Disclaimer: I do not own either Buffy or Dante's Cove, they belong to their respective creators. I'm only playing with their characters and making no money

Chapter One

As the sun rose over the tops of the houses of Sunnydale, California, Alexander Lavelle Harris, known as Xander to his friends, watched pensively from his bedroom window. Today was the day he graduated from high school. What should be a happy time for him and his friends, the start of the next chapter in their lives, was overshadowed by the danger that faced them.

Xander sometimes found it hard to believe that it was only three years ago that he had discovered the truth about the town he'd grown up in and lost his best friend. To think that he had unknowingly been living in a town and going to a school situated right on top of a Hellmouth, a literal gateway to multiple hell dimension, that attracted supernatural creatures like vampires all this time, it was shocking that he'd lived long enough to find out the truth.

Now Xander had three years of fighting the supernatural under his belt. Not alone, of course. This wasn't a fight he was destined to be a part of, not like Buffy Summers. She was the Slayer, the one girl in all the world destined to fight the evil creatures that preyed on humans. She wasn't the only one anymore. After dying briefly while fighting against an old and powerful vampire called The Master a new Slayer had been called. Her name had been Kendra and she had died within a year, calling Faith. It had been good for a while when Faith arrived, Buffy had been able to share her duties. But then Faith had accidentally killed a human on patrol and went into a downward spiral. The intervention of the Watcher's Council had been things so much worse that Faith had switched sides. She was now in a coma, put there by Buffy to save her boyfriend, whom Faith had poisoned.

Buffy's boyfriend was called Angel. He was a vampire who had been cursed with a soul by the Kalderash gypsies. What they hadn't known until it was too late was that a moment of perfect happiness would remove that soul from him. It had been rough the year before with Angelus running free and Buffy either unable or unwilling to stop him. He had even killed one of theirs, Jenny Calendar also known as Janna Kalderash. It had been hard for Xander to watch as Buffy failed to do her job in the hopes of getting her boyfriend back. He could understand it to an extent, but it had been clear to him long before Jenny died that the chances of getting Angel back were slim at best, and in the meantime, Angelus was slaughtering innocent people.

Of course, it turned out there was a way to give Angel his soul back, but it had been done too late to save him. Buffy had to send him to hell to save the world. Xander truly wished that it had been Angelus she had sent to hell rather than Angel. Angel and Xander were not friends and never would be as far as Xander was concerned. He could never bring himself to trust the vampire. But the soul was still innocent of the crimes committed by Angelus and shouldn't have had to suffer for him. Re-doing that curse was cruel as far as Xander cared. The demon didn't suffer as much as the soul did.

Also helping in Buffy's constant battle against evil was her Watcher, Rupert Giles. He had a dark past, he and his friends used magic for selfish reasons, going so far as to summon a demon. But Giles had turned his life around and dedicated himself to fighting evil and helping his Slayer. He cared so deeply about Buffy, as if she was his own daughter, that the Watchers Council fired him for it. But Giles refused to stop helping Buffy, which had been causing a few problems with the new Watcher, Wesley Wyndham-Pryce. Wesley was a very by-the-book type of Watcher, which wasn't helpful with an unconventional Slayer. He had potential though, at least as far as Xander was concerned though the others appeared to disagree with him.

There were other students who also helped Buffy, alongside Xander. One was his now ex-girlfriend, Cordelia Chase. She was brutally honest and popular. Her family had been rich until recently, when it had been discovered that Mr. Chase had been cheating on his taxes. But Cordelia was one of the strongest people Xander had ever met and he knew she'd make something of her life.

Another student was Willow Rosenberg. She and Xander had been friends since they were five, but that closeness had been disappearing for a while and Xander was no longer sure he knew who Willow was. She was a smart young woman, especially with computers, and was their resident hacker when it was needed. Recently she had been getting into magic. Willow had been the one to cast the soul curse on Angel and had since been practicing more and more powerful magic. Xander was concerned as Willow appeared to be using magic as much as possible with no help or guidance, though Giles had offered more than once.

The last person of their little group was Daniel Osbourne, known as Oz. He was the guitarist in a local band called Dingoes Ate My Baby, the boyfriend of Willow and a werewolf. He wasn't a danger to the public as he always made sure he was locked up on the nights of the full moon. Oz was a very zen person, Xander had rarely seen him show any emotion. Usually it only happened when Willow was upset or in trouble as far as Xander could tell.

Over the last three years this group had come together to help fight the forces of darkness, but now things were changing. Giles had been fired by the Council; Wesley likely would be too. Buffy, Willow and Oz were heading towards their first year as students at UC Sunnydale. Angel and Cordelia were both leaving Sunnydale, Angel to parts unknown to put distance between him and his doomed relationship with Buffy, and Cordelia to Los Angeles to try her luck at acting. Faith was stuck in a coma, languishing in a hospital bed, possibly never to wake up again.

And Xander was heading to UC Dante in Florida, though he hadn't told the rest of the group that. He was proud of himself, especially as he got in on a full academic scholarship, but he knew his friends wouldn't understand his desire to leave Sunnydale and would try to guilt him into staying. He wouldn't be able to transfer to UC Sunnydale either, he did get accepted there but not on even a partial scholarship, and he couldn't afford college without that.

Xander knew that if he tried to explain why he couldn't transfer then his friends would assume he was lying about his acceptance into any college, call him a coward and guilt him into staying anyway, on some crappy minimum wage job, to end up useless, abusive drunks like his parents. Xander couldn't allow that to happen.

So, he kept his acceptance to college quiet. Instead he told his friends he was going on a road trip after graduation and didn't know when he would be back. And that was when he realized what his friends truly thought about him. They heard road trip just fine, but somehow turned not knowing when he would be back to him promising to see them off on their first day of college. Even when Xander tried to correct them by saying he probably wouldn't be back by them, they ignored him, talking about how great it would be to be seen off to college by him.

That incident had gotten Xander thinking about how the people he considered his friends had been treating him. He and Willow hadn't been anywhere near as close since they met Buffy and lost their friend Jesse. The more time had passed the further they grew apart. Xander knew Willow used to have a crush on him and he had tried to help her get over him by having an obviously fake crush on Buffy. That crush had started out real enough, and Xander had hoped that by continuing to act like he had a crush on Buffy after those first few months that Willow would get the hint that he wasn't interested without him having to hurt her. It hadn't worked out like that and Willow still had a crush on him when he started dating Cordelia a year later. And then somehow, Xander still didn't know how it happened, Willow and Xander had started making out with each other behind Oz and Cordelia's backs. He couldn't understand it, he'd never seen Willow that way and truly cared about Cordelia, so why would he risk everything to make out with a girl he had no interest in? Xander suspected magic was involved, but he couldn't prove it. But the damage was done.

The problem with the aftermath, as far as Xander could see, is that everyone except Cordelia had forgiven Willow almost instantly. They hadn't done the same for Xander, but it wasn't just the forgiveness that Willow got, and he didn't. The others, Buffy especially, acted as though Willow was completely innocent of any wrongdoing, like she hadn't been an active participant in the whole thing. So, all the blame ended up on Xander. Cordelia hating him, he could understand that. She was the most hurt by what happened. But the rest? They should either have forgiven them both or shared the blame equally between them. Xander didn't force Willow into anything, that last time he couldn't even remember properly, he's been suffering from blood loss and a nasty concussion at the time. He wasn't aware of what was going on around him until Cordelia and Oz had arrived.

Then there was the incident with Faith. They'd had sex once, during one of the strangest nights of Xander's life, and he had hoped that meant there was a connection between the two of them, even if it was just as friends. So, he'd tried to talk to her after she accidentally killed a human, tried to help her deal with what had happened. Instead of letting him try, Faith had tried to kill him. Xander could understand her reaction and had already forgiven her for it, but the reaction of his friends was harder to forgive. They acted like he had been in no danger at all with a super strong Slayer actively trying to strangle him.

For the past year Buffy and Willow had been trying to push Xander out of actively fighting evil, trying to regulate him to their personal slave basically. Didn't they understand that it wasn't their choice if Xander put his life on the line fighting evil? Of course not, they decided that only they could decide what Xander was and wasn't allowed to do. They kept insisting that Xander was a liability and constantly getting hurt. But Xander had never gotten more than a few minor cuts and scratches except the one time he had his wrist broken. Any other injuries were on his father and nether Buffy nor Willow had seen him injured.

As for being a liability, the only time anyone's life was in more danger than it should be was when Willow or Buffy tried to 'save' him from something he'd already killed or was near to killing. The only liabilities, as far as Xander could tell, were Buffy and Willow, due to constantly focusing on someone who didn't need their help instead of someone who did and what they were supposed to be fighting.

Willow also acted like she knew everything and was always right, even when proven wrong. She only cared about herself and what others could do to improve her life. She treated Xander like an idiot despite his grades being better than hers, and like the whole world existed to serve her. Xander had only noticed this recently of course, or he'd have broken off the friendship years ago. Willow, Xander had discovered a few days earlier, had spent the last few years trying to get the teachers to accept failing assignments as Xander's work. The teachers acted like they believed her, but then just threw away whatever Willow handed in with his name on, because they knew it wasn't Xander's work. It was never in his handwriting when written and when typed Willow always forgot to take her name off the document she printed. For someone so smart Willow was incredibly dumb at times, but Xander was thankful for that as otherwise she could have completely ruined his entire future.

For the most part, Xander could understand Buffy's less than great personality traits. She was a teenager with a destiny to, basically, die young. It made sense to Xander that sometimes she would have issues and would occasionally take those issues out on her friends. And Xander understood teenagers make mistakes, he'd made plenty of mistakes himself.

But Willow? Despite their year's long friendship, Xander found that he was unable to forgive Willow, especially as he believed there was yet more that she had done, and he didn't know about. It made him sad to think that this was what their friendship had ended up like, but he'd rather it ended now than with him ending up as Willow's personal slave with no free will of his own.

Which is why Xander had been so happy to accept the UC Dante offer. It got him out of the town he hated and away from the friends who had become toxic. He could start his life fresh, in a new place where he could make new friends. He'd still fight evil too. Xander no longer had a choice in whether he was a part of this fight, the moment he'd been forced to stake his best friend at the age of fifteen, that choice had been made. He couldn't stop now even if he wanted to. But that didn't mean he couldn't have his own life as well, he could go to college and have friends, separate from what had been his life here in Sunnydale.

Of course, whether Xander got to follow through with his plans depended on whether he could survive his high school graduation. They were facing the biggest big bad they had ever faced. Richard Wilkins was the mayor of Sunnydale, the commencement speaker at the graduation ceremony, and about to ascend into a true demon named Olvikan. He was going to be bigger and stronger than anything they had faced before and Xander was right in the middle of everything. It would be him laying the explosives throughout the school as the only one with the knowledge to do so, thanks to temporarily being possessed by his soldier costume one Halloween. And it would be Xander leading the students in battle against both the mayor and his army of vampires while Buffy tried to lead the mayor into the school so they could blow him up.

People were going to die today and Xander was going to be the one leading them to their deaths. The other students were now fully informed and had made the choice to fight themselves, no one had been forced or left unaware. But their deaths would still be on Xander. He wasn't sure how he was going to live with it when it was over if he himself survived. For so many years Xander had been jumping between depressed and outright suicidal, and now when he truly wanted to live, could see hope for himself in the future, he was either going to die or must live with countless deaths of fellow students.

Xander didn't know who was going to live or die, if they were going to win or lose, or what came next if he survived this fight. What he did know was that he didn't have a choice but to fight, for all the people who had been lost to the darkness of Sunnydale. And so, fight he would, to the best of his ability, and he would hope that as many people survived the day as possible. There was nothing else he could do.