Title: Grief, Relief & Love

Author: Lysa-uk

Rating: PG

Feedback: Of course, it's always welcome. lysaharrisfsmail.net

Distribution: Ask and you shall receive

Pairing: Willow/Xander

Spoilers: If you haven't seen Season Three, I wouldn't read this.

Summary: What could have happened after Buffy and Xander thought Willow had been turned into a vampire during 'Doppelgangland', with a romantic twist.

Disclaimer: I don't own any of this so please don't sue me or anything. It all belongs to Joss Whedon/Mutant Enemy etc. No copyright is intended.

Notes: As explained, this is set during 'Doppelgangland', with lots of angst and a romantic ending. This was originally just one scene that involved Buffy and Xander dealing with Willow becoming a vampire, but it kinda grew. I wanted to include the library scene from the show because I just think it's hilarious and it always makes me laugh. I eventually added the romance element because I just can't help myself. I know that some of it doesn't exactly fit in with the show and the emotions are kinda interchanging a lot, but I had to write this. It begins directly after vampire Willow leaves them in the Bronze. I'd like to thank Martin because he helped me out with the dialogue in places. Thank you, babe!

Buffy watched the vampire's retreating form as it pushed through the small crowd of people and disappeared out of the doors of the Bronze. She stood stock-still, frantically trying to piece together what had just happened, her eyes wide in horror. She made a visual sweep of the club, making sure no one else had seen the demon that was now wearing Willow's body, and saw that everything seemed normal. It seemed almost cruel, the way the guys had resumed their pool game, the way the band played on, no one else feeling their chest grow heavy at the thought of one of their best friend's dying.

She tried to find her feet, feeling like she was rooted to the spot she stood on, until she eventually managed to turn around. The look on Xander's face was enough to make her eyes fill with tears, making her feel even worse than she did already, knowing that he was feeling this ten times worse. "Xander?" she said gently.

Xander didn't, couldn't respond. He was gazing off in the direction of the exit, the place he had last seen his best friend. His face was blank, pale, and his body was slumped, paralysed with shock.

"Xander?" Buffy said again, still gentle but this time louder, and reached out to him.

Xander felt the hand on his arm and backed away quickly as if he'd just received an electric shock from her, instinctively moving away from it. His eyes were dull and full of pain as they darted to her face, breaking the trance he seemed to be in. "What?" he said quickly.

She shuffled a few steps towards him, her hand reaching out slowly to rest on his arm again, and was relieved when he didn't back away from her again. "Are you…?" she began numbly, before shaking her head at herself. "Sorry," she mumbled. "Dumb question. I guess it's habit."

He looked at her, confused. "Was that…did that just happen?" he asked quietly. "Was that real?"

Buffy couldn't find the words to answer him. She tried to move closer to him in an attempt to comfort him, but it was like the closeness was too much and he backed away from her again, breaking the contact. Part of her had expected it from him, but it still hurt her that she couldn't help him. "We…" she started, taking a deep breath. "I think we need to go," she told him. "We should find Giles, see what he says."

"Okay," he said, his voice empty and his body not making any attempt to move towards the exit.

She gave him the smallest of smiles as her eyes met his, before she started through the crowds. She felt strangely numb inside, not able to get a grasp on her incoherent thoughts, the people in her way making her all the more tense and irritated. She turned to make sure that Xander was okay, only to find that he hadn't moved from the spot she had left him on. He still looked lost to her, still in a daze, still unwilling to believe what their eyes had seen. Her heart sank for him, amidst her own pain, and she hurried back to him. She placed a hand on each of his arms, lightly shaking him in an effort to get him to make eye contact.

He slowly came out of his grieving reverie and looked at her. "I can't…I…"

"Xander," she said gently, an edge of authority in her voice. "Come on," she told him, lightly tugging at the material of his sweatshirt.

He stumbled forwards, hardly able to carry his own weight, as Buffy began to head for the exit sign, one hand still pulling him along like a stubborn child on a harness.

All too soon, he found himself on the outside of the club, the cool breeze hitting him like a slap in the face, reality setting in, although he wished it hadn't. Everything seemed a blur: the streets, the people, the cars passing by, and he was only vaguely aware of a familiar female voice.

"…So we'll just head over to the library and go over everything we possibly can with Giles, and then we'll…" Buffy trailed off as she walked, almost marching, well aware that Xander wasn't listening, but part of her not caring. All she had left to keep her from breaking down was her sheer will and determination to get whatever or whoever did this to one of her best friends. Somewhere along the way she'd dropped Xander's arm, and now she realised that he was no longer following her. She turned on her heels, finding him a few yards behind her, slumped and defeated, sitting on the quiet roadside. "Xander," she said, her voice firm as she marched back to him. "We don't have time for this," she told him, standing over him.

Xander looked up at her. "She's gone, Buff," he said quietly, his voice thick with pain as he pulled his knees to his chest, wrapping his arms around them. "She's gone…"

"Xander," she said, kneeling down to him and trying to get him to look at her. "Please," she said. "We have to get to the library, talk to Giles and--"

"And what?" he snapped suddenly, something exploding inside of him, his voice hollow and cold. "What's Giles going to do?" he demanded from her. "Is he gonna magically bring her back to life? Is he gonna make this all better, or is he gonna tell us that we have to kill this thing that looks exactly like our best friend?" He shook his head at her. "Giles can't do anything here, Buffy, and you're kidding yourself if you think he is."

"I'm sorry," Buffy told him. "I just…I need to do something here."

"You can't," he told her. "No one can."

Buffy shuffled herself so that she was sitting next to him on the curb. "I can't believe this is happening," she told him. "There must be something I can do here. Some demon to kill or some kind of spell to reverse. But Giles will know…he has to. This can't be right."

"Of course it's not right," he said. "Willow's gone. How can that be right?"

"Xander, I'm sorry," Buffy told him honestly, not knowing what else to say.

"Sorry for what?" he asked.

"Because as bad as this feels for me…it's gotta be worse for you."

"I just don't even know where to begin processing this," he said, running a hand through his hair. "I thought she'd be around forever," he told her. "I though we'd be around forever."

"No one can be around forever," she told him gently.

"Yeah, but this wasn't how she was supposed to go," he said sadly. "It was supposed to be when she was old, when she'd lived her life. Not when some demon took it from her. All of this time we've been helping out with the supernatural stuff, some part of me always thought, deep down, that it would buy us some kind of immunity from it. I just figured that when the unknown became the known, we would all face it together. I mean, the dumb, blond chick in the horror movies has no idea what's coming, but Willow did. Why wasn't she wearing ten crosses around her neck? Or…or why wasn't she bathing in holy water every hour? Fighting should have protected us, even though we were risking our necks, but never until now have I ever wished that we didn't get involved." From the corner of his eye he saw Buffy put her head down, her eyes clouded. "I don't blame you for this, Buffy," he informed her. "And I know that she knew the risks, just like I did, but Willow's…well, she's Willow. She could never turn her back on someone who needed help. She's been like that forever," he smiled at the memory of all those times when she'd dragged him along while she was helping out her neighbours, or when she'd talked him out of a punishment from his parents, but all too soon he remembered. "But now…now she's gone. She's left me, Buff."

"I know," Buffy whispered, still in shock and now in total fear at seeing Xander this way. "It's just too hard to deal with."

Silence descended for a few moments, until Xander looked at Buffy questioningly. "Can I ask you something?"

"What?" she replied.

"Angel has a soul now, right?"

Buffy's eyes widened as she nodded slowly, not liking where he was going with this line of questioning. "Well--"

"And you say he's all ''grrr''-free now, right?"

She nodded again.

"Do you think that we could, you know, use that same spell and one of those glowy orb thingies and curse her with a soul? I mean, that could work, right?" he asked, his voice pleading and desperate. "I know that Willow was the only one who could work the modjo before, but I could try, or Giles could. I mean, it's gotta be worth a shot. That could work. She can't have killed that many people yet, so the brood-ness factor would be way lower, and she'd be the same Willow…only one that didn't attend that many beach parties – not that she did anyway. I mean, it would cut way down on the lotion she usually has to wear in the sun."

She felt a part of her heart break for him and struggled to keep her emotions to herself, not sure if she could handle breaking down at the moment, especially when Xander was trying so desperately to cling to some kind of hope and salvation. "I…I don't think…" Part of her was tempted to open her mind to the idea, to agree with him because, she realised, he wasn't the only one wanting hope. However, her slayer instincts took over. "Xander, that's not a very good idea," she told him, hating her own logic. "For starters, none of us are powerful enough to even attempt the spell, never mind the fact that we'd be doing something that went totally against what Willow would have wanted."

"How do you know what she would have wanted?" he snapped. "I'm the one who's known her all of her life." When she looked away from him, he took a deep breath. "Look, it worked for Angel."

"Xander, it's a curse, okay?" she told him. "It was done to him to make him suffer for everything he'd done. You want Willow to go through that?"

"That's not what you were saying when you found that disc of Miss Calendar's," he accused. "You wanted Angel back the way he was because you loved him. That's all I want."

"You saw what kind of terrible things Angelus did--"

"But Willow's only been a vampire for what, a couple of hours?" he asked pleadingly. "What harm could she have done in that time?"

"We don't know what she has or hasn't done yet, Xander," she told him firmly. "You saw that creature in there, and it didn't look or act anything like our Willow. I fell in love with Angel when he was already a vampire, not when he was a man. Giving Willow a soul isn't going to make her the same as she was."

"But at least she'll still be alive," he said in a small voice.

"No, she won't," Buffy said gently. "She'll still be dead."

For a moment he looked like he had been slapped in the face, and for that moment Buffy wished that she could take it back. But, as the tears welled in his eyes, he put his head down to look at the kerb, nodding his head. "You're right," he agreed hoarsely. "She wouldn't want that. You know, we…after Jesse died, we both made a promise to each other. We said that if one of us should ever…that the other would make sure we didn't come back. But Buffy," he said desperately, "I don't know if I can. Not again. I already killed one of my best friends. I don't think I can take killing another."

"You didn't kill Jesse," Buffy reassured him. "He was already gone. You killed the demon."

"How do I get through this?" he asked her. "I mean, you went through this with Angel. How did you survive it?"

"That was different," she told him. "I mean, I was in love with…" She looked at him, seeing something in his brown eyes that she had missed before. Among the pain and the unshed tears that made his eyes look like liquid chocolate, she realised that he was in love with Willow, and not just in the way someone should love their oldest and best friend. It went beyond that. "Oh," she said simply.

"What do you mean, 'oh'?" he asked.

"You never told her?" Buffy asked, almost rhetorically. Of course he hadn't, she would have known.

"Told her what?" Xander asked, confused.

"That you were in love with her."

"No," he said, too tired and emotional to argue and deny, as he looked down at his shoes. "Not when she was conscious, anyway."

Buffy nodded knowingly, having heard the story Willow had told time and again about waking up from her coma to find Oz standing over her, with Xander only a few feet away. She had said that she felt like that voice brought her back. "So, I'm guessing it wasn't so much a fluke?" she asked.

"Not to me," he said. "I don't think it ever really was for her either."

"She does…did…" she amended quietly. "…Love you, Xander. I know she did."

"I know," he said. "And that's why it hurts so much. I feel like there's an eighteen-wheeler truck on my chest, crushing my heart, making it so hurt so much that, when I breathe, it feels like it'd be so much easier if I just stopped."

She didn't know what to say to him, so she just put her hand to his shoulder and gripped lightly, letting him know she was there for him.

"I've been scared before," he told her. "But I have never, ever felt anything like this before in my life. It doesn't feel like it's ever going to stop."

"It won't," she said absently, wondering for a minute whose voice it was before realising it was her own. "I wish I could tell you that it all just goes away, or give you some piece of wisdom on how to deal with it. But I can't. I'm hardly a shining example. I ran away, changed my name, went to hell and then dealt with it. It doesn't ever go away, Xander, it just lessens. One morning you wake up and it doesn't hurt as bad. It's still there. It's always there. But it gets better."

"But Angel came back," Xander pointed out.

"He still died," Buffy said simply. "That fear, that pain, it's all still there. I can't even think about it without that panic coming over me."

"So how are you gonna deal with this?" he asked her.

"I'm trying not to think about that," she said. "I just want to get to Giles and wait for him to tell me what to do."

"Then we should go," Xander said finally, getting to his feet. He held his hand out to her and pulled her from the curb. "Promise me something?" he asked.

"Of course," she told him.

"Promise that you won't leave me?"

"What?"

"Buffy, I'm not as strong as you," he explained. "I mean, I know you have the whole slayer thing working for you and all, but I mean emotionally. If I see her again, and I'm alone, I'm gonna beg her to take me, to make me like her. I know it. I think a part of me even wants it…just to be close to her again. While you're around, I still have some willpower left. If I'm on my own, I'm afraid that--"

"You're not alone," she told him. "And I understand that you want to be with her in death, just like you were in life, but I won't let it happen. I promise." She reached inside of her jacket, pulling something from the inside pocket of the garment and handing it to him. "Here," she said.

Xander clutched the large cross she had handed him. "Why are you giving me this?"

"I want you to have it," she told him. "Just keep it, okay? Promise me you won't let it out of your sight?"

"Buffy," he said quietly. "I want to be with her."

"I know," she told him. She gripped his hand that she still held in hers. "Come on. We need to get to the library."

To be continued...