Xander stood listening to Buffy explain her next brilliant strategic move, or at least he had the sound of her voice running in the background. He had stopped actually listening when it became clear she intended to simply repeat the attack that had cost the lives of two potentials and him his eye.
That was it, that was the master plan. Attack the same position in exactly the same way with the same weapons and the survivors of the previous attack. His soldier boy memories were long gone but that was OK, he could make his own assessment. It reminded him of a scene from a TV show, or rather videotapes of a TV show that Giles had insisted he watch, in a bonding attempt when they were both unemployed.
"So Blackadder, General Haig wants advice on how to improve troop moral." The WW1 British commander said to the lower ranked officer. "Do you have any suggestions?"
"His resignation and suicide would be a good start." Was the instant response.
"Interesting idea, I will be sure to mention it in our next staff meeting."
Listening to the others argue he remembered trusting the elder slayer to the point of convincing the potentials, the poor dead potentials, to follow her. He had led them to the slaughter, and the loss of an eye was small punishment for that misjudgment. He looked at Faith, who was likely to be given command of this nightmare if Bufficus Maximus was overthrown. He turned back to the argument and felt the object hanging inside his jacket. The thing he had made up alone as an experiment, that none of the others was aware of.
"Buffy, I've been thinking." He said quietly.
The argument continued, his comment ignored in the heat of the moment.
"Buffy, I have the solution." And there was a pause in the fight that the bottle blond was losing. Faces turned to look at the man most here only knew as the handyman guy.
"The solution to what Xman?" Faith asked curiously. She was still trying to screw up the courage to apologize to him for trying to kill him. It was only in jail that she had realised he had genuinely been trying to help her. The guilt at her response still ate at her, hard to blank out except by sex with the Woodster.
"I know how to defeat the First." And the room went very quiet. Mostly because the people in it assumed that the stress had finally gotten to him. It was so the wrong time for a nervous breakdown among the core Scooby's.
"How?" Giles asked, remembering for once that the idea used to defeat all of their major enemies had come from the man in front of him.
"Oh, so the glorified bricklayer has all the answers, huh?" Spike sneered at him. "Since when did you grow a brain ya useless ponce, just shut u…" The sound of Spike dusting abruptly interrupted his angry tirade. Xander nodded thanks to the Boston slayer as she put the stake back in her jacket.
"As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted I know how to stop the First." Still with the Mr Calm and Collected facade, always worrying from the former class clown for anyone who had seen it before. Calm and Collected Xander was also Coldly Ruthless Xander, the man who had asked the escaped murderer for backup as and when this moment occurred, and was now looking at the stunned face of his second oldest friend with no emotion at all.
"You killed Spike, you PSYCHO BITCH SLUT you killed Spike!" Buffy launched herself at Faith, giving the zeppo his opportunity. Most witnesses just saw an underhand lunge as the elder Summers jumped at the woman standing near the one eyed man, and a loud 'bang'. Buffy's corpse was carried a small distance by momentum and collided with the wall as her intended target moved aside.
"Buffy, we all heard Giles when he told us the First could only be doing this because we brought you back from the dead and weakened the slayer line." He said to her cooling body as it quickly bled out onto the carpet. The rest of the room simply stood and watched in amazement, a cold blooded murder had been committed before their eyes by the supposedly harmless one of the group and it would take a moment for them to get a grip.
"We stole you out of heaven and made the world vulnerable to the First." Xander continued as he took the expended shotgun cartridge out and replaced it with a new one from his pocket. 12 Gauge custom loaded with silver, iron and wood fragments courtesy of a reloading rig in one of the abandoned houses a few streets over. "And now you're back, and the world is safe."
The weapon itself was from a half remembered Tom Clancy novel called Without Remorse. It was basically a piece of broom handle that held a shotgun cartridge over a nail. When slammed into someone the nail acted as a firing pin. It was called a 'bang stick', it was now reloaded, and it was hurtling up at the construction workers lower jaw as fast as his arms could move.
"NO!" The superhuman reflexes of the Southey slayer combined with her being inches away from him saved the Zeppo as she grabbed the stick out of his hand. Then she grabbed man himself and ran out the door with him, leaving the survivors to stare after them.
"Well, we're screwed." Faith commented about the events of the day. Here she was an escaped multiple murderer on the run with a man who was also a murderer and had multiple witnesses to prove it. He would have not only the police but the Scooby's after him, and Willow's tracking spells were probably making the quick getaway a futile exercise right now. Oh, and lets not forget Wolfram and Heart not being a very forgiving former employer of hers.
"We wouldn't be if you hadn't stopped me." Xander countered in a normal sounding tone. "Murder-suicide, nice and simple and even Detective Stein wouldn't have challenged it successfully. Everyone would be safe."
"You'd be dead." The brunette slayer corrected him.
"Everyone important would be safe." He amended.
"You're important boytoy." Faith said. There was silence for a while as they drove in the general direction of Las Vegas. She would miss Woods, but really it wasn't serious with either of them, or not as serious as her issues with the man in the car with her and that was that. "Xander, I'm sorry I tried to kill you back in the motel."
"Thanks." The silence continued for a while, and they stopped at a small town for food and petrol. They had Internet access and Faith checked something while she had the chance. A few hours down the road as it approached dawn she pulled into a motel and got them a room. Both were too tired and wired for anything sexual to happen and woke up around 2pm.
"Xman, I met someone in prison."
"Faith I appreciate you picking me to come out to but …"
"Seriously boytoy, she told me about someone who might want to employ my, ah, talents if I ever got out." Seeing the look on his face, she added. "Demon hunters that move around the world destroying old vamps and taking their loot. Got all sorts of connections, and they're weak on admin personnel, with your construction manager experience you'd be a natural, what do you say?"
"What about the hellmouth?" She had been sentenced to 20 to life BEFORE escaping from lawful custody was added, she wasn't in the picture to protect it regardless.
"Checked my email last night, Vi says she was called when B died."
"And everyone else?"
"Red, Jeeves and Dawn are sedated, but the potentials are willing to kiss your ass or any other part of your anatomy you name for saving them from 'the butcher of Sunnydale'."
"They could have just shot the preacher guy." With the town abandoned there was no shortage of firepower lying around, and the creep was human, basically.
"Didn't mean him. He's gone along with the Bringers and no one's heard from the First either."
Doing administration work for a fighting organisation was not his idea of a good time, but the east coast girl was right, it was a real skill he had and a necessary one helping kill evil things.
"So, how do we meet your friends?" His smile was tentative, but real, and they finished lunch and emailed off their acceptance to Faith's contact before going back to their room for some serious sex. By the time the Boston slayers was having her second orgasm they already had fake I.D. being couriered to their motel room. By the end of the month they were clearing out a nest of Marak demons in Bolivia.