I keep my eyes pressed tightly closed, the better to shut out Willow’s melancholy stare and the sight of all of the wires and tubes that are criss-crossing me.  I hate hospitals, hate the smell of injury and death, and I hate the thought of me in here, laying here helpless while hell itself is breaking loose outside these walls.  So I figure that I can make it all seem far away, like a dream… but only if I keep my eyes closed.  Well, my eye—singular.  I guess that the other one’s just an empty socket now… even if it was open and unbandaged I couldn’t see anything looking out from it, and more importantly no one could see anything of how I feel reflected by it.  Which is definitely a good thing right now—the thoughts running through my brain are not exactly something I want to share.  I can’t help but feel that I shouldn’t be the one laying here, minus an eye and a livelihood and facing a future that’s dimmer in so many different ways; it shouldn’t be here, not when we had a houseful of “cannon fodder,” as Anya so delicately put it.  The very idea I could even think such a thing makes me feel guilty, but even so, the bitter idea continues on a loop in my head.  It should be anybody but me—anyone else, really.  Why am I the one to walk away with the massive life-altering injury when I have such a minor role in this fight?  Some of the potentials got killed, I know, but the selfish and scared part of me thinks that first, it was their job and second, they got off lucky; this train of thought also makes me feel guilty, yet like the other refuses to be silenced and instead echoes insistently through my brain. 

This time—like so many others before, when I would lie down after a fight and steel myself against the pain of bruises or broken bones that would take ages to heal—my mind drifts back to high school, and I can’t help but feel that maybe Cordy was right.  I was always the Zeppo, on donut and bad joke duty, the last and weakest flank in this battle that Buffy wages nightly.  I realize now, far too late, just how right Buffy always was in trying to go out alone—at least, she was right in trying to hold me back from joining in.  In a lot of ways, I guess that I’ve always been the dead weight, the weak link, the one with no super powers of mystical resources.  It’s just me.  Xander, he of the goofy smiles and goofier jokes, the questionable future that turned by some miracle into a solid blue collar career.  But somehow, when I was in the thick of it, when I was really toughing out all of those fights to the death that we’ve faced through the years, I’d never felt as useless as I would always feel after, when I reflected on what had always seemed to be my minor role in our victories.  I guess that’s why I was so surprised when Buffy linked with all of us and decided that I should be the heart; I guess that’s also why the fight against Adam was the first time I really felt like one of the big guys on the team.  I’m not kidding myself; I know, in a lot of ways, it was by default—not like I was really going to be the brains, the muscle, or the mage, so the last man standing was the heart.  But I’ve always let myself cling to that as proof that Buffy loves me, and that in some way I make her life better, brighter, the way she does the same to mine.  Oh, I gave up on being her lover, her partner, years ago, but so much of me still needs her love, still needs to believe that the beautiful warrior still needs her jester to make the strain of her life just a little less.  I still need her to need me around, to want me around, even after all this time and all this pain.  It’s the least I can do, really.  She made me something more than the Zeppo, and maybe she even made me a little bit of a hero.  When I brought her back the first time, after the Master killed her, she’d said she felt stronger but she never really said how or why.  Maybe there was something in me that I gave her when I breathed life back into her—maybe I was the heart even all those years ago.

Except now I’m apparently the eyes—the one who sees, or at least, the one who used to see.  That’s what I’d told Dawn right after she found out she wasn’t a potential, and that’s what the creepy asshole told me before he blinded me.  What was the reason for that, anyway—what did I do to earn the First’s attention?  Why am I so important to the cause now, all of a sudden, when a few months back I wasn’t even worth a Scream Theatre-style night visit from the First?  Just my luck that the bodiless baddie decides that I need to be taken out, not just spooked… and how nice of it to have its minion gouge my eye out with his thumb as the starter to everything.  Why does the pain get sharper when I think about how it happened?  Maybe just because it’s new… but oh how I wish it would stop, or just ease off.  I don’t think anything has ever hurt this much… and for what purpose?  What did I see so well that I had to be blinded?  If I am the one who sees, we’re all screwed, because I’ve been blind for years.  I was blind to think that I could keep fighting this fight and come away unscathed.  Blind to believe that I could make a difference, or that Buffy could ever love me as more than a friend.  Blind to believe that I’d moved past being the insecure, beaten little boy of two drunks and into being a mature adult.  Blind to believe that Anya and I could somehow work through problems she didn’t even know we had, and blind to believe that anything between us could ever be the same once I left her standing alone at the altar on the wedding day she’d planned so carefully and joyfully.  Blind to believe that Buffy could have a normal life when everything about her is anything but normal.  Blind to believe that any of us could have normal lives, given what we face every day.  Blind to believe that life could be black and white, even when it had long since turned into nothing but shades of grey.  Blind to have not seen how wrong it was to bring Buffy back and so, so blind to the consequences.  Blind to her hurt and her need and how lost she’d been once she came back, and blind not to see how Spike tried to care for her when we failed her.  Blind to the downward spiral upon which Willow had started until it was too late.  Blind to have not understood what my shy little Willow had become in the wake of her descent until I faced off with her on Kingman’s Bluff, desperate to turn her back into the girl I’d known for years.  Blind to not see the changes in all of us since we’d come together in the Sunnydale High courtyard six years earlier.  Blind to not understand that my hero worship and blind folly were a sort of unforgivable weakness all their own.  Blind not to see the danger posed by the ‘priest’ until it was too late.  Blind not to appreciate the changes in Spike until the vampire pulled me from the grip of death.  All of these things, and so many more, I’ve missed through the years; they were right in front of me, and yet I never recognized, not until it was far too late.  This is the great visionary that the First is afraid of?  I can’t even decipher the people that I’ve always believed I’d known the best—including myself.  So how am I at all the one who sees?

And now I owe my life and the half that’s left of my sight to the Bleached Wonder I’ve campaigned for years to kill—the vampire whose head I wanted so much to take off last year that I never even had to guess how Willow felt as I watched her take Warren’s skin.  I’d never liked Spike—not from the first moment that I saw him in the alley behind the Bronze, long before he’d added to his now-long list of reasons to hate him.  I hated him even before he and Angel had casually discussed sharing me as a meal, before he’d kidnapped Willow and I and made me lose Cordy, before he’d gotten fangless and somehow become, in Buffy’s eyes, acceptable company.  But even with every ounce of hatred that I’d built up for him over the years, I still don’t really know where the pure fury that propelled me down the darkened streets of Sunnydale came from that night, the night that it all really started falling apart—all I know is that every valid reason I have for wanting him dead had nothing to do with the way I felt as I carried that axe towards the Magic Box after catching the little closed-circuit freakshow he and Anya had put on.  I’ve tried to tell myself over and over again that all of that anger was there because Spike had had the courage to try to comfort Anya when I’d hurt her so badly, when I’d tried and failed so many times to ease the pain that I’d caused, and he’d obviously succeeded in getting close to her.  But some part of me didn’t buy it even then and still doesn’t; that traitorous little voice inside knows that what really spurred me on was the fact that I had finally realized that he’d truly taken my place as Buffy’s confidante and hero—and I’d given him the opening, all of her friends had, because she was hurting at our hands.  That same part of me still recoils in a combination of guilt and disgust from her—I remember everything I learned that night about she and Spike, and I hate her for taking another vampire as a lover as much as I hate myself for caring so much about who she sleeps with and for driving her to the brink of what I tell myself had to be insanity.  If nothing else, learning that she and Spike were sleeping together was just a bitter reminder of how much her ‘friends’ had failed her—that we’d failed her the day we brought her back by ripping her from heaven and leaving her to crawl out of her own grave, and that we’d failed her again and again by leaving her to crawl out of the messy grief and turmoil that was her life because we were too wrapped up in our own.  All of these things, and every wrong that Spike had ever committed—and, even more infuriatingly, all the good that he had done to help us—were spinning through my mind the night I found his coat on the stairs and her bruised and crying in the bathroom.  I could never figure out—still can’t figure out—why no matter how hard I try, I can’t get him to fit inside the “evil demon” box into which I’ve put every vamp since Jesse—including Angel.  I felt betrayed, seeing Buffy on the bathroom floor and guessing what had happened to put her there, and the sting of betrayal was a reminder that I had trusted him on some level.  Knowing that I’d ever trusted that thing, no matter what he’d done for us, made me furious, and that was what led me to spit venom at Dawn about what had happened between Spike and Buffy.  That night everything was just moving too quickly; I didn’t know then why I’d had so much venom on the subject, though later—through my nasty little realization that I’d let Spike past my defenses—the whole thing became less of a mystery to me.  I thought I’d learned my lesson.  But once he’d come back, once we’d seen him and realized he’d earned his soul, once Buffy had guilted me into letting him into my apartment and my life yet again, I found out that irony wasn’t quite done with me yet.  I still had more lessons to learn, and it was Spike who was going to teach me.  Laying in bed one night, listening to him scream and cry out in his sleep from the closet I’d put him in, the soul tormenting him ceaselessly for wrongs both recent and long-past, I had a revelation that called my whole world into question.  I realized suddenly what I must’ve always somehow known:  I hated Spike so much from that night on because I had done the same thing he had, but I hadn’t stopped—and I wouldn’t have if Buffy hadn’t knocked me out.  I’d never even apologized, just pretended it hadn’t happened and let Buffy play along.  But Spike—he went and got a soul; no apologies were enough for him.  He’d had his soul put back in, bright and shiny, only to grow blackened and weak under the weight of things his demon had done. What did that mean for my soul, I wondered, that it had been there the whole time I was attacking Buffy and every day ever since and yet I’d never once woken up screaming from the guilt?  What did it say about me, the fact that a soulless demon could stumble away from the scene of his crime and seek his soul in an effort to atone, while I simply brought Krispy Kremes and hoped against hope that she’d forget, given time?  To the part of me not entrenched enough in denial to ignore it, the little hateful voice that speaks brutal truths tells me that Spike’s response to his crime makes him a better man than I am.  I think the little voice might be right… and I hate Spike for it, almost as much as I hate that it was him who saved me from Caleb. 

Maybe this is what I deserve, all these hard truths bearing down on my already pounding skull.  Maybe this is what I’ve earned—karma finally biting me in the ass for the thousand little knives I’d dug into my friends over the years, the thousand little things I’d done and never apologized for, the thousand little betrayals that have gone unmentioned all these years.  Sometimes I feel like they’re screaming beneath the surface of all of us, these old ghosts, and I can’t help but think that deep down we all know just how screwed up we’ve become, that we hate each other every bit as much as we love each other, that we’ve all been casualties of the dark for years.  I almost raped Buffy.  I nearly got us all killed over a love spell.  I lied to Buffy about Willow’s attempt to re-ensoul Angel, and then helped Joyce, Willow, Cordy, and Giles rip her apart when my lack of warning helped to shatter her.  I cheated on Cordy and broke her heart.  I broke Willow’s heart over and over while I kept her dangling on a string and played with her emotions and used her as my safety girl. I treated Anya like she was less than human, even when I knew it hurt her that human was all that she was.  I only paid attention to Dawn when it did my ego good to remind myself that she had a crush on me, that at least one Summers saw some potential in me.  I conjured a demon that nearly danced Buffy to death and almost let him have Dawn rather than owning up to my mistake.  I took advantage of Anya’s love for me, of her belief in me, and destroyed her bit by bit—saving the biggest public humiliation for last.  I spewed nothing but hate at Buffy when I found out the truth about she and Spike, but I had nothing but tender words for the apocalyptically-evil best friend who was ready to take the world into hell.  I tried to deny Spike sanctuary, even though I could see how much he needed it.  I resented every ounce of effort that Buffy put into retrieving him.  I reminded both of them at every opportunity of the night that he’d left Sunnydale and what had happened, and a part of me had thrilled to the pain on their faces every time.  The demon at my wedding was right, just not in the way he thought.  I’ve done my father proud these last few years, used every nasty trick he taught me to keep dragging the extraordinary people around me down to my level, to make them hurt and scared like me, instead of trying to rise up to their example.  A part of me knows that I’m being too hard on myself, that I’m being too bitter and harsh—maybe, but the biggest part of me doesn’t care.  I’m laying here in pain and so, so alone in this room full of people and I can’t believe that there’s not a reason.  Something caused this—something had to.  And if not me, then what?  Who?

I feel Willow’s hand in mine, feel the warm droplets of her tears as they splash over my skin, and I can feel Buffy walking away.  She gets to leave, gets to go home bruised but whole to the comfort of the vampire who’s so much better than me, while I get to lay here broken in so many ways.  I know her so well, and I’m certain that she’s blaming herself, that she believes it’s her fault.  The ungenerous aching part of me, the part that’s taking over with every pulse of pain through my head and body, wants to scream at her that she’s right.  I think I understand better, now, the loneliness she feels at times like these, the crippling weight of the world that descends on her shoulders, because now I’m feeling it, too.  But I’m not built to carry the weight, not like she is, so why did she let this happen to me?  The rational part of me understands that it’s not her fault, that there are always casualties and that even the greatest generals lose soldiers in battle.  It’s just that this time, I’m one of those casualties, and I know that it hurts her just as much as I know that she can’t let it stop her.  Even so, I hate her for being able to walk away, for being able to turn from Willow and I and walk out into the night to face her battle and her enemies with all her senses intact while I lay aching and terrified, alone even in a room full of wounded.  I can’t let myself think now of the contradiction in the fact that I fought so hard to bring her back only to suddenly and hatefully wish for her to be a casualty; I need the anger, now, to get through the pain, and maybe the tenderness can be allowed back in later.  I don’t have the energy for charity or empathy yet.  Right now I need to hate her, and so I focus on the rage and the pain and let the darkness come.    

For the first time I really let myself think that maybe I’d never really been a player in the game of good versus evil, not the way that I had believed myself to be—the way she was, and tried to convince me that I was, too.  It had all seemed so exciting, had always felt so thrilling, even when I was completely terrified; I had been having fun, pretending to be Superman with a sheet tied around my neck.  But I realize now that playing is all I’ve been doing—I’ve been playing at this for years with no real sense of the stakes involved.  I’ve never really tried to understand the other pieces as they came into play, never tried to strengthen my game and better my odds—not the way I should have, and I’m paying for that tonight.  I’ve let myself stay weak and have become a pawn, or I’ve let Buffy make me into one; I don’t know which thought makes me angrier, and so again I let Buffy shoulder the blame.  I’ve borne enough for one long night—let her share some of the burden.  I can feel sleep begin to pull at me, but I can’t let the last epiphany fade just yet.  It seems important that I know…

There it is again… it’s all about the game, and me being child enough to believe, even after all these years, that being in the game itself made me important.  That sharing this fight lifted me up somehow, made me more than the geek or the disappointment or the Zeppo.  But tonight I realize how wrong I was.  None of it set me apart—when it comes down to it, with no powers or smarts or bonus strength, I was always just glorified cannon fodder.  And yet in the blink of an eye, an eye that I don’t have anymore, all that changed.  I’m different now—set apart and made distinct in my own way from Buffy, from Willow, from Spike, from Giles.  Now I have something that takes me out of the realm of the normal.  I bring my hand up to touch the gauze on my face and feel the bitter chuckle burn my throat as I give into the pain and the exhaustion.  As I drift towards a welcome state of unconsciousness, only one thought echoes.  I always wanted to be special—but I didn’t want it to happen like this.

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