Series: Birthday fics,
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sam_arkand Pairing: Kennedy/Willow with a major side of Xander
Rating: PG-13 for sexual references
Setting: post-Chosen
Word Count: 3,476 words
Disclaimer: Buffy the Vampire Slayer was created by Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy. All characters, places, and events are the property of the aforementioned and Twentieth Century Fox.
Summary: Sometimes, all you need to do is talk about it. And cry about it. And threaten your best friend over it. Oh, and, also, help with the relationships, but that's really secondary.
“So I was thinking of getting her a cross or something.”
Every other word was accented by a heavy punch, padded thuds that echoed through the room while the reverberations turned Xander’s insides to mush. And that was through the heavy duty sandbag he tried to keep from flying off its chain.
“A cross?” he grunted out, clenching his stomach whenever she landed another hit. The really strong ones weren’t allowed to work out on their own, given their tendency to either hurt themselves or break everything in the gym. Xander had already had to rebuild the balance beam and restock the training dummies.
And put out a fire or two. He was still trying to figure that one out.
“Yeah,” Kennedy said, pausing only long enough to flick a hair out of her eyes before swinging a kick into the side of the punching bag. Unprepared for the direction, Xander was actually lifted off the floor for an instant as it swung out to his side. “A really nice one. For when she wants to patrol with us, you know?”
“Huh,” he offered. “Uh, Ken, it’s not so much that I think she’d be unappreciative, but you still have to think about the fact that you’d be giving a Jewish woman a cross.”
Kennedy blinked.
“Willow’s Jewish?”
Apparently, it was pretty easy to skip a few conversations when you were falling in love while, also, the world was ending.
“That makes sense, I guess,” Kennedy went on. “I mean, she was acting really weird when I grilled those hotdogs for her.”
Xander cringed, because he knew it wasn’t the fact that the food wasn’t kosher that had bothered Willow. After all, it’s not every day that one lesbian woman prepares a feast of phallic symbols for her lesbian girlfriend, right? He could still hear Willow ranting to him about it, calming only when she spun on him to ask him to remind her of Kennedy’s redeeming qualities, and he had supplied her with tongue ring.
The fact that that had actually made Willow feel better only served to remind him that she wasn’t quite the innocent young girl against whom he had committed the cardinal sin of grand theft Barbie.
And since it seemed to be Xander—and not Buffy—that Willow had chosen as the girlfriend that got hear all the fun details of her sex life, he often found himself wondering just when all the women in his life had forgotten that he had a penis.
“Right,” Xander said. “Hotdogs. Because of the not kosher. Yeah, that’s it. That would make her weird.”
“You’re talking funny.” She struck the bag especially hard, and one of the chains came loose. Xander ducked way from the lashing whip, grinning awkwardly and backing away from the apparatus once it had come to a stop.
“Hey, cool, how about a break?” he asked, wanting to lift his arms in a supplicating gesture but finding that they were both quite numb. Kennedy shrugged and bounced across the room, not looking at all like she had spent the last two hours power training with the only Watcher brave enough to supervise her. Between the bent leg press and the dumbbells that now permanently had Kennedy’s handprints wrenched into them, it might do to make her stop before she could destroy anything else.
Like any Xanders that may be present.
A little glistening on her brow, and that was it. It never stopped astounding him, because he had become intimately aware of the fact that young women could, in fact, get every bit as sweaty as men when they spent several hours a day in combat training.
She took a small tug of her water, while he downed nearly all of his. She padded her forehead with her towel, and he sort of wished there were a bucket of water nearby that he could just dunk his entire body in.
Slayerhood was wasted on the slayers, really.
“Can I ask you something?” she asked, addressing the bottle cap.
“As long as you ask with your mouth and not your hands,” he offered. He blinked. “Wait, that came out differently than I meant it to.”
She rolled her eyes, and he couldn’t blame her, because it was almost like he couldn’t turn a phrase without also turning a phrase. And he wasn’t even that good at turning a phrase when he wasn’t trying to turn a phrase.
“You really know how to make a girl comfortable, don’t you?”
“Is that your question?”
“It’s a question,” Kennedy said, hitting him with the same kind of smile he had come to expect from women when they were toying with him. It was a blanket thought, yes, but one he felt qualified to think.
“What’s your question?” he asked, managing a grin as he made a soaked towel out of a dry one. Kennedy was probably happy for the twenty feet between them, because he wasn’t even sure that a very thorough scrub-down was going to alleviate him of the worst of the funk.
“Does Willow ever talk about me?”
How many ways were there to say “yes!”? For that matter, how many ways were there to see “Willow and I can’t even go a conversation without her mentioning your name!”?
Not that it was strictly a criticism. After she had been gone for a summer and then too distant for him to even be able to understand her for longer than that, any talking with Willow was talking with Willow, even if it wasn’t exactly necessary for him to know what Kennedy had done with her fingers the night before.
Really, very not necessary. Guy with a penis over here.
“Yes?” he tried, wondering if it was placation that Kennedy was looking for. It wasn’t like she was kept separate from the rest of Willow’s life. Xander had, more often than not, found his patrols to coincide with Kennedy’s. And Buffy always turned to Kennedy when she needed something done that she didn’t have the time for, herself. And that kind of made Kennedy Buffy’s go-to-girl, and Xander’s patrolling buddy, and Willow’s girlfriend.
With a new tongue ring that Xander hadn’t really needed to know about.
“What does she say about me?” Kennedy went on, and the sip she took from her water bottle would have been casual if her eyes hadn’t been boring into Xander all throughout.
“You’re asking me what my best friend and I talk about when we’re having a private conversation?”
There was no light of awareness in her eyes that told him that she understood just what the problem with her question had been.
“If you don’t mind,” she offered quite charitably. Xander snorted and tossed the towel to the bin. It might do to figure out who was on laundry duty this week; he was fairly certain it wasn’t him, but he was going to have to apologize to whomever it was.
“Why do you wanna know?” he asked, because even though Willow sometimes shared sweet things like the fact that Kennedy drooled a little in her sleep or had a weird thing for chinchillas, he was pretty sure that Kennedy would be appalled that he probably knew more about her sex life than she did. “You guys having problems?”
“Um,” she stuttered, “not having, no. But had. And will have. And will have had.”
She had the kind of grammar that would have made his Ds more A-shaped back in high school. And she was flaunting it, because that was one proven way to distract him these days. Quirky ways of talking and very literal truths.
Too distracting, but right now, all it did was annoy him a little.
“Fess up, or I’m not telling,” he said, subscribing to the use of juvenile diplomacy. From her expression, it was probably one she was familiar with—maybe even proficient with—but in this instance, he knew that he was winning.
“Okay,” she said, looking away from him. “Look, I don’t really know her, all right?”
“What, now?” he said. “Yes you do. She’s your girlfriend.”
Well, if that wasn’t the completely brick-headed thing to say of the century, he didn’t know what was, but the words were out before he could stop them. Maybe she saw the wince, though, because she didn’t argue him the point. Instead, she put down her water bottle and sat on the leg press she had all but crushed an hour earlier.
“I just know this little tiny piece of her,” Kennedy said. “The one that made me all strong, you know? And, hey, not complaining or anything, but that’s just a part of her. Yesterday, when she was unpacking some of our leftover stuff, she showed me these plates and one of them had this—this bald woman with no eyebrows and this weird thing on her head, and—”
“Wait, Will has that!?” he demanded. “That—that’s mine! How’d she get it!?”
“Oh, well, she was kind of gushing about it,” Kennedy said. “She kept going on about how much trouble she’d gone through to save them, and how I couldn’t ever tell Xander about them or—” She paused, brow furrowed, before looking at him with as much feigned innocence as she couldn’t muster. “So, anyway, it was like talking to a stranger, you know? She was being all nerdy and goofy and I’d never seen that before. Shy, yeah, and nervous, yeah, but—”
She shook her head, face in her hands, and Xander wondered if the gym equipment hadn’t just been victims for her frustrations. The way Willow described it, Kennedy was—well, frequently amorous had been the words Willow used, and he had had to sit and think about it for a second before understanding it, and by that time Willow had already launched into one such detail-ridden account. And entering the conversation at the point that he had would have been about as jarring as entering the room at the point that that point in the conversation was actually taking place.
Maybe the frequently amorous thing was Kennedy’s way of coping with the sides of Willow that she hadn’t been able to know. It wasn’t like Willow would have been able to be nerdy and goofy when there was a world crisis going on and, also, she was trying to emotionally recover from the death of her girlfriend and, also, there was that whole torture and murder she had committed the year before.
A little debris on Willow’s highway of life, and Kennedy had tried to park nonetheless.
Well, that metaphor had run away from him.
“If you really wanna know, she just talks about you,” Xander said.
“I know that. I mean what does she talk a—”
“No, I mean she talks about you,” Xander repeated. “Everything. What you two did the day before. Food you like, things you like, stuff that bothers you. Hell, I could probably write a book about you right now, and that’s not even getting to the—” Don’t mention the sex stuff! “—childhood stuff.”
“Really?” Kennedy asked. “I mean, she doesn’t complain about me or talk about how I don’t get her?”
Insecurity was a weird thing in the women in his life, because all of them really had the power to crush him with a breath. Well, maybe not Dawn, but she could probably say something that would crush him, and that was kind of crushing him with a breath. And yet, it was weird being in the center of the maelstrom that was their lives, where he could almost literally wade through their worries and their fears as readily as he could be amazed by their strength.
Kennedy was no different, and he wondered why Willow had never mentioned this side of her before.
And it occurred to him that he was the first one that Kennedy was showing this to.
“Well, she says you’re really strong, so when you’re being—” Pick your words carefully. “—uh, rough, you’re really, really rough.”
There. That had been fairly collected and well thought out. No making his friends at all uncomfortable today, thank you.
Oh, wait, no, she looked a little like she was panicking.
“No, no, it’s okay!” he said quickly as she looked away from him and her eyes started bouncing in every direction. “Willow doesn’t mind! She likes rough!” She did, and he knew that, and he sort of wished that he didn’t. “Just, you know, she doesn’t really like it to leave marks in, um, public places.”
She didn’t like that. And he knew that. And, heaven help him, he really wished that he didn’t. He would have been perfectly happy thinking that mark had been a bee sting, not a love bite.
Still, trust was good, he guessed. Which, as she had explained via the transitive property of mathematics, must have meant that his embarrassment at this new information was also good. Whatever part of her was trying to make up for never actually telling him that she was gay was doing so by telling him just about everything else.
Everything else. And as comfortable in his skin as he had gotten in his time with the group, he wasn’t sure that he was comfortable in Willow’s skin, as well.
“God, she talks about that?” Kennedy asked. “Why couldn’t she just tell me stuff like that? I really don’t get her, do I? Her birthday’s coming up, and the best idea I’ve had is to get her a cross when, oh, by the way, she’s freaking Jewish!”
“Look, Ken, it’s not that you don’t get her,” he offered, not quite sure where he was going to take this, “it’s just that you two haven’t had the opportunity to live in a world that wasn’t about to end. Now that everything’s slowed down, you should have that chance.”
“We’re gonna have to redo every conversation we’ve ever had,” Kennedy went on, clearly not listening to him. “‘Cause the only Willow I’ve actually talked to is the empowered one. Now I have to figure out what nerdy Willow thinks about toys and what the goofy Willow thinks about my new tongue ring, and—”
“Can you please use different examples!?” he demanded, because he really didn’t need this from both sides. Kennedy waved away that concern, however, and kicked away one of the dumbbells at her feet. Xander cringed when it skipped across the floor, leaving cracks in the hardwood, before imbedding in a wall. “I’m not fixing that.”
“I’m not fixing it, either!” she snapped irritably. “We’re not going to last, are we!? She’s going to open her eyes one day and realize that she’s shared her girlfriend’s life story with her guy friend because she has nothing else she can talk about to the girlfriend.”
“I’m not sure Willow thinks of me as a guy friend, but—”
“And then she’s gonna realize that we have nothing in common because I don’t know why it was such a tragedy that Na’Toth stopped being Na’Toth in the second season—”
“Well, that’s ‘cause—”
“—or why Doogie Howser’s such a big deal. And I like her, Xander. I really, really like her. I think I love her. Oh, God, Xander, I love her, don’t I? I do, I love her, and now I’m rambling like her because she always rambles when she gets stuck on a thought and I don’t know how to get off the thought!”
This? This was scary. Scarier than scary, because Kennedy was a freaking drill sergeant when it was time to get down to business, only right now she was an emotional wreck. He couldn’t take the dichotomy.
Scarier? Willow standing in the doorway to the gym. Because then Willow might find out that Kennedy knew that Xander knew what Kennedy had done the night before, which could only result in her ransoming the Babylon 5 plates back to him at the cost of chore substitution.
Sure, Xand, you can have ‘em back. After you take my bathroom duty for the next four years.
He wouldn’t put it beneath her. That woman could be damn evil when she wanted to be.
And sometimes when she didn’t want to be.
But she wasn’t looking at him right now, quietly walking instead to the blubbering woman on the leg press she had crushed earlier. Willow met his eyes for an instant, giving him some kind of smile that was either a thank you or an I’ll take it from here or a you better not have talked about the sexy stuff.
It was hard to tell with Willow sometimes.
She settled a hand on Kennedy’s shoulder, whispering something into her ear. For her part, Kennedy didn’t jump in surprise at the arrival of the subject of her dismay. Instead, she wiped her eyes and nodded and stood and walked for the door, leaving Willow behind for just an instant.
Ah. A discussion taking place in a where that was else. That made sense. And the discussion was probably going to turn into some kind of make up encounter, and Xander was probably going to be hearing about it afterward, whether he wanted to or not.
Willow smiled at him and brushed a little lint off his shoulder.
“I heard,” she said. What had she heard? Everything? Or just enough.
“That’s good,” he said. It always paid to act like he knew what he was doing when people actually figured something out while in his presence. Kennedy had stumbled onto the fact that she didn’t actually know Willow, which brought to light that insecurity to Willow, who could do what she needed to abate it.
Willow wasn’t being shy or goofy or awkward or nerdy just then, however.
“Thanks,” she said, running one hand on his shoulder and turning toward the doorway. Kennedy was already gone, probably off to the room they shared to wait for her. “She’s been kind of weird lately. I didn’t know it was that bad, though. I’m glad she found someone to talk to.” She turned to him again, rewarding him with the old kind of smile. “So, really. Thanks.”
“Glad to do it,” he said, and even though he hadn’t even been aware that he had been doing it, he really was glad about it. Because doing things like that, when he was surrounded by so many strong people, was what made him feel empowered. Strong enough to stand next to them and face whatever came.
Strong enough to stand up to anything, even a crazy-powerful überwitch.
Willow started away, and he caught her in a hug.
“I’m glad to help,” he said, and she giggled and returned the embrace. When he pulled her away, though, he fixed her with a grim look as his hands settled on her shoulders. “But we’re going to have words about those plates.”
Ah. There was the awkward. And the nervous.
“Ha, um, funny you should mention those,” she said, and scared could probably be added to the list. She had learned long ago not to come between a Xander and his nerdiness. The whole Barbie fiasco had been the result of her trying to marry the doll to his Boba Fett, and Xander just couldn’t do that to the bounty hunter. “I was just going through my stuff, and—”
“Oh, I know all about it,” he said, letting a little danger creep into his voice. “But really. Go talk to your girl. Get your affairs in order.” He grinned darkly. “I’ll be waiting.”
“Yeah,” Willow stuttered, backing away a little and clapping her hands together. “I’ll go, uh, get my affairs in order, then. Our affairs, I mean. Which sounds a little like I’m writing a will, huh?” She laughed with a lilt of worry, probably exacerbated by the fact that he didn’t join her with it. “And my nickname’s, uh—it’s Will. Kind of a turn of phrase, huh?”
Still more staring, still more of the smile that wasn’t really a smile. Willow gave up and lowered her head.
“I’m gonna go talk to my girlfriend now,” she said, sounding a lot like a child that had been caught doing something she shouldn’t. He patted her on the shoulder, looking forward to the day when he would be reunited with his collector’s plates, and ushered her toward the door.
“I believe in you, Will,” he said. “Even if you are a rotten plate thief.”
That got him a smile, and then she was off to go talk to her troubled girlfriend.
And Xander was more than ready for a shower.
Yeah, to talk to her girlfriend, and probably make up with her girlfriend.
And Xander was more than ready for a cold shower.
This is a bit of an experiment. An experiment that was fun to write, but an experiment nonetheless.
In the same vein, the epilogue to Not My First Rodeo was a similar one, because I like to try and write interactions between characters who, in the original series, did not actually interact. It might come up later in a little something that's been bouncing around in my head, but I'm not gonna talk about it just yet.
Anyway, happy birthday
sam_arkand .Really, really hope you liked it.
All the best.
Let's get one thing straight. I'm not.
-Kate Clinton
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Comments
And I do get why Xander might be a tad...freaked by the frank discussion of Kennedy's love gymnastics. Probably the fact it's Willow who's the partner. Proximity=fantasy death.
I.e., if he drools while they're giving details, it's not because he's lost in a fantasy. It's more that he's trying to shut down all higher brain functions.
This was just - sweet. I like Xander being the listening ear for others, and it seems to me that Kennedy didn't have a lot of friends at the end of the series, so it's nice he could be one.
Had to feel a little sorry for Xander, though. Sometimes being the one who sees has its drawbacks, especially where images of Willow + Kennedy + toys and tongue rings are concerned.
Gabrielle
I'm always hesitant to write characters like Kennedy, that being characters I don't exactly yen with. Still, she has her high points, which brought this about.
Gabrielle