded beyond anybody's wildest expectations. Xander hadn't so much as laid eyes on his surviving ex-girlfriend, Cordelia, who was, according to Angel, very much occupied with some sort of special project for the firm.

Giles had long since packed off the remaining new slayers to their respective homes, with strict orders to keep the slaying simple until they received further instructions from him. Wood and Faith had gone to his adopted father's place a few days after they'd arrived, hoping to buy time until Giles had a chance to marshal the Council resources on her behalf, figuring that Beverly Hills was the last place the police would search for an escaped convict. Andrew had been the last of the assorted hangers-on to leave, heading out to his grandparents' in Bakersfield the previous Thursday, taking his endless chatter and bundt cake recipes with him. Overall, the entire building had a pervasive air of overness about it, that feeling of almost suffocating finality that invades places like the Coliseum or Gettysburg, sites where bloody, exciting, important things once happened, but never will again. Willow and Xander had spent days rattling around in the oppressive atmosphere like two lonely ghosts.

When Buffy bustled into the courtyard, bronzed bare arms hung with enough shopping bags to test even slayer strength, every inch of her was as sleek and polished as a showroom Corvette. She was like a ray of sunshine stabbing right between the eyes when you've already got a blinding headache.

"Guys, look at these," she said, pointing down at her immaculately buffed feet, which were clad in woven platform sandals interlaced with small silver beads.

"Nice," Willow said patiently, with barely a glance downwards. "But we saw those when you brought them home last week. You were going through this whole big dilemma, remember? Is the stylishness and comfort of Sam & Libby straw espadrilles worth the stinkiness if you get them wet down at Venice Beach?"

Buffy rolled her eyes dramatically, flashing them her gleaming Mentadent smile. "Not the shoes! My toes! Look at my toes!"

Xander and Willow leaned closer, peering at the objects under discussion, which were wriggling excitedly. Each had been lacquered a bright peppermint pink, the big toes then embossed with a hand-drawn design in red.

"Wow, cherries," Willow said, sounding anything but wowed. "That's cute, Buffy."

"'Cute'?" Buffy exclaimed, her slight form sparkling and rustling with mock-indignation. Xander's eye--what little there was left of it--itched underneath the patch. "Seventy-five bucks outta buy me more than 'cute'! I was thinking more along the lines of 'stunning' or at least a good old-fashioned 'awesome.'"

"Lemme get this straight. You gave someone seventy-five dollars to paint fruit on your feet?" Xander asked disbelievingly.

"Nope, Marcie did," Buffy said with a smirk. "She's all worried about coming off like the wicked stepmother with Dawnie and me, you know, so yesterday she took us for a day of beauty and bonding at The Paint Shop in Beverly Hills. It was unbelievable--they have this amazing process where they use melted white chocolate and hazelnuts to pumice your calluses. It's like a sundae for your feet." She looked down at her toes with the smug air of a girl who's sold her favors to the enemy for lipstick and nylons and doesn't regret the transaction one bit.

"Well, I guess it beats Marcie feeding you poisoned apples or leaving you in the woods with a loaf of stale bread," Willow said drily.

"As long as I don't have to talk to her too much, yeah," Buffy replied. She dropped the shopping bags by the stone steps and perched on the ledge of the dusty fountain, long, tanned legs swinging girlishly. "So what'd you guys do this weekend? Bet it wasn't nearly as much fun as getting melted chocolate poured over your feet."

"No, not really," Willow said, with a careful glance in his direction. "We went to Sunnydale."

Buffy sighed impatiently. "A gorgeous Fourth of July weekend in the City of Angels, and you spend it stompin' through the ruins out in the sticks. Again." She shook her head sadly. "I don't know what I'm gonna do with you two."

"I hear there's a salon in Beverly Hills that gives Grape Nehi enemas," Xander said. "Maybe that'll show us the error of our ways."

"I'm serious," Buffy replied, hearing the humor in his comment but not the contempt. She folded her hands in her lap and fixed them with a concerned counselor expression that made Xander's eye socket throb with anger. "You guys should be moving on, making plans, not spending every day moping around this gloomy old hotel or hanging out down at Ground Zero. 'Today is the first day of the rest of your life' and all that." She delivered this last bumper-sticker sentiment with a lack of irony that would have had the old Buffy popping her bubblegum with derision.

"Sounds like you have plans, Buffy. I'll bet you're just dying to tell us all about them." Xander's voice came out entirely more bitter than he would have wanted.

Buffy flashed that brilliant white Barbie Doll smile again. "You bet I do. The Watcher's Council--Giles is calling it that these days because he's sick of Council of Watchers being abbreviated as CoW--they're gonna send me to school to finish up my degree. A pension-y stipend-y, 'thanks for all the help' thingie. The whole Slayer deal kinda sent my education into a big old roadblock, so I think they outta foot the bill to train me for something in the real world."

"When did this get decided?" Xander said. "I thought Giles was getting the fallout from the slayers-in-training cleaned up before he worried about you and Faith." After arranging transportation home for all the newly-minted slayers who'd survived the apocalypse, Giles had spent the last few weeks flying all over the world, determined to meet personally with the parents of every girl who hadn't been so lucky. It was certainly more sensitive than a telegram starting off "The Watcher's Council regrets to inform you. . ." especially since in most cases there wasn't even a body for the bereaved families to bury. But Giles returned from every journey a little greyer and hollower than he'd been before, each countless mile he'd traveled since last Thanksgiving etched into his careworn face.

"I pinned Giles down about it this weekend. Caught him on his cell when he had a forty-five minute layover at Heathrow on his way to Hong Kong. Couldn't sit around here forever waiting for him to finish obsessing--I had application deadlines to meet."

While Xander sat there speechless at that last statement, Willow jumped in again.

"Do you know where you're going?"

Buffy brightened and pushed her newly platinum-streaked hair out of her face with a casual gesture.

"Northwestern, where I wanted to go four years ago. I'm negotiating to transfer there as a second-semester sophomore in the fall. That means I have to declare a major almost right away, and I really liked working with the kids at the high school, so I'm thinking adolescent counseling. I'll get to use everything I learned dealing with the Sunnydale kids and the slayers-in-training. Can't live with that many teenage girls and not learn something other than melted peanut butter on popcorn is pretty good."

Melted peanut butter on popcorn had been Molly's favorite, and Molly had been one of the first ones to die. Gutted like a fish by that bastard Caleb.

"Northwestern's in Illinois, right? Sweater country," Willow said, shooting Xander a covert pleading look.

"Yup, it's outside Chicago, right in the buckle of the snow belt," Buffy chirped. "And my whole sweater collection's somewhere in Hell being worn by demons." She held out one small be-ringed hand and inspected her glistening French manicure critically. "So I'm thinking that the next Hank and Marcie Summers guilt payment is going straight into the winter wardrobe account. Saks should have some great pre-season sales come August."

"A good and worthwhile thing," Xander said between clenched teeth.

"How's Dawnie feel about the move to the great white North?" Willow said quickly.

"Oh, Dawn's not going," Buffy said, rubbing at a microscopic bubble in her nail polish. "Now that Dad's remarried and all about the domestic blissfulness, he wants her to stay here and finish up high school in L.A. She'll even be going to Hemery, my old stomping grounds. After seven years, we figure they've gotten over the whole Summers-inspired gym-burnage and everything." She gave what could have been interpreted as a slightly guilty shrug. "She wasn't thrilled at the idea of following me all the way out to the Windy City, anyway."

The throbbing behind Xander's eyes had reached near-intolerable levels. "Wow, acceptance at a Big Ten school, conscience cash from Giles and Hank, and now no little sis cramping your style. Isn't it great how everything worked out for the best?" he said, putting his hands to his temples. He was expecting a small Greek goddess to break out of his skull any second now.

"You know, I'm getting a little of the hostile here, Xander," Buffy said, looking up from her fingers. "And I don't appreciate the 'tude. What's your problem?"

"Hostile? Me? Why would I be hostile?"

"Duh. That's what I'm asking."

"Buffy, I don't think this is where you want to go right now," Willow warned.

"It's okay," Buffy said, her eyes giving him a cool challenge from across the flagstones separating them. "I think Xander knows by now that he can tell me anything."

For a moment, Xander wasn't sure if he was seeing Buffy or the First Evil wearing her face again.

"Tell you anything?" he asked.

"Sure. After all we've been through together, I think I can handle it." She tilted her chin up with a little flare of the old Buffy feistiness.

"Can you handle this? Fuck you, Buffy."

Buffy's lipglossed mouth opened in a perfectly round O, then closed again, like a goldfish. If he hadn't been so angry and in so much pain, the sight would have amused him.

"While you were out getting foot sundaes and nagging Giles on the Nokia, Willow and I spent the Glorious Fourth looking at rotting, dismembered corpses, trying to see if any of them resembled my parents."

Buffy had gone very pale beneath her new tan.

"It took awhile," he continued relentlessly. "One pile of meat in a bodybag looks a lot like any other, you know? Finally recognized Mom from the enamel bracelet she bought off QVC last year. We figured there couldn't be that many people in Sunnydale who liked jewelry designed by Joan Rivers. Decided the other remains found near her must be Dad. Couldn't be sure, though--there wasn't much left, and Tony Harris was never much for accessorizing. I may very well have just ordered the cremation of the neighbors' Great Dane, Chippy."

Buffy put one hand over her heart, touching the silver lavalier dangling there as if for reassurance. "Jesus, I'm sorry, Xander." And in that moment she really did look sorry, all her blinding brightness dimmed down by the horrors she'd just heard. Xander felt the pounding behind his temples ease a bit.

"Why didn't you call me? I would have come along, I would have helped." And then it was all about her again, and he was just as sick as before.

"I. Didn't. Want. You. There." He spoke slowly, deliberately, lobbing the words at her like hand grenades.

Buffy's tinted, carefully shaped eyebrows drew together in confusion. "I don't understand." He could see she really didn't. The idea that someone, anyone, wouldn't want Buffy Summers around just didn't register in her worldview.

"I had enough to deal with without watching you picking through the ruins, trying not to mess up your nails, and pretending to care."

"Pretending?" The furrowed brows had been joined by the Pursed Lips of Deep Thought. She was really trying now.

"Come on, Buffy. From the day we got here, the most angst I've seen from you is over those sandals you're wearing." He tried to keep his words calm, strong, but the bitterness kept leaking in, streaking his whole voice like ink drops in water. "Fine--you got out of Sunnydale smelling like a slightly singed rose. Goody for you. But as someone who actually got bitten by the Hellmouth, I really don't feel like listening to your pseudo-sympathy and yet another inspirational speech."

She was now clutching the necklace like it was a talisman. "I lost things when Sunnydale went down. Lots of things." Her voice had taken on the trembly, wounded quality that would have had him on his knees and begging for forgiveness when he was sixteen. Now he just wanted to put his hands around her throat and squeeze till the trembling stopped.

"What did you lose?" he shot back. "A job you'd already been fired from? A falling-down house that was fully insured anyway? A bunch of teenage strangers whose names you couldn't remember half the time? Don't try to tell me you're crying into your pillow at night over Anya and Spike. You were ready to take her out yourself a few months ago. And as for him--"

"You don't know what I feel about Spike," Buffy interrupted sharply, all her fluttery confusion gone. Her face had taken on the stony, secretive look it always got whenever anybody brought up her relationship with the vampire.

"Oh no?" Xander said jeeringly. "The last time your demon ex-lover died to save the world, you disappeared for three months and almost got yourself white-slaved to a hell dimension. This time, you're painting cherries on your toes and talking about sweater sales. Either your coping skills have greatly improved in five years, or you never gave a shit to begin with."

"How dare you sit there and judge me," Buffy said in a low, flat voice. The stoniness of her expression had spread to her entire body, a deadly stillness that made the tiny hairs at the back of his neck prickle. For the first time in weeks, he saw the predator beneath the princess. "I lived with death every day for seven years. I faced it alone every night, all those times you guys were too busy with dates or homework or just didn't feel like showing up." Her voice had started to tremble again. "I came back from it, twice, the second time against my will." Her words were speeding up, taking on a slightly hysterical quality. "I know death, I've got a goddamn Ph.D. in death, and I don't need you to tell me how to handle it!" Buffy was on her feet, hands clenched into fists, her whole tiny, shiny body shaking with sudden rage. Xander felt Willow tense beside him, out of the corner of his good eye saw her make a slight, protective gesture in his direction, like she was ready to start flinging the mojo at any second if Buffy made one false move. He wondered, not for the first time, what it was about him that pulled so many powerful, dangerous women into his orbit. He was like a moth surrounded by flames.

Perhaps correctly interpreting Willow's movement, Buffy unclenched her hands, though she remained standing. She took a deep breath, and when she spoke again her tone was quieter, calmer, and the icy set to her features had thawed. "You've lost a lot lately, Xander, and I'm sorry about that. I'm sorry about everything that's happened, to everybody." He saw a flash of that secretive look again. "But I'm not going to plop myself down in the rubble and cry about it for the rest of my life."

"A week or two would have been nice."

"And what good would that do? Would it bring anybody back? Make anybody who's survived better off?" she asked, her voice as sharp as cut glass. "I spent all last year in mourning, Xander. Mourning my mom, mourning my life, God, even mourning my death. And it nearly killed me, again. It nearly killed you guys, too, or don't you remember when Buffy flew over the cuckoo's nest last spring? I can't do a repeat performance of all that."

She turned and began gathering up her shopping bags, rustling mylar tissue paper from an expensive boutique on Melrose throwing strange lights on her face. "I've had enough of darkness and sadness and death--I want bright things, happy things, alive things," she continued in that same brittle voice. "After seven years as the Slayer, I think I deserve them." She headed towards the steps, clearly signaling that her part in this conversation was over.

"And what about the rest of us? The ones who weren't the Slayer, who weren't chosen. The people who were just trying to help out a friend all these years," Xander called after her, standing up to watch her retreating back. "What do we do deserve?"

Buffy paused with one well-shod foot on the top stair. "I don't know," she sighed. "I can't be your general anymore. From now on, I'm not making life and death decisions for anybody but myself." She shrugged again, but this time there was nothing guilty about it. "If you want my advice, as a friend, you'll get the hell away from Sunnydale. It's a dead place, Xander. Live things don't belong there." And with that pithy piece of wisdom she was gone, trailing clouds of Eternity for Women behind her.

Xander just continued to stand there for a minute, seeing his own pulse pounding before his fractured vision. His fisted hands were shoved deep into the pockets of his jeans, straining against the thick cotton as he gathered every bit of willpower he possessed to keep from stalking after her and pushing this ugly argument to an even uglier conclusion. Then his deadly focus was suddenly broken, pierced by a small, crunching sound. With a sinking feeling, he pulled a wad of Kleenex out of his left pocket and unwrapped it. He stared, heartsick, at the tiny fragments of red glass winking at him in the failing sunlight, all that was now left of the single chili pepper light he'd found in the wreckage of his apartment. For weeks, he'd been carrying this last memento of Sunnydale in his pocket, and now it was ruined too, broken like everything else in his old life.

Anya wrapped around him like the softest of blankets, fine features flushed and sleepy after two hours of christening their new living room sofa. And the Barcalounger. And the glass dining table. And the kitchen counters. "We're going to buy red lights for every room," she says in that soft, loopy voice only he gets to hear. "For inspiration. . . ."

He closed his own hand around the wad of tissue, feeling the tiny shards trapped inside slice into his palm.

"You okay?" Willow said, her voice as delicate as the glass fragments in his hand.

"So much that we've lost, Will. So much we can't ever get back. And she doesn't even care." The iron hand was back, squeezing his rapidly pounding heart until he thought it was going to explode out of his chest like an alien thing.

"She cares, she cares a lot. She just can't afford to admit it right now," Willow said sadly, laying soft, placating fingers on his shoulder and drawing him back to the bench. "It might not be how you or I would deal with it, but she's doing her best. If shopping and pedicures make her feel better, I say she should clean out Melrose and have her toes done twice a day. At least she's not trying to destroy the world, just buy it." The witch made a wry face, like the last words tasted rotten, but bad gallows humor was such a habit with them he barely flinched.

Her next words did give him pause, however.

"And what she said to you, about moving on. . .she's not wrong there."

Seeing his shocked, hurt expression, she rushed to explain. "I mean, she didn't have to be so Rosie O'Donnell about it, but. . .Sunnydale's gone, Xander. They can bulldoze the ruins and fill in the crater and rebuild everything, but it won't be the same." She pushed an errant lock of hair behind her ear nervously. "And even if it was, would you really want to go back there? Could you stand it?"

Xander stared at her, sudden realization dawning. "You're going too, aren't you?"

Willow nodded, a faint flush coloring her pale cheeks.

"Where?" His heart was no longer pounding. Now it seemed to have stopped altogether.

"Graduate school, NYU. They've got one of the best Neuropsychology programs in the country. If I've learned anything from everything that's happened, it's that how the brain works and what it can do is really the biggest mystery of all. I want to know why certain people can do magic and others can't. There has to be a biological reason behind all of it." The animation in Willow's voice and face was the first sign of life there that hadn't been forced in weeks. The sight of it blocked whatever feelings of anger or betrayal had been rushing in to fill the hollow in his chest. Still, he couldn't help being a little hurt at her lack of confidence in him.

"Geez, Will, how long you been planning this?"

"Grad school applications and GREs were probably created by the First Evil, so it seemed along the research-y line," Willow replied, with a spark of her old whimsy. Then she sobered again. "Seriously--I've been thinking about it for awhile, before I came back from England, even," she continued. "Sunnydale's never seemed right to me, not since. . ." she trailed off, staring pensively at the wavering jasmine vines.

Not since Tara, of course. Willow's battlefield romance with Kennedy seemed to be going strong even now that they were out of foxhole mode, the two of them talking on the phone every night since the oldest new slayer had left a couple of weeks ago for her family's place in the Hamptons. But Xander knew that for Willow, all the feisty private school girls in the world would never take the place of the gentle woman whose death had almost ended it.

"Why didn't you say anything before?"

"I didn't get the letter of acceptance till the day before I went to L.A. to find Faith, and after that. . .there never seemed to be a good time."

"There was lots of time, once we got here."

"I didn't want to look like I was doing the macarena all over Sunnydale's grave."

Willow had been lucky, or at least her parents had been. There were times when going to one of those mind-numbing academic conferences could be a lifesaver. Literally. Chez Rosenberg had been as flat as Chez Harris, only a higher quality of flat, and Willow had been able to pull some of her belongings out of the wreckage, whereas Xander could now fit all his worldly possessions in a backpack.

"Unlike some people."

"Xander--" Willow stopped mid-reproach, as if realizing there was no use denying the truth they both knew.

"She's not at all what she was, is she?" In what he was now realizing were the very last moments of his old life, that brief epilogue after the credits roll that almost nobody stays to watch, there was no pain, no anger, just an all-consuming exhaustion.

Willow just gazed at him for a moment, a sadly familiar expression in her big hazel eyes. He knew that look, saw it in his own bathroom mirror every single morning. It was the look of someone who's been staring into the darkness for so long, that they've finally begun to see what's hiding there.

When she spoke, she sounded almost as exhausted as he felt.

"Neither are we."

Xander called Tito that night.

Part Two: Water dissolving, water removing

A little more than forty-eight hours after the scene at the Hyperion, Xander was sprinkling his parents' ashes into the eternal expanse of the Pacific. Like many things they'd left unsaid, his parents had never mentioned what they wanted done with their bodies after they shuffled off this mortal coil. Even though they had been found as flattened as roadkill, Xander wasn't about to have them interred. Interment hadn't seemed like a permanent option in years. Even with the Hellmouth allegedly gone forever, he didn't want a chance post-mortem meeting to further disfigure his already ugly memories. Especially the memory of that night in early May, when he'd tried in vain to convince them that an extended vacation out of town was a good idea. If there was a memory he wanted surgically removed, it was that one.

Willow, ever the good soldier, had offered to come with him to scatter the ashes, but he didn't want any company, not even his best friend. Instead, he went alone at sunrise to the Santa Monica Pier, site of one of his only happy memories of childhood that had anything to do with his parents. They'd taken him there for his seventh birthday, fed him hot dogs and cotton candy and Hawaiian Punch, then let him ride on the big Ferris wheel. His mother hadn't even gotten mad when he got motion sick and threw up pink and red all over her new white tennis shoes. His father, jovial after clearing a grand at the track the previous weekend, had won him a giant Huckleberry Hound at the Pitch-Til-U-Win. Tony Harris had carried both it and his tired, sticky, sunburned boy on his shoulders all the way back to the car that night.

Xander stood alone for a little while at the metal railing overlooking the water, remembering. Then, without further ceremony, he dumped their worldly remains into the choppy grey-blue water, along with the portion of a bottle of Smirnoff's that hadn't already gone down his throat. All the while, he felt an achy burn in his stomach that had nothing to do with the alcohol. It was a hot knot of emotion too big to be digested right away, made up of equal parts of grief, guilt, and something that felt uncomfortably close to relief. That was why he hadn't wanted Willow with him--not because he was going to break down, but because he was pretty sure he wasn't. Still dry-eyed after scattering the last of the thick greyish-brown ashes, he tossed both the cardboard crematory box and vodka bottle into the Pacific and headed back towards the shore without a backwards glance. It wasn't the most poetic of farewells, but the best he could do under the circumstances.

He wouldn't have the chance to make any kind of proper farewell to Anya. Her body had never been found.

He returned from the impromptu funeral in Santa Monica and almost immediately fell into a heavy, vodka-fueled sleep, not awakening until well after sunset. That night, like every night since he first came to Los Angeles six weeks ago, he ran. He ran the mean streets surrounding the art deco hulk of the Hyperion wearing sweats and shoes that he'd borrowed from Angel. It was strange to realize that he and Angel wore pretty much the same sizes. The vampire had always seemed larger than life--or more accurately, larger than death--to him. One more illusion shattered. He ran a couple of extra miles that night, until his lungs were on fire and the blood pounded in his ears like a ball-peen hammer, and he thought he'd be permanently lamed from shin-splints. He ran through the pain, because only when he was running did his mind clear of all the thoughts that jangled against one another like out-of-tune wind chimes. He ran and didn't think of Anya, of Spike, of Molly, of his parents, or any of the others lost to the Hellmouth. He ran and didn't think about Buffy--whom he hadn't seen since the fight--or of the future.

As always, Xander ran with a stake tucked in the pocket of his sweatpants. He tried to scan the streets as best he could by moving his head to compensate for the blindness on one side. But nothing had ever approached him since he'd started these nightly journeys, not a vampire, not even an aggressive beggar. Then again, who really wanted to start trouble with a man in an eyepatch? Really, he shouldn't have enjoyed it, the reaction he'd been getting when people noticed he had the patch. Xander knew it made him look like the badass he'd never be. For weeks, he had listened to Willow's daily reports on tracking down the strange and far-flung ingredients she needed for the eye-restoring spell with an odd ambivalence. (And precisely how things like the left horn of a Fyarl demon, the heart's blood of a she-goat, and seventeen ounces of Australian mandrake root were supposed to mix together and create a new left eye for him he didn't want to ask.)

The first call from Texas came a few mornings later, a brief, preliminary request for more information from a very young-sounding man with a terrible head cold, probably some underpaid, overworked intern. That afternoon, he dutifully faxed the resume Willow had whipped up on her laptop. It was a fine work of fiction, but even as he sent it through he considered it, at best, a haphazard roll of the dice unlikely to pay off. But the Human Resources Department of O'Shea Construction contacted him again the very next day. Xander took that call in the cozy office Wesley had made behind the reception desk at the Hyperion. He spoke for more than half an hour to a pleasant woman with a Texas drawl as thick as honey, all the while staring at the pages and pages of foreign language notes and occult symbologies that Wesley had left strewn over his desk the way another man might leave spreadsheets and invoices. Apparently the owner, one Clifford O'Shea, was looking for somebody to manage the day-to-day business of the Residential Division, something Xander's resume indicated he was capable of, though right now he felt anything but capable. Afterwards, other details of the conversation remained fuzzy, but going by the notes he'd scribbled next to Wesley's, he'd at some point agreed to fly to Eldorado, Texas on the O'Shea dime for an interview the following week.

According to the website Willow found for him, Eldorado was a rapidly-developing baby city in central Texas, with a population growing in leaps and bounds because of the high-tech manufacturing companies just outside the city limits that were taking advantage of NAFTA subsidies and cheap Mexican labor. It was four hours from the turquoise-blue waters of the Gulf, three hours from the bright lights of Houston, and a half-day's journey from the border of Mexico. There were two shopping malls, a regional art museum of good reputation, a small but well-respected liberal arts college, even a minor-league baseball team, the Conquistadors. Oddly enough for so obscure a place, Eldorado Regional Medical Center boasted a world-renowned facial deformities clinic. And according to Willow, nothing of any supernatural consequence had ever happened in Eldorado, other than the haunting or two mentioned in the Eldorado Examiner website archive as fluff pieces every Halloween.

Tito was right: Eldorado looked good.

It was no problem for Xander and Willow to borrow Wesley's SUV and go get Xander a suit for the interview, though his wardrobe budget was something of a problem. Most of his money was in the same post-disaster limbo as Tito's, and Xander flatly refused to take anything else from Angel & Co. To his surprise, the mirror in the dressing room at J.C. Penney, the swankiest store he could afford, showed him that physically, he'd lost more than an eye. Between the running and the fact that food tasted like cardboard, Xander had dropped enough weight that his reflection seemed downright gaunt. He now fit in sizes that he hadn't had close personal knowledge of since he was on the swim team. There were lines and angles in his face that he'd never seen before, and he looked far older than twenty-two. The weight loss was a good thing--in the last year, he'd heard more than enough about the bulk he'd put on since high school from both Anya and his mother--but he'd never suggest the Sunnydale Pain and Suffering Plan over Slim-Fast.

There were seven Target stores in the greater LA area, and he and Willow finally got un-lost enough on the freeways to find one of them and finish fitting him out to go to Texas. They started with a generic black nylon suitcase and proceeded to fill it with all the little things he'd lost and been doing without for the last six weeks. Trundling down the clean and brightly-lit aisles of Target, a Muzak version of "Penny Lane" playing softly in the background, was a surreal experience. Clearly, they were both pretending that life as they knew it hadn't just been shot to hell, that they didn't have dead friends and lovers, and that neither of them had much to talk about.

"I'm thinking black or blue socks, not both. Both is just asking to show up wearing one of each," Xander said, peering at the rack.

"Live dangerously. Consider argyle."

"What does argyle say? 'Hi, I'm a complete geek who wears weird socks,'" Xander said with a frown.

"Argyle says, 'I'm adult and mature and comfortable with the choices I've made in socks.' Oooh, here's some blue with flecks, which are kind of sexy."

"Socks are not sexy, and I'm not going to Texas for sex. I'm going for a job interview."

"Hey, Texas is known for its hospitality. You never know. Maybe you'll get offered sex and the job."

"Hard as this is to believe coming from me, Xander Harris, founding member and two-time president of the Horn Dog Club for Men, I'm taking some time off from the whole sex thing. Possibly decades. I'm joining the 'My Ex-Girlfriend is Dead, Right After We May or May Not Have Gotten Back Together' Club."

"I founded that one, I think." Willow said, tossing two pairs of the blue-with-cream-flecks socks into the shopping cart.

"So when does it stop hurting?"

"It doesn't. You just get used to the hurt and it turns into background noise. Then you don't remember not having the hurt."

"I miss her the way I miss my eye," he said, rubbing his patch, which continued to irritate his skin despite all the strange and expensive moisturizers Willow and Buffy kept around the Hyperion.

"Stop that. It's going to be tricky enough growing your eye back without the skin around the socket being abraded."

"Speaking of which, is Eldorado going to be introduced to my dashing Nick Fury look, or are we working the mojo before next Friday?"

"The mandrake is supposed to be here tomorrow. After I steep it in the yak's milk for twenty-four hours, we'll be ready to go."

Believe it or not, I think I'm going to miss the patch," Xander said, stopping in front of a mirrored display unit and examining himself critically. "Ya know, in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king."

"You'll just have to settle for being a two-eyed peasant in the land of the sighted," Willow said, giving him the Determined Face. "We're fixing you on Sunday. I just hope the monkey glands don't turn before then."

Xander's stomach gave a queasy little shudder at that last statement. He noticed that mirror-Xander didn't seem too thrilled at the prospect of drinking or smearing or otherwise having Willow's strange brew introduced into his system, either. "Seems like a pretty complicated spell, Will. Sure you're up for it?"

Willow blinked at him, an odd mixture of pride and self-disgust on her pale face. "I just made, at last count, 67 potentials into slayers. I took a bullet out of Buffy's chest last year. I almost single-handedly ended the world right after that. Yeah, I think I can handle putting your eyeball back in your head."

There was a brief, awkward silence. They both looked through an aisle display of off-brand running shoes on sale.

"She'd be happy to know that," Willow said after awhile.

"Who'd be happy to know what?"

"Anya. That you miss her. That her sacrifice wasn't for nothing, and you'll still think about her even now that she's gone."

"Yeah, Anya's luckier than some."

Because it was still a little too raw, Xander examined a rack of short-sleeved shirts with pseudo-Asian designs. He found one with Tiki heads that he kind of liked.

"Will, did Buffy actually say anything to you about Spike?" he said eventually. "I mean, like she might have felt bad? Even Angel seemed to be upset when we told him. He blinked and frowned. That's a big reaction in Angelville. On a par with falling to your knees and sobbing."

"He blinked three times. Verge of hysteria, really," Willow said, skimming through the rack absently. "But Buffy hasn't said anything, no. Case you hadn't noticed, she's not been one for the caring and the sharing for quite awhile now."

"Let me just say, and if you ever quote me I'm going to give you the wedgie to end all wedgies, that I actually miss Spike. How weird is that?" Xander asked, throwing the Tiki shirt into the cart.

"'Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most--human.'" Willow quoted offhandedly.

"Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan," he said automatically. But he wasn't going to be distracted by their name-the-movie-from-the-quote game, however clever the reference. "Doesn't it bother you? We're her best friends, or we were, anyway. If anybody has the 411 on her, it should be us."

"If I got angry every time Buffy held out on me, I'd be angry all the time."

"'And we wouldn't like you when you're angry.'"

"Hey! I'm the only one who gets to make jokes about Darth Rosenberg," she said mock-angrily. "Anyway, that's too easy--we just saw The Incredible Hulk again yesterday."

"Think we should've invited Buffy? She'd have really gotten off on the whole beauty-and-the-beast subplot."

Willow sighed and shook her head, pushing the red plastic cart forward with an exasperated shove. "Go to Texas. Eat barbecue. Get a cowboy hat. Leave Buffy alone to get through this in her own way, like she always does."

She stopped in front of a wall of men's underwear. "Have you ever thought about switching from boxers to boxer briefs? They're way better looking. Boxers look like diapers," she said, not-so-subtly changing the subject.

"No offense, Will, but your lesbian-ness kinda ruins your street cred as an arbiter of what's attractive in men's underwear."

But he grabbed the briefs.

"Are you and I still going to be friends?" he asked. "If I move to Texas and get cowboy boots and a hat."

He got a big, beautiful Willow smile in return, as she linked her fingers through his. "'I have been, and always will be, your friend.'"

"Hey, no fair quoting twice from the same movie," he said, and knew his smile was wobbly.

"Since when do we follow the rules?" Willow said, quirking an eyebrow at him Spock-style.

Then her smile morphed into a smirk. "But if you get the boots and the hat, all bets are off."

Somehow, it didn't seem too unmanly to be tearing up and hugging his best friend over a 2-pack of Hanes. He knew at that moment that something of his had survived the destruction of Sunnydale, after all.

********

"Life is like drywall," Xander said that Friday morning as he stood in the main atrium of LAX. He was studying the departures monitor, blinking first one eye and then the other, trying to get used to having binocular vision again.

"How's that, Forrest?" Buffy said drily, looking over her rimless blue sunglasses at him.

"Oh, you poke a hole in it by accident and all you have to do is cut a piece to fit, slam it in, mud it up, and once the wallpaper's up, nobody knows what's happened."

It wasn't much of an apology for their fight in the Hyperion courtyard, but it was the best that he could manage under the circumstances.

"I think Willow's spell affected your brain," she joked.

When Buffy had offered to take him to catch his plane, Xander accepted the olive branch with more than a little relief. Although later, while zipping down the freeway in the tiny blue Honda she referred to as the "paternal guiltmobile," Xander hadn't been sure this was such a good idea, after all. Her erratic driving habits were better suited to LA's traffic than Sunnydale's, but he still feared for his continued existence no less than three times during the forty-minute commute to the airport--four times, if you counted that near-collision as they pulled into the short-term parking lot itself. But in the end, perhaps it was worth adding a few more grey hairs to his collection to be standing here with Buffy on this smoggy Los Angeles morning, staring at the blinking digital display together with something like solidarity.

"So, if this Texas thing works out, you're going to come and visit, right?"

"I don't know, all those cows. And they still have spiral perms there, don't they?" she said, shuddering.

They pondered the potential livestock and grooming hazards of the Southwest for a moment, before the silence between them began to stretch to uncomfortable lengths. Xander shifted uneasily, transferring his briefcase from his right hand to his left. Their conversation had been like this since Buffy had shown up unexpectedly at the Hyperion that morning, bearing lattes from the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf for the drive over and a stack of magazines for the flight itself--stretches of what felt like the old camaraderie, punctuated by increasingly uncomfortable pauses. There was so much unsaid between them that neither of them seemed to know what to say.

Finally, Xander couldn't bear the awkwardness any longer. "I better go. No telling how long the whole baggage thing is gonna take." He picked up his new nylon suitcase.

"Xander, wait," Buffy said, removing her sunglasses for the first time that morning. He saw now that there were dark circles under her eyes even spa treatments and careful makeup hadn't been able to erase. "I wanted to tell you something, before you head off into the Great Wide Open." She looked down, fiddling nervously with the silver charm around her neck. "I--I do care."

"About what?" Xander said, knowing full well what she was talking about, but needing to hear her say the words aloud.

"About Anya, about Sunnydale, about--Spike." She nervously shoved her hands into the pockets of her khakis, letting go of the charm in the process. It was at that moment Xander realized it wasn't some expensive trinket she'd picked up at the Third Street Promenade. It was a ring.

An old, tarnished, silver skull's head ring.

Fuck me. I am the asshole of the world.

If Buffy noticed his embarrassment, she didn't let on. "Do you remember, the night before we went into the Hellmouth, when I was in the basement all that time with him?"

"Yeah, we all kinda figured you guys--" Xander paused. It seemed really crass now, after the way things had shaken out, to think of all the snarky, suggestive comments they'd made about the "special instruction" the Slayer was giving her newest Champion.

"Were getting busy before we got really busy?" she finished flatly.

"Something like that, yeah," he said sheepishly

"Well, we didn't. I think I might have--no, I know I would have," Buffy said, meeting his eyes steadily. It was the first time that he'd ever seen her mention sex with Spike, and not look either angry or ashamed. "But he wasn't in the mood, which was definitely a sign of the coming apocalypse," she said, her mouth quirking up into the tiniest of smiles before she sobered again. "We just talked, God, for hours. He told me things. . .lots of things, mostly about his life before he was turned. He was a poet, can you believe that? Said his stuff sucked, mostly, but his father had made so much money in widgets or corsets or something that it didn't matter."

Xander almost couldn't believe it. It was hard to even imagine Spike as human, much less some poor little rich kid trying to play starving artist. But he didn't say anything, realizing that Buffy needed a sympathetic ear, not sarcasm.

"He had a sister who died of the flu when he was little, and a spaniel named Byron who disappeared a few days before he did. He always suspected Angelus had taken it while his gang was stalking him, but he could never prove it." She looked a little ill, which given what they all knew about Angelus and dogs wasn't surprising. "He told me a lot of other things, but I can't remember most of it. I was too wigged out about what we were facing in a few hours to focus on what was right in front of me," she continued ruefully. "Mostly I just lay there and let him ramble--it was like he had this big charge of words built up, and if he didn't get them all out he was going to explode. I realized later, he was talking so much because that was his last chance to talk to me. He knew he wasn't going to make it out of the Hellmouth." Her sea green eyes darkened to emerald with pain. "That I was leading him to his death in the morning."

"Buff, you don't know that," Xander said, feeling, if it were possible, even more guilty than he had two minutes ago. There was something gutting about the realization that Spike hadn't spent that final night in Sunnydale drinking or screwing or doing any of the other things you'd have expected of him. That he had spent his last few hours on earth trying to give the women he worshiped some idea of the man he'd been, rather than the monster she'd known.

"Yeah, I do. Because of what he said, right at the last," Buffy replied sadly. "I was about to go upstairs to find the rest of you, when he stopped me. He took my face in his hands, and he looked at me so seriously. He seemed exhausted, but sort of at peace too, you know? Like he'd finally beaten the demons he'd been fighting all year. I'd never seen him look like that before." Her voice had slowed, face gone almost blank with concentration, like she wasn't retelling the experience so much as reliving it. "He made me promise him that whatever else happened, if I survived I'd get out of Sunnydale and not look back. He said, 'You've been in the dark too long, pet. Get out into the light before you start thinking you belong down here with the night creatures. Before you're too in love with Death to ever give Life his fair shot with you.' I'll never forget that." She looked up at Xander then, eyes wide in that frozen way he knew meant she was holding back tears. "So see, I've just been trying to do what he asked me to do. And maybe I've messed it all up, 'cause I was never very good at following directions, but I figure I owe it to him to try, at least."

Xander blinked hard, his own eyes feeling suspiciously full, before finding his voice. "Buffy, what happened to Spike, and to Anya and the other slayers--it's not your fault. You were a general leading your troops into Armageddon. There was no way we were getting out of there without collateral damage. Everybody understands that."

"Then why are you so mad at me?" Buffy said, her voice as high and pleading as a child's.

No, I'm the asshole of this and several other dimensions.

He sighed deeply. "I'm not mad at you, not really. I was a grade-A jerk to chew your ass like that the other day. I know that, even if I didn't have the balls to say it before now. But see, the First doesn't have an ass to chew." He glanced down at the battered old ring dangling directly over her heart. How had he not seen it for what it was before? Maybe because I didn't want to, he thought guiltily. "I'm sorry, Buff. I really am. I know that if we were adding up accounts, you've lost more than anybody."

She took his hand in her own small, exquisitely manicured one. "That's why I'd kinda like to hold on to what's left," she said softly. In that moment he could see the ghost of the sweet, moon-faced girl she'd been, the one who'd stolen his heart and sealed his fate so many years ago. Then the speaker overhead squawked to life, making them both jump, and the girl was gone, leaving behind this small, tense woman with eyes too old for her face.

"Delta Flight 837 to Dallas, now boarding at Gate 16," it blared.

"Sounds like they're playing my song," Xander said lightly, because the moment was already broken.

She nearly cracked his ribs when she hugged him goodbye, she held on so tightly. God, she's such a tiny thing, he marveled as her head fit under his chin. How did something this small carry so much for so long?

"You do good in school. No drinking, no smoking, no cutting class, no slaying, and no boys. I expect to see good grades from you, young lady," he said a little breathlessly as she released him.

"And you, Private Harris, will hightail it into the wilds of Texas and show those cowpokes how it's done," she said, standing back and crossing her arms in full-on General Buffy fashion. "That's an order from headquarters."

He sketched her a little salute. "Yes ma'am."

They just looked at each other for a minute then, and Xander realized that this was it. This was really, truly it. Even if this job didn't work out, things would never be the same. The Scooby Gang was now on permanent hiatus.

So this is the way the world ends, he thought. Not with Armageddon, not even with the three of us riding off into the sunset together. Just one big fight, a true confession or two, and a few bad jokes. Who knew the grand finale would be so fucking lame?

He reached down and grabbed his carry-on bag to hide the sorrow in his face.

"Call me!" she shouted as he walked away.

Xander couldn't look back to watch her be swallowed up by the heaving masses of the airport.

Part Three: In another part of the world

The sunlight was really, really bright in Texas, Xander realized, stumbling off the plane and onto the glittering tarmac at Eldorado Regional Airport. Even with the sunglasses he had on to protect his new, sensitive eye, he still had to squint. Dazzled by all that shining whiteness, he bulldozed a trio of scruffy student-types probably headed for the local college before hastily making his apologies and scrambling to the shelter of the gate area. He paused for a moment just inside the doors, slipping a hardshell case out of his satchel pocket and exchanging the clear prescription glasses inside for the tinted ones he was wearing.

Whatever Willow had done seemed to have split the vision between his surviving right eye and his new left one, so besides being oversensitive to light, he now had shit-for-vision in two eyes, instead of good vision in only one. But glasses were a small price to pay, he supposed, for not having a Sammy Davis, Jr. marble-in-a-dead-socket or the ironic eyepatch. When trying to start fresh in a new, non-demony place, it was best to leave behind the image of bad-ass one-eyed demon hunter, which was also why he hadn't brought any weapons with him. Well that, and the fact that he knew he didn't stand much chance of getting a twelve-inch dagger or a crossbow through airport security in these heady post-9/11 days.

No, glasses weren't a bad thing at all, Xander thought, looking around the clean, white, over-air conditioned space through his new scratch-proof lenses. Especially since they kicked the whole mature volume up another notch, which could only be of the good in trying to secure employment. The only part of his new adult look that disturbed him was the gray hair, which Willow had explained was a pretty standard side effect of the eye-fixing magic. So along with the glasses, Xander now had a Rogue-like skunk stripe running from hairline to nape where his part fell. Catching sight of himself in one of the mirrored columns scattered around the gate area, with his glasses and greyness and sober blue suit, he realized he looked like the Xander Harris of three months ago's older, world-wearier brother.

Yeah, Texas was bright. The sunlight was bright, the airport sparkled, and there seemed to be an abundance of silver belt buckles and bolo ties catching the light. Not as many cowboy hats as he would have imagined, but there were plenty of boots worn with business suits clicking on the tile floors. He made his way as part of the herd to the baggage claim, feeling the duct tape-wrapped handle of Willow's old leather satchel-cum-briefcase get wet and slippery from flop sweat. The posters in the airport advertised steak houses, dude ranches, a Salvador Dali exhibit at the local art museum, and Jack Daniels, as well as the usual Fortune 500 companies and Internet services. Tammy Wynette was singing about her D-I-V-O-R-C-E over the airport PA system, and Xander wondered if a real taste for country music, the music of pain, was something that one developed over time, or an infection one caught from contact with country music lovers.

His suitcase finally rode by on the conveyor belt at the baggage claim, and he grabbed it. Feeling a little more balanced with a bag in each hand, he looked around at the other side of the arrival area, where tour group leaders held signs and families waited and pointed as members claimed their luggage. In the middle of this mess stood a perfectly still and upright African-American man with a head full of silver hair, holding a tasteful placard with the O'Shea Construction logo and the words "Mr. Harris" lettered beneath it. That's right, he was Mr. Harris now, since Dad was pieces of ash washing up on the sands of Santa Monica.

The man looked at Xander and Xander nodded, pushing all thoughts of his new orphanhood away with a very determined shove.

"Hiya," Xander said, coming level with the man. "That's me. I'm him. I mean, I'm Harris. Xander Harris."

Vodka martini, shaken not stirred, he thought. I sound like a total asshole. Shoot me now.

"Yessir." The man folded the sign under his arm and looked at Xander in a way that made him feel as though the man were adding up his total worth, from his cheap suit to his Timex watch to his Target boxer briefs, and finding the total lacking.

"Take your bags, sir?"

"I'm cool. I mean, I'm balanced. Balanced with the bags. Briefcase in one hand, bag in the other gives me some equilibrium. False equilibrium," he babbled, managing to stop before he made an even bigger ass of himself.

"Yessir, the car is this way."

Xander put his suitcase in the trunk of the Lincoln Town Car, thanking whatever deities were on the clock at the moment that the driver hadn't shown up in anything grander. A limousine would have reduced him to an even bigger gibbering wreck than he was already. He issued a strict injunction to his mouth not to make any Driving Miss Daisy cracks, no matter how great the temptation.

"It's about forty-five minutes to the hotel," the driver said as they pulled out of the parking lot. "Mister O'Shea's put you up at the Corporate Suites, which are very nice. I 'spect he'll be callin' between now and our arrival to set up a meetin' with you."

"Great," Xander said, hearing his voice come out thin and eager.

He bit his tongue.

So he wouldn't give into the temptation of speech, Xander rummaged around in his satchel for a moment and dug out one of the Star Trek novelizations Andrew had left behind at the Hyperion. Strange thing there, to think that Andrew was the closest he'd had to a guy friend for a long time, unless he counted the brief periods when he and Spike had been roommates. Which he really couldn't, even if the vampire had had excellent taste in cult television. Then again, maybe his singular lack of male companionship wasn't so strange. After all, how easy was it to make friends when your hobbies were science fiction, fighting demons, and taking orders from Buffy? Not exactly the kinds of things you could bond with your co-workers over while slugging down beer and pretzels at the local seedy bar. Now that he was retired from the latter activities, maybe he'd have time for some extra-curriculars that didn't involve such a high quotient of blood, guts, and general weirdness. Unless he took up playing Resident Evil again, where the carnage was virtual and so didn't count. Pulling another hardshell case out of his satchel and switching to his reading glasses, Xander opened the paperback and hoped that he wouldn't get a blurry vision headache before they reached Eldorado.

Eldorado, the legendary city of gold.

Maybe it would be. If Xander had learned anything over the years, it was that there was no knowing how things were going to turn out.

Well into the second chapter, right after the third red-shirt security guard had gone to that big transporter room in the sky, the phone built into the console chirped loudly, making Xander jump in his seat and drop the book. He looked up and saw the driver's eyes fixed on him in the rearview mirror.

Facing down vampires had been easier than this.

He picked up the phone.

"Harris," he said, trying to force a little Shatner attitude into his voice.

"Why hey there, Mr. Harris. Clifford O'Shea here. But you can call me 'Buck', everyone does--'cept the missus and the minister, when he thinks of it. Y'all have a good flight? Is Phillips treatin' you good or is he bein' a snob? Tell you I ain't sure if I'm up to that man's standards, and I sign his paychecks!"

O'Shea's voice leapt out of the telephone and grabbed Xander around the neck. Bright, cheerful, and dripping with Texas drawl, it belonged to a Chuck Jones cartoon character. Like Foghorn Leghorn. Or possibly, Yosemite Sam.

"The flight was fine, everything's fine," Xander said to O'Shea, all the while thinking help! to himself.

"All right, then. Phillips is gon' de-cant you at the Suites. Get yourself a shower an' some shut-eye if you want. I'll come by 'bout seven and we'll get you some supper. You eat steak, son? I know there are plenty of veggy-tarians out there in California, and we can fix you up with toe-foo or whatever if you don't eat meat."

"No, steak's fine. Never met a cow I didn't like."

"Good man. Seven it is. Oh--don't get dressed up. Eatin' steak's a messy business if ya do it right."

As Xander hung up, he decided that the formal job interview must be the next day. Dinner out was just the condemned man's last meal before sunrise, a token gesture of pity before the ritual flaying and beheading, and the dumping of his unqualified carcass back on the plane.

The Corporate Suites turned out to be an apartment-slash-residential hotel-type thing, where he checked in at the reception desk, got the key to a one-bedroom suite, an access card to the on-site workout center, and a standing invitation to the daily breakfast buffet, which was included in his stay. Although in general the Suites were as standard, inoffensive and generic as a box of Kleenex, there were design elements here and there that showed a Spanish sensibility. The buildings themselves were finished in stucco-like fashion and had faux red tile roof treatments, red accent tiles demarcating the area between floors, and decorative black iron shutters on the windows.

The suite he'd been assigned had a view of the center courtyard in the bedroom, where he could see the tile-lined fountain bubbling away in the middle of the manicured garden. The living/dining area had a balcony and sliding glass doors, with a million-dollar view of the modest skyline of Eldorado. In the early evening sun, windows flashed like diamonds between the swathes of bright green trees that striped the cityscape in neat rectangles. He could see more tile rooftops, Victorian copulas, and rows of gabled roofs peeking out of the vast canopies of greenery. The profile of the city was pretty low, not much more than five stories or so, and it had the well-laid-out charm and tidiness of a model train platform.

From what Xander remembered of the city website, Eldorado had initially been a Spanish town, part of the Mexican encroachment into what was then the Territory of Texas. Eventually, the Mexican Spanish had been forced back south, and the American settlers had moved in with a vengeance. The first mayor of Eldorado had been named Hezekiah Darling (the name was silly enough to be memorable) and had come to Texas after being banished from Savannah, Georgia for unknown reasons. Darling couldn't have held too much of a grudge, however, since when the time came to formulate a civic plan for Eldorado, he had based it on his hometown. Like Savannah, old Eldorado was laid out on a grid, with squares that faced a central green space which served as almost a neighborhood front yard for those lucky enough to live in one of the fine old houses in the historic district. There had originally been twenty-one squares, as in Savannah, but time and construction had reduced the number to seventeen.

Most of the downtown city area was also in the historic district, where no new building had been permitted since the seventies. The bulk of O'Shea Construction's work was on the outer perimeter of Eldorado, where it built sprawling mansions set back on generous swathes of green for the wealthy magnates of the high-tech companies just down the highway. O'Shea also built less imposing mini-mansions on typical suburban lots for middle-management, and modest ranch-style haciendas on postage stamp-sized yards for the rank-and-file. O'Shea Construction was also responsible for most of the upscale shopping centers and chi-chi restaurants where the magnates and middle managers gathered in the off-hours, as well as the factories, strip malls, and discount outlets where the rank-and-file shopped and worked, but that was the Commercial Division.

It was too much for his brain to process at the moment, Xander reflected, hard enough to imagine he was somewhere that wasn't urban decay or a smoking crater.

It was time to take a shower.

Afterwards, he lay on the bedspread of the king-sized bed in his new Target boxer briefs and didn't sleep. The red numbers on the bedside alarm clock moved and changed until it was time to get ready.

He wore the new Tiki shirt with chinos and a pair of brown loafers that Willow had picked out for him, and headed for the main entrance to meet his fate.

********

O'Shea looked like his voice, if Yosemite Sam had been clean-shaven and six-foot-four. He was even wearing the wardrobe--Levis with a big western-style belt, well-worn cowboy boots, and a faded plaid button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up. All that was missing were the ten-gallon hat and a pair of Colt 45's slung around his substantial waist. Maybe he left 'em in the car, Xander thought with a gulp. O'Shea's bulk matched his height, with arms like tree branches and legs like tree trunks, and a belly that made an entrance a moment or two before the rest of him. But it was hard fat, like a tackle too many years away from the gridiron. His round face had the peculiar kind of weather-beaten ruddiness that results when fragile fair skin burns and peels and re-burns until it goes permanently pink in protest. The rest of his visible complexion was a mottled brown, not from suntan, but from thousands of freckles that had joined together, creating giant freckle continents on his upper chest and forearms. Xander bet that underneath his button-down, Clifford "call me Buck" O'Shea had the farmer tan to end all farmer tans. The color of his face and arms contrasted sharply with his thick shock of silver-white hair, which still retained a few rusty streaks of its original red shade. His small, wide-set eyes were the faded blue of much-washed denim and were drawn up into a permanent half-squint, as if they too had been blasted by the unforgiving Texas sun and had tried unsuccessfully to shield themselves. Clearly, Buck was part of that generation of good ol' boys who thought sunglasses and sunscreen were for women and fags. Leaning against one of the beige stucco pillars in the Suites entranceway, cleaning his nails with a wicked-looking pocket knife, he radiated the paternal benevolence and calm confidence of a man absolutely at home and in charge of his world, a clean-shaven Texas Santa Claus greeting him with a big aw-shucks grin and a twinkle of his bleached chambray eyes.

Xander found him absolutely terrifying.

Buck shot Xander a quick once-over glance identical to the one Phillips had given him earlier, as if he were weighing Xander's entire net-worth on some inner balance sheet. Then his grin widened. "Al-ex-an-der Harris, pleased to meet you in the flesh, son," he announced, pocketing the knife in one smooth motion and nearly crushing Xander's hand in a big, freckled paw.

"Good to meet you too--s-sir." he stumbled on the last word, but decided that when in Texas one should do as the Texans do. "Uh, people usually just call me Xander."

"Fair enough." Buck jerked his head in the direction of the parking lot. "Now that we got the social niceties took care of, let's head out. I got the car outside and we're burnin' daylight."

The car in question was a gigantic black Cadillac from the days when gas had been cheap and bigger had been better. The car was faded from the sun, dinged here and there and in need of a good coat of wax, but Xander had the feeling that it was the automotive equivalent of a comfortable pair of shoes. The interior was pristine, and Buck piloted the vehicle one-handed, with the ease of someone who considered his car an extension of his own body.

"Damn nice little town, ain't it?" Buck said, as they pulled out onto the main thoroughfare that ran in front of the Suites. "Came out here in '70 straight out of the Corps and it was like nothin' had changed here since FDR was in office. Just a wide place in the road, really, and sleepy as hell. A little too sleepy for my tastes--for awhile there, I wasn't too sold on stayin'. Hell, I was young, and when a man ain't seen thirty yet he's always looking for somethin' bigger and better over the horizon. You know how it is," he said, with a knowing glance at Xander. In the process, he entirely failed to yield the right-of-way at a four-way stop to a little old lady in a giant green Oldsmobile. She seemed to take the slight personally, if the fist-shaking and expression of impotent rage were anything to go by.

Buck continued blithely on. "But then I met Candy and started makin' good money working for the DOT, and after we put in the Expressway in the summer of '75--and wasn't that seven different flavors of holy old hell, lemme tell you, supervisin' a crew of men diggin' ditches and pourin' tar in 105-degree weather, tryin' to keep 'em on schedule when the state's payin' 'em slave wages. Chasin' Charlie down the Ho Chi Minh Trail had nothin' on that," he chuckled, gunning the Cadillac's powerful V-8 engine and flying through a light just as it flipped from yellow to red. "Well, pretty soon some hotshot at corporate headquarters figgered out what an easy commute we was from both Austin and San Antone, and that the land here was still as cheap as--well, dirt. Before ya know it they was puttin' in office parks out on the highway an' I told the wife, 'Darlin', if people are gonna work 'round here they might take to the idea of livin' here, too.' Hell, who'll commute an hour or more each way every day when you can be ten minutes from your place o' business? 'Specially when the town's as purty as this one is."

Spotting their turn-off, he changed lanes abruptly, cutting off a Toyota truck full of Mexicans who started yelling out various suggestions in Spanish. Xander's knowledge of the language was limited to "hasta la vista, baby" and "yo quiero Taco Bell," but he was pretty sure they weren't being told to have a nice day. If Buck heard or understood what was being said he gave no sign, still intent on the slings and arrows of his salad days. "Didn't take a genius to figger that Eldorado was gonna grow like kudzu in June, but you wouldn't believe the jawin' I had to listen to when I sunk my life's savin's into that first tract of residential lots. I told some buddies of mine they had a chance to get in on the ground floor of somethin' big, but I may as well've been talking to myself. Some people got no vision, no vision at all," he concluded with a mournful shake of his head, as if feeling deeply sorry for the poor souls foolish enough to ever question the judgment of Clifford O'Shea, Sr. (Much later, when Xander began to have some idea of just how much Buck had cleared on those first developments back in the dizzy boom years of the late 1970s, he would come to understand the older man's pity.) "Anyway, Eldorado's been a great place to live an' raise a family. Sure, you got a few undesirable elements, but nothin' that ain't under control. I bought me and the wife adjoinin' plots in Peaceful Acres, so we're gon' be here 'til Judgement Day."

The Cadillac made a sharp turn and Xander nearly bounced off the door panel.

"Here we are."

Roy's Steak Ranch looked like a place where roach motels sat on the tables between the sugar and Sweet-n-Low packets. It was a low cinderblock building with a sign featuring a neon cowboy reaching up into the sky to drop a neon lasso around a neon T-bone steak that seemed bent on escaping. There was a cement longhorn steer the size of a school bus plopped down next to the main entrance, threatening with its fiercely pointed metal horns anybody who wasn't brave enough to eat steak.

"Don't look like much, I know," Buck said as they climbed out of the Caddy. "The inside's not much better. But Roy gets his meats from Dell's Packing plant near the railroad, and you won't find a cut of meat in here that wasn't on the hoof the day before."

As would often prove to be the case, Buck was right--the inside wasn't any better. Roy's Steak Ranch consisted of a single long, rectangular room, low-ceilinged and dimly lit, floored with rough unfinished pine planks that had long since darkened to almost-black by decades of use and abuse. The room was lined by red vinyl booths on each side, with additional seating provided by a row of pitted and scarred formica tables running down the center of the room. Pictures of prize steers from cattle shows dating all the way back to the fifties graced the cinderblock walls, and Hank Williams, Sr. was wailing about being so lonesome, he could cry over the tinny speakers set into the stained ceiling. There was a pervasive smell of woodsmoke in the air, and honest-to-God sawdust in the corners. The only clue that this place served, according to Buck, "some of the best dam' beef this side of paradise" was that every booth and table was absolutely packed with what looked like locals, with ten or fifteen more people crowded into the small vestibule by the cash register waiting on seats. Xander's stomach growled, and he wondered how long it would be before he got a chance to actually taste any of what he was smelling.

As it turned out, not long. Practically the minute they stepped in the door, Buck was greeted effusively by a small, frog-faced man, the Roy whose Ranch this was, who led the two of them over to a prime corner booth that had just been cleared. Many heads turned to follow them as they made their way across the room, and Buck endured the scrutiny with the good-natured aplomb of a visiting dignitary, exchanging brief, hearty greetings with a few and nodding cordially at the rest. As they slid onto the slick red vinyl, Roy slapped down two oversized laminated menus that had appeared from behind his back as if by magic. After he had engaged in a minute or so of small talk with Buck, in an accent so thick Xander could only make out the occasional "y'all" and "damn", the owner signaled a waitress over to their table and excused himself, mumbling something about needing "ta laht a farr unner dat dam' cook 'fore da holl place's at sixes an' sevens."

Their waitress was a cheerful-looking woman on the wrong side of forty, brown and buxom in the sun-ripened way of many native Texans, with yellow hair teased into the exact height and consistency of cotton candy. She had on a dark green t-shirt with the Roy's Steak Ranch cowboy-lassoing-a-steak logo stretched over one ample breast, and tight Wrangler jeans that strained at her substantial but shapely hips. She greeted them with a toothy thousand-watt smile that reminded him, oddly enough, of Buffy's.

"Well, if it ain't Big Buck O'Shea," she drawled, setting down two waters with lemon and a basket of complimentary garlic bread. "We ain't seen you 'round here in a coon's age. What you been up to, sugar?"

"Aw, the usual, Tammy darlin'--just tryin' to stay ahead of those people I owe. How's that grandbaby of yours?"

"Oh, he's doin' fine, just fine. Fixin' to start school come September."

"Ain't that amazin'," Buck said, squinty eyes widening as if he really were amazed. "I can remember when his mamma was runnin' 'round here in pigtails and kneesocks. Speakin' of which, she ever get things settled with his daddy?"

Tammy gave a decidedly unladylike snort, pursing up her pink lipsticked mouth into a disgusted pout. "Shoot, Buck, she cain't even find his daddy. Last we heard he was down in Mexico, prob'ly holed up with some of his kin down there. You know how it is. Why Amber ever got herself mixed up with the likes of him I still don't know. She's seein' a real nice man now, though, works as a line supervisor at Dell's Packagin'. So keep your fingers crossed."

"Will do. I'll tell Preston to keep an eye peeled in the meantime for Ricky, case he hits town again. Boy's only got one eye and half-sense, but that ain't no excuse for not payin' child support an' helpin' out with the medical bills."

Tammy flashed him another one of those high-wattage smiles. Xander could see in the lines of her cheekbones and the curve of her lips the echo of the knockout she'd been twenty years ago. "I'd sure 'preciate that." She pulled an order pad out of the black cotton apron tied around her surprisingly tiny waist. "Now what you boys havin' tonight? I guess you'll be wantin' the usual, Buck? Porterhouse with a side o' ribs and a Coors?"

"Sweetheart, you're as smart as you are good lookin'," Buck said, sitting back with the satisfied air of a man who's had his every need anticipated. Then he nodded at Xander. "Now this here is Mr. Xander Harris, come all the way out from Los Angeles to see about workin' with me. He's never been to Texas before, an' I done told him the best steak and the best lookin' women in the state were right here at Roy's. So you treat him nice, hear?"

"Honey, you know I treat all my men nice," Tammy said, with a wink at Buck that was just on the right side of too-flirtatious. She turned her fluorescent smile on Xander. "What'll it be, darlin'?"

Xander looked down at the glossy beige menu confusedly. He'd been so busy following the banter between Buck and Tammy that he hadn't even bothered deciding what to eat. Judging from the menu, Roy's Steak Ranch was a democratic establishment: You could have anything you wanted, as long as it was steak. His mind went blank as he surveyed the bewildering array of choices, from rib-eyes to t-bones to filet mignon, in every possible weight and thickness. He noticed one selection set off in bold and his eyes widened--nobody really ordered a 72-ounce porterhouse, did they? And even if they did, nobody was crazy enough to try to eat it all, were they? But there it was, in 16-point type: "The Cattleman's Challenge: seventy-two ounces of pure, marbled perfection. If you can finish it, it's free!" Xander decided to pass: whatever macho points he might score with Buck by taking the challenge would probably be lost when he vomited chunks of pure, marbled perfection all over the stained pine floors.

Okay, then. Should he go for the Spicy Pepper Steak, just $9.95? His frugality and thoughtfulness might be worth something to Buck--self-made men were generally tight with a dollar, weren't they? Then again, Buck might find it insulting, like Xander was implying he couldn't afford to treat interviewees to a more expensive cut of beef. So maybe he should go just for the Strip Sirloin with a side of lobster tail, at a whopping $39.95? Would that signal he was a man with the confidence and charisma to order the most expensive thing on the menu? Or would Buck conclude that Xander Harris was a cocky young whippersnapper who'd run up his expense accounts at every opportunity? Xander's newly-healed eye began to throb from stress, as he felt the silence stretch out to what seemed like infinity while Tammy waited patiently for him to make up his fool mind. Realizing that choking over ordering a steak was no way to impress his prospective boss with his decision-making skills, he elected to take the traditionally safest route and shamelessly ape his betters.

"Uh. . .I'll just have what he's having."

Tammy's smile dimmed sympathetically, as if she'd known all along what was going through his woolly brain. "There, that wasn't so hard, was it, baby?" she cooed, sea-green eyes sparkling with amusement. Picking up the menus with one practiced sweep of her scarlet-tipped fingers, she gave him another one of those flirtatious winks. Xander felt a tiny ping! of attraction deep down in his stomach, which squicked him out to no end, since this downhome honey was probably around the same age as his recently departed mother. Tammy tucked her battered notebook into her apron and turned prettily on her platform heels. "I'll have those drinks and appetizers up for y'all in a minute." She headed back towards the kitchen area, rounded buttocks twitching perkily in her too-tight jeans.

"That is one helluva woman," Buck said with a chuckle. Xander looked up, startled, and saw Buck giving him the internationally-recognized leer of masculine appreciation of feminine assets. Xander gave a non-committal grunt that would have done Oz proud, not quite sure what to say when caught checking out a woman twice his age.

Then Buck's just-us-boys grin faded, and he sighed. "It's a cryin' shame, what she's done been put through. Clocked in fifty hours a week at this place for nigh-on twenty years now, raisin' two girls by herself since her husband lit out for the territories when the youngest was still in diapers. The oldest one's done just fine--she teaches history over at the high school, but the youngest got herself mixed up with this sorry devil Ricky Cuernos her junior year and dropped out to get married. Sure enough, they've got a baby before the ink's dry on the marriage certificate, an' next thing you know she's just like her mamma, workin' her tail off for six bucks an hour to support the kid while hubby's God knows where. Her mamma's just sick over it. Allison might've got most o' the brains in the family, but Amber still deserves better than workin' at the Q-Mart the rest of her days."

Buck shook his head in the ain't-that-a-shame-way Xander recognized from the car. "Why these little ol' gals wanna throw themselves away over men that ain't worth killin' I do not know. 'Specially in this day and age, when a young lady don't need a man to make out just fine. It's not like in the old days, when a gal that wasn't married by the time she was twenty-five may as well've dried up an' blowed away. I done told my two girls--get your education 'fore you start thinkin' 'bout hearts and flowers. Love don't always last, but if you've got that sheepskin, cain't nobody take that away from you."

He paused and took a meditative sip of his water. "'Course, if some no-account had done one of my girls that way, I'd string him up by his balls and let the buzzards peck his eyeballs out," he said matter-of-factly. He picked up one of the enormous greasy slices of garlic bread, then pushed the basket in Xander's direction. Xander took one absently, his mind still occupied with chewing over that last statement.

"But both of mine have better sense than to have anythin' to do with that crazy Cuernos bunch," Buck continued cheerfully. "Don't know what Tammy's girl was thinkin'. Bless her heart, Amber ain't no beauty queen, but I tell you, that Ricky looks like he fell outta the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down." He leaned forward conspiratorially. "Comes from all the in-breedin', ya know--those Cuernos have been marryin' their cousins for I don't know how long. Blood tells, too--Jake looks just like his daddy, poor little bastard."

"Maybe that's why he's sick." Xander said, feeling the time had come to get a word in edgewise.

"What's that?" Buck said, around an enormous mouthful of garlic bread.

"You said something about medical bills--I read somewhere that in-breeding causes all kinds of inherited diseases." Actually, his knowledge of such disorders came entirely from the X-Files episode where Mulder and Scully took on that in-bred family in rural Pennsylvania, but he figured it couldn't hurt to come across as a man who read something besides Star Trek novelizations.

"Well, Jake's not exactly sick," Buck replied, chewing thoughtfully. "He was born with a--well, I guess you could call it a growth on his forehead. Cost his mamma a small fortune to have it taken off. But I'd be willin' to bet the business he got it from his daddy's side of the family, an' the least the worthless son-of-a-bitch could do is pay for it. Lemme tell you--you gotta be real careful who you get hooked up with in this crazy world. You let algae get into your gene pool, you'll have a devil of a time cleanin' it out." While Xander tried to come up with some sort of response that towed the sensible line between Nazi eugenicist and bleeding-heart California liberal, Buck started to chuckle to himself. "Sorry to bend your ear about all this, son. But when a man's to the point where he's contemplatin' bein' a grandfather, his mind tends to dwell on these things."

"Oh, is one of your daughters--" Xander stopped, realizing that Buck had not informed him that either of his daughters was married, had actually made it sound like they were very much not married, and that he might be stomping all over a delicate area. He took a big bite of the greasy bread to cover, and nearly choked on the overpowering taste of butter and garlic salt. If any of the restaurants in Sunnydale had served this stuff, Buffy's job might have been a heck of a lot easier.

Then again, maybe not. Spike had really liked lemon-garlic buffalo wings, after all.

Xander blinked the thought away and, taking an enormous swallow of water to wash the bread down, tried to pick up the loose thread of the conversation. "I mean, uh, are you going to have grandkids, um, soon?"

"Oh, not right away," Buck said. "Kelly's still in high school--so I better not be hearin' any announcements from that quarter anytime soon, and Crissy is too focused on her career right now to even think about a boyfriend, much less a husband and kids. Cliff Jr.--that's my boy--he's not exactly family-minded." A faint grimace crossed Buck's face for a moment, like the garlic bread wasn't agreeing with him, either. Then his face cleared, and he shrugged carelessly. "But eventually. . .hell, I'm not gonna be here forever. Have to consider the future."

Just then, Tammy arrived with their ribs and two foaming mugs of beer. She set down the basket of ribs, two appetizer plates and two bundles of silverware, and gave Buck his beer. But she held onto Xander's, smiling apologetically.

"Sorry, hon, but I'm gonna have to see some I.D. before I give you this. You sure don't look underage, but Roy's just got on my case again about checkin' ID's. He's been het up about it ever since the state cops busted Alpesh at the Kwik Stop for sellin' Eight Ball to some high school kids last week."

"No problem," Xander said, digging out his wallet and handing her his license, which thankfully he'd had on him when he fled Sunnydale. Tammy glanced at it, overplucked eyebrows arching dramatically as she took in his birthdate. "Huh. Alrighty, then." She handed it back to him, looking ever-so-slightly disappointed. "Your steaks'll be up shortly." She twitched away again, rather less pertly than before.

"If you don't mind my askin', how old are you?" Buck said, who'd been watching the whole exchange intently.

"Twenty, uh, three," Xander faltered, then realized that, if he were hired, Buck would see his real birthdate eventually. "I mean, I'll be twenty-three soon. Next April," he concluded miserably.

"Huh," Buck said, the frown lines between his eyes deepening a bit. "I'd've guessed older than that. Thought the easy-breezy California lifestyle was supposed keep the grey hairs away, not bring 'em out," he glanced at Xander's hairline pointedly.

"Guess I was in the wrong part of California," Xander mumbled, carefully heaping ribs from the basket onto his appetizer plate so he wouldn't have to make eye contact.

He heard Buck give a startled chuff that must have been a sound of embarrassment, judging by his next words. It was the first time Xander had heard him sound anything but wholly at ease.

"Sorry 'bout that, son. I get to runnin' m' mouth and forget what I'm about. I spoke with Tito Vasquez about what happened in Sunnyvale and he mentioned that you'd done lost both your parents and your sweetheart in the earthquake. I am most sincerely sorry for your loss."

Xander swallowed and nodded. Having run out of ribs to concentrate on, he now attempted to feign interest in "Pollcat," a brown-and-white steer that had won fame and fortune as the "1996 Reserve Champion at the National Braford Show," and thus been immortalized by an 8X10 glossy hung directly over their table. He stared at "Pollcat"'s placid white face like his life depended on it, knowing that if he looked into Buck's faded blue gaze at that moment and saw the same warm sympathy he'd heard in his voice, he'd start sobbing like a little bitty baby and that would be even less impressive than blowing chunks, wouldn't it?

"Course, the town fathers had no business buildin' on a fault line," Buck went on smoothly, giving Xander time to compose himself. "You gotta have proper gee-o-graphic and seismic studies done before you go to work. Folks gotta live there, an' nobody wants to wake up one morning and find their front yard's turned into the Grand Canyon. 'Course we got tornadoes here, an' that's a whole other flavor of God's wrath. But the boys at the University do a good job with their computer models and whatever voodoo they do with the satellites, so we ain't had nothin' without at least a ten-minute warnin' for years. Bunch a' broken windows and messed up trees, mostly. Except for the trailer parks, o' course. Tornadoes takin' out trailer parks is God's way o' sayin' that people should be livin' in houses, not chicken coops." He paused, and Xander could hear him chewing appreciatively at a pork rib. "Candy has an aunt, sweet woman, but she musta been rollin' out biscuit dough when the Good Lord was handin' out brains, and just as stubborn as the day is long. I told her, 'Aunt Myrtle, you don't wanna go livin' in one o' them wobbly boxes, it's just not safe in these parts.' Even offered to build her a house for cost, but she'd have none of it."

Xander, having finally gotten a grip on himself, snuck a look at Buck, and saw his little blue Santa Claus eyes were now twinkling with laughter. "'Course, next thing you know we get a twister out this way, and sure enough, that tin-can she was livin' in goes up like Dorothy's house headin' for Oz. Lucky she was off visitin' her daughter, or she'd a' gone with it. Still, not an easy thing for a woman her age to get over, havin' all her wordly possessions scattered to the four winds. Some technician even found a pair of her drawers hangin' off the Cell One tower, if you can believe it, and wasn't she embarrassed? Never understood why some people feel the need to write their name in their underwear--I mean, if ya lose 'em, do ya really want 'em back?" He chuckled and took a deep swallow of his beer, draining a third of the glass in a few gulps. He wiped his mouth on his napkin and tactfully suppressed a burp. "But we got her set up in a real nice little place over at Ponce De Leon Estates, now."

Then, seeming to recall that Xander had probably just experienced something similar to his aunt-in-law, his expression sobered again. "Don't mean to be makin' light o' this kinda thing. To be sure, if there's anythin' that burns me more than innocent people gettin' hurt because of somebody else's carelessness, I don't know what it is." He reached across the table and put one huge, warm hand on Xander's shoulder. "Son, you need anything, anything at all, you let me know."

"Th-thanks," Xander stammered. He blinked quickly and looked away, taking another stab at memorizing "Pollcat"'s vital stats, which had been printed helpfully beneath the photo: hip height, 75", weight, 2560 pounds, DAM--"Dominette", SIRE--"Tomcat". . .

Luckily, at that awkward moment Tammy arrived back at the table, bearing a huge, steaming tray in one tanned hand.

"Here ya go. Two Buck O'Shea Specials." She started unpacking the contents of the tray, which to Xander's astonishment contained not only fresh beers and two of the biggest porterhouse steaks he'd ever seen, but additional plates upon which steak fries, hush puppies, and coleslaw had not been so much placed as mounded. He wondered for a second if he'd ended up getting the Cattleman's Challenge after all, then took a look around at some of the other diners' plates and saw that, nope, troll portions were apparently standard in the Lone Star State.

"You fellas need anythin' else?" Tammy said briskly. Xander shook his head and concentrated on the enormous piles of steaming food in front of him, wondering how he was going to stuff a suitably manly percentage of it into a stomach that felt like it had shrunk to the size of one of Tammy's sculptured nails.

"Naw, darlin', I think we're set," Buck answered for both of them. Tammy nodded and twitched off to answer the summons of a foursome of cowboys sitting at one of the center tables, who were holding up their almost-empty beer mugs with aggrieved expressions.

"Xander, you're lookin' a mite green around the gills, there. We may as well go ahead an' talk business right now, so that mebbe you can enjoy the rest of your meal in peace," Buck said, tucking his napkin into the V of his shirt.

Xander looked up from his mountain of coleslaw, for a second too confused to answer. Business. The only business they had between them was about the job. But they'd talk about all of that at the formal interview tomorrow, wouldn't they? Then he realized, with steadily mounting dismay, that Buck had never actually said anything about an interview tomorrow--that had been Xander's own assumption. And now that he thought about it, what kind of Texas millionaire went into the office to do interviews on a Saturday? Though since his return plane ticket was for nine o'clock Sunday morning, the interview had to be tomorrow, unless. . .fuck. Unless this casual conversation over ribs and garlic bread was the interview, to which his major contribution so far had been a random fact gleaned from an old TV show. FUCK. He opened his mouth, probably to make some totally lame and inappropriate comment, like "If I'd known this was it, I'd have worn a better shirt," when, mercifully, Buck cut him off.

"How's six-two-five sound, to start?"

At first, Xander thought he meant $6.25 cents an hour, and he opened his mouth again to protest, since he'd been making more than twice that in Sunnydale. Then it hit him that Buck was actually offering him sixty-two thousand, five hundred dollars a year, and he shut his mouth again, because the only words that were springing to mind were various forms of "gaaah!", and hearing his newest employee grunt like a caveman would change Buck's mind for sure.

Apparently taking Xander's silence as demurral, Buck threw his hands up in a "you got me" gesture. "Okay, okay--six-five-five. That includes full medical and dental, four weeks of paid vacation and a company car, o' course. But that's my final offer. If that don't suit, we'll just have to shake hands and say 'been nice knowin' you.'"

Xander had a sudden, horrific picture of himself slinking back into the Hyperion in his cheap suit and borrowed briefcase, forced to live on Angel's charity for the rest of his life after being rendered hysterically mute by Buck's insanely generous offer.

"NO!" he almost shouted in his panic to get the words out. Get a grip, man, he thought. He clenched his hands into fists under the table. "I mean, yes!" he said, in a slightly calmer tone of voice. "I'll take it. Sir."

"Fan-tastic," Buck said, slicing into his porterhouse with relish. He took a large bite, eyes closing briefly in ecstasy. "Damn. Roy's beef gets better all the time. If I didn't know better, I'd swear he was some kinda witchdoctor." He swallowed quickly and cut off another big piece. "Oh, one last thing--we're a mite mixed up in the Residential Division since Albert Johnson had that stroke of his a few weeks back. I've been tendin' to it best I can, but I've got other things needin' my attention. Hell, I cain't be everywhere at once. Upshot is, we could sure use someone in there ASAP. How about startin' on Monday?"

Xander paused with his first bite of steak halfway to his mouth. "Well, um, I mean, I was sort of planning on making the trip back to L.A., you know. . . to get my stuff together?" In reality, the "stuff" he'd left in L.A. could fit inside a large shoebox, but there was no need to tell Buck that. No, the real reason he wanted to use that return ticket was because he needed one last trip to California to see his friends, make his real goodbyes, get some closure on the old life before he started the new one. Didn't he?

"Shoot, just have your friends back there ship it out," Buck said with a dismissive wave of his fork. "O'Shea Construction'll pay for it, o' course--just give Nancy in Accounting the receipts."

"Uh, well. . ."

The older man fixed him with what Xander would soon come to refer to privately as Buck's bulldozer look, a steely-eyed glare that made Xander's free will want to turn over and offer up its belly.

"We could really use you by next week, son."

"Oh," Xander said. He paused and took the bite of steak to give himself time to think. Was there really any point in going back to Cali again? The few friends he had left in L.A. were leaving in a matter of weeks, and they'd already pretty much made the big tearful farewells. And when you came right down to it, how much more closure on his old life was he going to get than a big smoking hole in the ground?

"Okay, then," Xander agreed finally. "Sure. Monday's fine."

"Great. You can hitch a ride to work with me on Monday, and we'll have you settled in before you know it. And you're welcome to stay at the Suites till you find a place you like better." Buck reached across the table again and offered Xander one big, slightly greasy hand. "Welcome aboard, Xander Harris." They shook, Xander this time doing his level best to match Buck's crushing grip and succeeding fairly well.

"Ya know, I got a feelin' about you," Buck said as he released him. "Think you're gonna make out like gangbusters in Eldorado."

"I hope you're right, sir," Xander said, the enormity of the decision he'd just made suddenly hitting him. I am the Residential Division Manager for one of the biggest construction firms in the Southwest. I make sixty-five thousand, five-hundred dollars a year. I have a company car. God help me.

"Oh, I'm never wrong when it comes to spottin' potential." Buck said, with another one of those quick assessing glances, like a man checking over the prize steer he'd just bought. "Pollcat," maybe.

Xander tried not to choke on his steak at Buck's next statement, which was made in all innocence, he was sure.

"I can see it in your eyes, you might say."

Part Four: And you may find yourself

Eight o'clock on a Saturday morning in a strange town was not a comfortable time for doorbells to be ringing. Xander muted the Dexter's Laboratory re-run he'd been half-watching, stumbled over to the door and opened it. In Sunnydale he would have checked the peephole for monsters first, but there was no peephole in the door and presumably no monsters in Eldorado.

Nope, not a monster, though the being on the other side still wasn't quite what Xander had been expecting, which was the maid service or, possibly, maintenance. Instead, his sleep-blurry eyes settled on a tall, curvaceous young woman with long strawberry blonde hair, wearing a sunflower yellow dress that showed off a pair of legs which should have been designated as a controlled substance. She had a fruit basket in one hand and a dog leash in the other, attached to a small, wrinkled creature with a mashed-in face. She opened her mouth to make what was probably a cheerful greeting to match the basket, but before either of the humans could say a word, the creature gave an enthusiastic yip and leapt past Xander into the apartment. The leash jumped out of the young woman's hand, and she yelped with dismay as the fruit basket tumbled to the ground, sending a mixed assortment volleying in his direction. At the same moment her fantastically large handbag hit the floor, vomiting up its contents.

"Mister Winston!" she said, in a tone generally reserved for language that was far harsher and made up of words of four letters.

She dropped to her knees and began stuffing cellphone, fat Filofax, and half-a-dozen pens back into her bag.

"Harris," Xander corrected, dropping to his knees to corral the escaping fruit.

"What?" she asked, but with the ubiquitous Texas accent, it sounded like 'wuut', and for a second Xander wasn't sure she was speaking English.

"Harris," he said and tapped himself on the chest. "Me. Harris."

Belatedly, he realized he was holding a banana.

"Me Tarzan, you--"

"Jane," she said, automatically, and then shook her head as if to clear it. "No. No. Me Brooke, you Harris, he Mister Winston."

She pointed at the dog, who was now working his way through the Krispy Kremes Xander had gotten at the Kwik Stop as part of his healthy breakfast. The dog, who obviously had the best command of the English language in the room, licked Bavarian cream off his short, stubby snout and tucked into another doughnut.

The girl reached over and snatched the banana out of Xander's hand. She then stretched sideways, scooping up a large navel orange that had been making a break for the space under the sofa. Xander made a heroic but not entirely successful attempt to avoid looking down the rather substantial cleavage revealed by her awkward position.

"I can speak English, y'know," she said almost as if she'd read his mind, as she dumped the recovered fruit back in the basket. "And most of the time I can even speak it in complete sentences, but you're kinda catching me at an off moment--I'm not this much of a spaz, usually, really I'm not. So why don't we just forget about the fact that I came in here flingin' fruit at you, and start from scratch, okay? I know you're Alexander Harris. The pug's name is Mister Winston, and I'm Brooke. And I'm real sorry about Mister Winston and your doughnuts, but he's got a sweet tooth, and at the office we always have a big ol' box from Krispy Kreme or Entemann's just sittin' there waitin' to be raided, so he's sorta turned into the Pastry Bandit. I try real hard to keep him on a diet, bu