lirazel | Choco_cherries Challenge: Lessons in How to Live

Ha!

New

choco_cherries entry, and the prompt is London, which totally cracks me up. It also means I'll probably be writing several different entries for this round. But here's the first one.

Title: Lessons in How to Live
Author: Lirazel (penny_lane_42)
Fandoms: Supernatural/Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Characters/Pairing: Jo Harvelle/Xander Harris
Wordcount: 299
Prompt: London
Summary: He isn’t Dean, and that’s the first strike against him.

He isn’t Dean, and that’s the first strike against him. The second is the patch over his eye and the flannel he wears (because he doesn’t wear it like Dean does; this guy looks like a lumberjack, not a hunter); the third is the lectures. He assumes that the girls don’t know anything about the world of vampires and boogeymen, and he starts them with the basics when all she wants to do is learn how to use her new strength to be the most effective hunter she can be. She thinks he’s patronizing, he thinks she’s a smartass.

She learns quicker than any of the rest of them do: they were schoolgirls, not so long ago, concerned about boyfriends and softball games and nail polish. None of them have seen real darkness, not like she has: it all seems so exciting to them when it’s so nightmarishly familiar to her.

She sees that same familiarity shining—no, not shining: darkening—in his eye, and she hates that she recognizes it, feels it tugging at her. He, at least, has seen the real world and knows it.

And that’s what she hates most about him, more than the other things combined. He’s seen everything there is to see, and he still smiles. Still makes lame jokes, most poking fun at himself, and there’s no desperation lurking behind them like there was in Dean’s devil-may-care attitude. The brokenness Dean tried to hide—that she could understand; it fit neatly into her world. But Xander…he really means the jokes, the encouragement, the hope. She can’t understand how to live like that, and it frightens her.

But she lets him kiss her in the dark in Highgate Cemetary one night, and it isn’t so bad.

(Maybe she tastes hope on his lips.)