Title: Hand Me Down Pairing: Xander/Willow Rating: PG-13 Summary: "There's a whole world of 'but', an encyclopedia-sized list of reasons why Willow putting his eye back isn't comparable to what Xander did on Kingman's Bluff. He just doesn't know how to get them off the page so he can give them to her." Notes: The title is from a Matchbox Twenty song, the chorus of which goes: I'm here for the hard times The straight to your heart times When living ain't easy You can stand up against me Whatever may fall on you Call on me That said, this isn't songfic. I didn't come up with the song/title connection until after I finished the fic. Also, thanks to everybody who audienced this for me. danawoods, dessert_first, kita0610, obsessedmuch and ladycat777 being a complete list of the people who put up with me about it. I hope. Thank you, ladies. "You know," Willow says, folding her arms across her chest and using her best 'I'm doing my best to be patient, but you're definitely on the short end of the rope' voice, "You keep saying it's different, but-" "Because it is." Xander shrugs and sighs for what has to be the fifty-seventh time in the last ten minutes. "It's not even close to the same thing. We're talking cousins so distant you'd need a chart the size of Zimbabwe to map out the relationship." "I could arrange that, you know." Willow turns to look at him. Her face settles into familiar, unrelenting lines, but her bottom lip is sticking out just a bit. Xander has to look away, both to hide the grin and give himself some space in which to collect his thoughts. Even now, Willow's determined look both cows him and makes him want to giggle. Neither one is a particularly effective argument-winning strategy, not that he wants to be arguing. But somehow that's exactly what they're doing, and Xander figures if they're going to have it out about this once and for all, then he might as well do the best he can to make her see reason. "No, it's really, really not." Xander returns to his point with a mutter as he slows his steps and stops in the shade of what has to be the biggest oak tree in all of Giles-land. He turns away from Willow and wedges his fingertips roughly under a piece of bark that's working its way loose. The cracking snap when the bark finally breaks free doesn't do much to relieve the pressure he feels building, but picking out the splinter that lodged itself under his fingernail distracts him enough that he's calm again when he speaks. Calm enough, anyway. "It's not the same thing at all." Willow isn't paying attention; she's drifted ahead, almost all the way to the wood at the edge of Giles' property, but realizes she's lost him when he speaks. Slowly, she turns and makes her way back. The caution behind each deliberate step, the tilt of her head as she watches him, the way her hair cascades down her arm; all of it is plain and clear and far too highly visible out of the corner of the eye he's not supposed to have. He wants to be grateful. Part of him is. He can admit that much in the sputtering incredulity that used to be the quiet in his head. Coping jokes aside, he never did settle into anything even resembling acceptance of the loss of his eye. He never did learn how to look at his new reflection head-on, never eliminated that initial shudder when he reached for the eyepatch on his nightstand each morning, never stopped checking to see if people were looking at him or the safely-covered-up hole in his head. But... Xander sighs and leans against the tree, shoving his hands deep in his pockets. There's a whole world of 'but', an encyclopedia-sized list of reasons why Willow putting his eye back isn't comparable to what Xander did on Kingman's Bluff. He just doesn't know how to get them off the page so he can give them to her. He shakes his head and starts kicking at tree roots with the toe of one sneaker, hard enough that he can almost feel the bruises as they form. He's not good at this, at finding real, honest words to frame his disappointment, his pain. Sarcasm he could do. Biting commentary or pointed jokes? Sure. But actual discussion, words that can't be laughed away, nothing but the two of them and all their pain out here where there's no chance of somebody saving them by walking in at an inappropriate moment or the phone ringing at the wrong time? He doesn't know how to do that. "Is it that bad?" Willow's voice is almost as soft as the glide of her fingers over the side of his face. He's still not used to being touched there, not anymore, but his startled jerk is as much about retreating from the question as from her hand. "It's not about..." There's a patch of flowers waving gently in the soft breeze in a dip of grass just on the other side of the tree. He doesn't know what they are, but the wide, soft yellow petals mock him gaily from their safe haven. He can't stop staring at them. "That's not the point." His voice is gritty, thick and rough with all the things he's been trying to swallow lately. Trying and failing, and here they are, having a conversation he doesn't know how he started, doesn't know how to end. Doesn't want to finish as much as he wants to get it out there and over with. "You keep saying that," she repeats. There's an edge to her words, a thin, sharp sliver that slices him with the implication that he's the one being stubbornly blind, in spite of his newly restored vision. Xander does a double-take; goggling once isn't enough for the depth of Willow's lack of understanding. "Because you keep not getting it!" he yells. At her. Finally, and it almost feels good, but he manages to rein it in a little before continuing. "We're not talking about you helping me find my car keys or pick the right Powerball numbers here." Willow frowns, cocks her head. "I don't think they actually have Powerball here, Xander. I'm pretty sure that's just a Stateside thing." He doesn't want to laugh, but he can't help it. It works like a backfire against his previously-unadmitted anger, and the flames inside him gutter and go out with a tiny, whimpering whoosh. "Jeez." Xander sighs and sinks to the ground heavily, ignoring the rough scrape-and-pull of his new jacket against the uneven tree trunk. "I just...I don't see how you can even..." He trails off, distracted by the feel of his fingers tugging his eyelid sideways as he rubs his face with one hand. It's been a few weeks, but it's still new in more ways than one. "I lost an *eye*," he says carefully. "An eye. Which sucked the mighty suck, true, but it's just an eye. You..." He stops with the realization that he's barbed-wired himself into a corner. No way in hell he's going to say it out loud, not even from the safe distance of almost half a decade from that rocky, dusty bluff. But Willow does it for him: "Lost my mind." She doesn't bother with the pretense of putting a question mark at the end of her sentence. He slides an almost head-on glance at her as she folds herself to sit beside him. Her legs are crossed, knees pushing into the side of his leg, hands folded in her lap. Her eyes are soft and serious and round. She looks like she's helping him, offering solemn advice on the best way to successfully manage a term paper assignment or telling him all about the latest findings on the connection between rapacious consumption of food with no nutritional value and various mortality-inducing diseases. Xander grimaces. "Hell of a time to remember how to finish my sentences, Will." She grins. It's crooked and wide and sunnier than any afternoon they're liable to see anytime soon, and he grins back at her in spite of himself before letting his expression grow serious again. "But yeah," he says quietly. Unwillingly. "You really kind of did." "Really or kind of? Which is it?" she asks, still grinning, poking his knee with one short, unpainted fingernail. He can't laugh with her this time. Not while he's remembering her eyes like that, dark and dead and determined to suck the entire world into a black hole of her own making. "It's not funny. It's not the same thing, and it's not funny." He's repeating himself, and he's a little sullen to boot. He doesn't care. He never could switch gears as easily as she could. "Hey." She pokes him repeatedly until he looks and recognizes that she's deflated herself to his plateau of quiet seriousness. "Really," she says, answering her own question for him. She pokes him again, then flips her finger over and starts flicking the tip against his leg, pulling at the underside of the thick seam on his jeans. "But you fixed it, Xander. You fixed *me*." He feels a little wobbly without the crutch of his anger tucked righteously, safely, under one arm. He wants to be able to give her the out, make the easy call, but then he doesn't, either. "No, I didn't," he says, shaking his head. His voice is emphatic enough that it burns his throat a little, pushes her back slightly. "No." His hand twitches as he reaches for her and decides not to all in the same heartbeat. She comes anyway, curling gracefully against his side until he can run a rough hand awkwardly over the shiny spill of her hair. "You did it," he says, and he's not bothered by the catch and snag of his voice over the words. Strain of disagreement and distance aside, she's still Willow. "You fixed you. With a little help from Giles and his band of merry women, but you did it. Not me." "It was a lot of help," she says, moving her pokey fingertip to his chest. "And you started it, buster. You and your-" The moment she starts to talk, Xander remembers why he's never brought that day up before with her, not in any substantive way. He was proud and giddy and talked about it with anybody who would even pretend to listen at the time, but once she'd got home and he saw her struggling to look everybody in the face, it felt like he'd spent the summer talking about something he'd accidentally seen in her underwear drawer. He never mentioned it again. "Don't," he begs, interrupting. He worries for a moment that she won't know whether he means the poking or the talking, but surprisingly, she stops both. He takes the unexpected amnesty silently, with a squeeze to her shoulder and a quick, grateful press of his lips to the top of her head. Willow sits up but doesn't scoot away from him. Xander's arm feels awkward and unmoored in the cool grass by her hip. "Why did you come up there after me?" The size of reprieves, like everything else these days, seems to be shrinking. "Do you suppose any of those trees could be Ents?" he asks by way of ignoring her. He nods at the stand of trees rustling coolly at the bottom of the hill. "It's a pretty old forest, isn't it? Wasn't Tolkein English?" Willow makes a noise deep in the back of her throat, one that's perfectly designed to leave him with no doubt whatsoever about just what she thinks of his lame attempt at tangent creation. "Right. Because you don't know." "About trees?" "About Tolkein." Xander shrugs. "They weird me out. And it's not like stranger things haven't happened." "Than Tolkein being English?" "No, than those trees being Ents." "Xander, the trees aren't-" Willow breaks off with a sharp look in his direction. Maybe even a Look. Sometimes it's hard to tell with her, and there's the added difficulty of him still adjusting to stereoscopic vision. "I don't suppose I get bonus points for managing to actually suck you into the diversion, do I?" Expression sheepish, hopeful. The head tilt of 'please forgive me, I'm cute'. "Nope." Willow shakes her head and smiles, dimples appearing as she dips her head and tucks in her chin. Outdoes him in cute by a landslide of adorably wrinkled-up nose. Xander brings his knees up so his head has somewhere to land when it falls forward. "Not fair. I think the judges are biased." He ignores her giggle, as well as the first gentle push at his shoulder. The second one, too. The third, and the 'Xander?' that accompanies it, brings his head up again reluctantly. "Still waiting for my answer, Avoidance Man." "Do I get a cape with that nifty nickname?" "No. You lost it." Xander waits; Willow doesn't disappoint. "You keep meaning to go pick it up from the dry cleaners, but then you stop for dinner, you need to fill up the gas tank, Giles sends you to Burundi-" Xander chimes in on the "again." "Yeah. You know how it is," Willow continues after flashing him a wide, tip-of-her-tongue-showing grin. "Next thing you know? They've given it to Goodwill, and you're capeless." In spite of himself, he's chuckling when he returns his forehead to his knees. A wise man submits to his defeat with grace, but always in the most comfortable position possible. This much, he knows. "I should probably stock up or something. It's always good to have a spare." This time, Willow ignores the distraction. "How about if I guess?" Her breath is warm against his skin, softer than her voice. Xander squeezes his eyes shut, wincing both against his knees and a sudden influx of goosebumps. He's the wounded party here. The ex-wounded party. The ex-wounded party who saved his best friend from ending the world in a fit of insanity. The part where he's defensively deflecting uncomfortable questions is a last-minute change in the game plan, and Xander's pretty sure it's an illegal one. He's not sure where the goosebumps fit in, exactly. "Do you have to?" His eye starts to hurt. It does that when he's upset. Xander slips a hand surreptitiously under his forearm so he can reach to rub the ache away. "Can we just... do the thing where you know what I'm going to say and I know what you're going to answer and we kiss and make up without the fighting part?" "You say that like you didn't start this whole thing," Willow says, but the nudge she gives his shoulder with the top of her head feels friendly, and the hand that works its way up his neck is bent on soothing, not pulling his hair, so he lets himself breathe. Relax a little. Maybe too much, because the words are out of his mouth before he even realizes he's thought them: "No, you started it. You and your coven-powered fix-the-broken-Xander-kit. All I wanted to do was-" The sharp intake of her breath stops him cold. He can feel her body tighten and her hand stills, but she doesn't pull away. Ouch. There might have been a little more bitter honesty in that sentence than he'd intended. Xander risks a look, rolling his head to the side a little, but all he can see is the top of Willow's head where it rests on his shoulder. "Will-" She moves. Sits up and shakes her head. "No." Her hair falls in her face, but he can see the drawn whiteness around her mouth. It hits him in the gut like a pair of size ten combat boots. "Is that...is that what you think?" He can hear the effort she's putting into controlling her voice, but the quaver is still obvious. Xander ups the steel-toe quotient to size twelves. "You think I..." Willow breathes, shaky and deep. Looks up, and her eyes are wet, almost as shiny as her hair is where the sun is dripping on it through the leaves. "You think I gave you your eye back because I wanted to fix you?" Yes, no, maybe, I don't know. For once, Xander keeps his mouth shut. He still gets the answer wrong. "Oh my god. You do." Willow stares at him for a moment that both goes on forever and doesn't last long enough to give him time to scramble for an appropriate response before she twists away and clambers to her feet. He follows, but not nearly as quickly or gracefully. She's a good three steps away and rubbing her eyes dry before he catches up and lays a hand on her sleeve. "Will, no. That's not what I-" She whirls on him. "Don't you dare lie to me, Alexander Harris!" He grimaces and pulls back, but not before she shakes his hand off her arm. Double ouch. "That's exactly what you think." Xander considers giving it a shot for all of about half a second. "Okay, fine. It is. I admit it." The weight of the slump of Willow's shoulders makes his back ache. "What else am I supposed to think? What other reason is there?" He's not expecting the slap on the arm, even though he should have been. "Ow, hey!" It doesn't really sting, but he makes a show of rubbing it anyway, as much for something to do while he tries to figure out where he missed his bus stop as anything else. "I really don't think this situation calls for the spilling of blood, do you?" He allows himself a tiny grin when she rolls her eyes at him instead of storming off again. "Dork." "Hey, now. None of that." At Willow's questioning look: "Being good with the obvious is my job. Get your own gig." She laughs once, a short, hollow chuckle, and closes the gap between them in two quick steps. "I didn't really hurt you, did I?" she asks, pushing his hand away and rubbing his arm for him. "Through my jacket?" He shakes his arm as if testing it, and grins. "Not so much. Let's hear it for the slap-absorbing power of the poly-cotton blend." Willow laughs again. This one's slightly more genuine; Xander's breathing comes a little easier because of it. But when she pushes at his arm and looks up at him, her eyes are even sadder than they were when she was fighting back tears. "Not that." It takes him a minute to get it, even with the way she's staring at his eye. "Oh." He places one hand over hers and rubs the back of her hand with his thumb in what he hopes is a reassuring fashion. Its effectiveness is probably lessened by the fact that he has to look away from her in order to answer, but it's all he has. "Maybe. A little bit." "I'm sorry." For all that he'd never wanted to actually have this conversation, Xander had spent a lot of time thinking about it. Eventually, after the what the hell and the why the fuck and the how dare she, Xander'd decided that all he really wanted was an apology. Just some kind of acknowledgement that Willow didn't have the right to arrange and rearrange other people's body parts, no matter how gold-plated her intentions might have been. Now that he has it, though... Well. He has yet to stumble across a pot of gold that didn't turn into a plastic bucket full of yellow-painted rocks by the time he got his hands on it. When he can look at her again, her face is dry, but there are tell-tale tracks on her cheeks and her eyes are full. "Hey. Hey," he says, slipping one arm around her. She buries her face in his shoulder, but he palms the side of her face, pushing up gently on her jaw until she consents to look at him. "Don't. Please?" "No, you're right," she says, shaking her head. He'll never know if it was the motion or the swipe of his thumb across her cheek that made the tears come. "It's not the same. It's not even... you... god, Xander. I'm so sorry." She retreats to the safety of his shoulder again, crying quietly, gently. It's more heartbreaking than the gut-wrenching sobs he half-expected ever could be. He strokes the back of her head and murmurs things to her, words, phrases and soft shushings he forgets as soon as they leave his mouth. Later, he's unable to remember how it starts. A quick kiss to the crown of her head, a clumsy addition to his attempts to soothe her. The hitching pause it earns him leads to another one, and then another, forehead to temple to cheek. Something like that, anyway, and the next thing he knows, he's got a handful, an armful, an oh-my-god-whoa lipful of warm, kissing Willow. A moment passes, then several moments. When they finally break apart, Xander's hand is shaking as he lifts it to tuck her hair behind her ear. "Um..." he starts, before realizing he hasn't quite yet regained the power of speech, what with all the gaping his brain is doing. Willow's lips twitch upward in the pause while she waits for him to admit that he's got nothing. It makes him want to kiss her again. Afterward, she makes an indescribable noise that's half sigh, half exactly what he can't find the words for. "I can't help but think I should say something here. Something other than 'um', that is." "Whatever it is, just make sure it doesn't sound anything like 'that didn't just happen', okay?" "What?" Xander frowns until his eyes go blurry. "Why would I..." He stops and tries to jar the confusion loose with a quick shake of his head. "I was actually thinking more along the lines of 'wow', or 'whoa', or possibly... well, one of those. Maybe some sort of jazzy combination of the two." "Oh." Willow blushes, looks down at her feet. "Okay." It's pretty obvious she's keeping something from him, but maybe they've had enough bald honesty for one day. He's relieved when she recovers and looks up at him with a mischievous twinkle that he hasn't seen all afternoon. It only feels like forever, but it was long enough. "You know, I didn't think you meant the 'kiss and make up' part quite so literally." "Actually, can we leave the make-up part in the realm of the theoretical?" He ducks in when she looks confused for another kiss that makes his stomach twist. He could get used to that feeling. He kind of hopes he never does. "Eyeliner's not really my thing," he says with a grin. This time, the smack on his arm doesn't surprise him a bit.