*****

Sucker love is heaven-sent
You pucker up, our passion's spent
My heart's a tart, your body's rent
My body's broken, yours is bent
-Placebo, "Every Me, Every You"

I: XANDER

She laid one leg across his, crept it slowly over him like she was doing something sneaky. Will was like that - always with those big, uber-innocent eyes looking somewhere above the level of his gaze, pretending she hardly noticed he was there. Don't mind me, hell no - just slithering across the bed naked - hey, how long have *you* been there?

She knew, though. She knew just what it did to him, the ripple of her small, squirming body as it pressed against him, the bone of her hip in the soft part of his thigh, her belly stroking light then heavy against his hard cock, her small breasts rolling this way and that way across the broader surface of his chest. Aw, baby. Willow, what you do....

First Xander's hand, then his lips glided up her shoulder. Will's skin, just as soft and sinfully comfortable as the warm satiny sheets of his parents' king-sized bed under his back. Soft and soft, sin and sin, and holy shit, the touch and the taste of Will, his girl, his brainy, crazy, loving goddess girlfriend, his wacked and wonderful other half.

Bright eyes, finally right on him, in through Xander's sex-clouded eyes and into his perpetually sex-with-Willow clouded brain. Her lips parted in one of those smiles, that was so unbearably sweet, and yet wicked in ways that no all-American high school sweetheart should know enough to be, and it knifed through Xander again, how bad he wanted her, how she was his first, his best, his witchy Willow Rosenberg....

***The first time they made love was in Xander's back yard, inside his battered, army-green Boy Scout tent that was so full of worn holes that the porch light shone in through them and cast planetarium-like speckles all over the tarp. There was nothing there, nothing but Willow and a bedspread and a little transistor radio - he remembered that the Spice Girls were involved in there somewhere.

They'd known since the funeral that afternoon. It was too awful, too cruel and nasty and wrong to talk about - what they were doing to faithful, soft-eyed Oz, what they were feeling right there in front of Cordy who'd died from the shock, practically. So they didn't say anything to each other at the funeral, but it was in the way Xander couldn't hold her tight enough and the way Will fit so perfectly into his arms, her back pressed against his chest and hitching with the force of her silent tears. But that night he waited for her in the tent, too scared to do anything that might make it look like he expected - but knowing anyway, why Willow would be there.

It was always perfect like that between him and Will. Made in heaven, like his mom always said - only she said it like it was the punchline to some particularly devious Penn-and-Telleresque joke, and Xander could really feel it, believe it all the way down to the heart. Not his heart, and not Willow's, but some phantom heart that was *them,* the two of them taken whole.

He had been so unbelievably awkward, and Will too shy to speak a single word, just looking at him with trusting eyes like two full moons and her face flaming to the touch with her nervous embarrassment. God, he'd been inept, he could tell from the way she flinched when he tried to push into her, and even after she helped it had been all wrong for a minute, or two, or what felt like forty years in hell, but after that-

After that he found his angle, and Willow found their rhythm, and it got easier and easier until they weren't just two teenagers screwing in the backyard, but skin and bone stretched tight over fiery souls, together in the way they'd been stumbling blindly toward for all their lives. Xander knew he didn't have the same kind of destiny that Buffy did, the kind stamped on his birth certificate right next to his little inky footprints, but he was seventeen and narcissistic and it was easy to believe that he was born to wind up here tonight, in a moth-eaten tent flooded by starlight and porchlight and Willowlight.

At the end, when they laid side by side under the blanket, nose brushing nose, and Willow smiled that sly, kittenish smile at him, Xander began to suspect that he'd been duped. She'd known all along that they were looking at the big picture here, all her talk of accidents aside. Willow had known from the beginning of time that she was for Xander and him for her, and he was finally catching up to her, late like always. Slow on the uptake, one more time.

Willow's perfect knowledge, knowing him and his slowness and his strength and the rage and confusion that could smoke and stutter inside him, and knowing the way he had been looking all his life for someone to need him, someone he could shock by being more than he seemed. How dumb could you get, making it all complicated by wanting someone who thought nothing of you, just so you could go *surprise! I'm a real-live person, not some cartoon doof who can't spell �obnoxious,' ironic, huh?* When really it was as easy as holding as tight as humanly possible to the one person who could see, spell, and get him, right from the beginning.

Nothing about her surprised him, either. When she said *I think I know how to bring Cordelia back,* Xander had been like, if I knew how to do that, I'd tell Mrs. Lovett to take her chem midterm and shove it up her ass. Not surprised that Willow could bring somebody back from the dead, just surprised that she could go about her life being so basically normal, the whole world looking right at her and not getting the whole direct hit of Willow's *knowledge.* The power bundled inside that floaty, skinny little body was way past what anyone but Xander had a fucking clue about. Even Willow passed it off, said it was the Wicca, said Giles was teaching her. Managed to screw it up, somehow, when she thought too hard about it. But when it was just Willow and the need, the knowledge raised its head up and breathed fire, and it never surprised Xander even the littlest bit.

Maybe once. Maybe just that one time, when he saw Cordelia's eyes open, and saw *Cordelia* in there. Not that he hadn't thought Willow could do it, if Willow said she could do it, but-

It gave him the wig. A little bit.

Because what was he, Xander L. Harris, average American adolescent male, doing in bed with Glinda, the Good Witch of Southern California and the - undead? Once-dead? Pre-dead? Ex-dead body and soul of Cordelia Chase -***

Cordelia's heat was pressed against one side of him, making the other side seem about thirty degrees colder and more naked by comparison. The hot ocean of her hair didn't help things - it was like when you got out of the water at sunset, cold in a way you never were until after you were out of the cold water and burning your feet on the sand.

Xander's logic, crooked at the best of times, was spiraling around on itself in a mad, Eschery frenzy, like a trapped animal chewing its own leg off. Cordy was a heat like a brand, or a cold vacuum sucking him towards her like in *Black Hole* which was the only movie his dad ever took him to at the Ski-Hi Drive-In Theater back before it closed. She was the sand on his feet after he'd come up for air - no, she was the chill in the air, and Willow was the red sunset.

It didn't make any sense, but none of this did. Xander only knew that Will was sinking slowly down over him, balancing herself with her hands heel-to-heel across his stomach, and that being buried inside Willow was a privilege he never earned, he was just born to the purple, born to doofishly and unintentionally be the one who made Willow sing from the inside.

He threw his head back, and there was vast, wide knowledge of Willow, and a sharp punch of madness - Cordelia's arm pressing across his chest, her fingernails digging into his shoulder. The thing that made it all sick and freaky was...

The way he knew that Cordelia was clinging to him. The way he could feel her fear, her lingering doubt that this was all real.

Because Willow was scary - Cordelia was scared - and Xander could feel just the first, rippling echo of that thing he felt once before. The thing where he was meant to be right where he was.

*****
II: CORDELIA

She nestled up against him, long since used to the weirdness of finding Xander Harris big and handsome and comfortable - no, comforting. There had been so much weirdness for Cordelia lately that some of it just had to get chucked by the wayside, and so she hadn't thought much lately about how she shouldn't get this fluttery, keep-me feeling in her stomach when she was crushed warmly under Xander's arm.

The sounds and the scent of him, and she'd always loved the weirdness of Xander - how he could be dumb as meatloaf sometimes and still always be the first one to spike any snarky comment she made back at her, how he had the body of an athlete and a smile that was like warm butter pouring all down your back but still think that he was the most ordinary person in the world and never display a flash of arrogance or attitude, the way she'd wanted him to want her from the beginning because he seemed like the only person who didn't, and the way she wouldn't have felt so *real* in his arms if she hadn't known she wasn't Cordelia Chase, Center of the Universe, but just a little corner of Xander's broad, colorful life.

Xander was just the right level of weirdness.

She drew her leg up along his, which used to make Xander go crazy - leg man - but this time he hardly seemed to notice. Cordelia's knee bumped Willow's leg, making her jump a little at the sudden feel of soft, shaved skin. By touch alone, there was nothing much to tell Willow's leg from Cordelia's. Maybe that was why the whole idea of lesbians had always given Cordy the wig, kind of: could anyone ever find anyone else attractive without the allure of mystery? Wouldn't another woman know all the tricks, all her secrets, and wouldn't it be like it was with all Cordelia's chick friends, where no flattering unknowableness softened the cold facts of your imperfect beauty, your imperfect grace, your imperfect confidence?

The sounds and the scent of Xander and Willow, and she'd always envied their history together, they way they spoke eye-to-eye in a way that shut everyone else out at a glance. They even breathed together as they fucked, long rasping ins and outs, the rhythm jerky and velvety at the same time. Without realizing it, without being able to escape it, Cordelia found her own breathing keeping time perfectly.

She didn't want to breathe this way, coiled around the outside of the tight clasp of Xander-to-Willow-to-Xander. The desire to sob and scream was more pressing, and yet something all too familiar took control inside her, prohibiting it. Stronger by far than the need to run and hide from this new and prize-winning level of weird was the pressure to conform. This wasn't the first thing Cordelia had done because Cordelia Chase couldn't be the only one not doing it.

Xander's skin was becoming slippery with sweat, and as his shoulders flexed without warning, Cordelia lost her grip, her hand skidding along his chest. Dark panic threatened to claim her - crack of wood giving way, nothing holding her, falling through emptiness....

***Back in the day, Willow didn't have the strength to look Cordelia Chase in the eye, but ever since she brought Cordelia back from the dead, all the fear was gone. She walked right up to Cordelia by the soda machines, and only a little subconscious fluffing of her coppery hair betrayed any self-consciousness on Willow's part.

On her side, Cordelia didn't have the strength to rebuff her. Pathetic, how Cordelia was so desperate to have *somebody* not afraid of her that she didn't even care anymore that it was just Willow. Everybody else - even Xander, even Buffy - was still a little tripped by the fact that Cordelia showed up for class two weeks after she was buried. Some of them actually seemed a little pissed off, like Cordelia was inconsiderate for coming along and negating all those hours of primo mourning they'd done. Flowers, assemblies, little street-corner altars with her picture on them - it had been pretty choice, from the videotapes and newspaper clippings Cordelia had seen. Even Cordelia had kind of felt like her existence was an anti-climax.

Which explained why she was okay with Willow walking right up to her and talking, even though when she was home alone and thinking about the last two weeks, she hated Willow with a fervor that only barely stretched to cover the bottomless terror Cordelia had of her.

Nothing, *nothing* explained why Cordelia had *listened* to her, and let herself be talked into this.

Gratitude? The thoughts made Cordelia itch just under her skin, but she had to admit that there was a - a debt there. Willow may have been the cause of Cordelia's death, but it still couldn't have been easy to resurrect her, and nothing had *made* Willow do it. She'd just done it. Brought Cordelia back from the dead, given her back all the chances Cordelia had not yet found peace for having missed - for Xander? To ease Willow's own guilt? Because she was just that kind of soft-hearted witch? Surely not for Cordelia Chase, who had been nothing but a problem for Willow since they were six years old. Ten years of mocking Willow, shaming her, excluding her, stealing the only guy Willow ever cared about, and then forcing her to act like Cordelia was a friend - and still she brought Cordelia back.

Cordy doubted she would have done the same thing, if their positions had been reversed.

And maybe that was why she'd agreed. Because it closed the gap between them, made Willow slightly less the better person. Sure, she was the big hero, the big savior, giving Cordelia her life back. But she was also asking for something pretty twisted, and Cordelia could tell that she wanted it. Really wanted it, even if it was just on Xander's behalf. So Cordelia said yes, and it wasn't exactly like saving Willow's life, but it opened Willow up to her, made her less the diva of magic and more just one more person hoping Cordelia wouldn't reject them.

There was a deal struck there by the vending machines, and a little of the power passed back into Cordelia's hands. Cordelia had trained herself to recognize the signs of power, and she could see it in way Willow turned and walked off, a little more jittery, her head and shoulders ducked a little more than when she'd walked up. The flush of excitement that had stayed with Cordelia for the next day and a half had nothing to do with the exact nature of the bargain, and everything to do with the fact that she was on her way back up, and Willow on her way back down.

The thing that Cordelia didn't really know, the thing that might or might not change things, was why *Willow* had agreed to this. Didn't she know that she was the one losing, here? Not only was Xander slipping through her fingers, still part Cordelia's even though he swore he was Willow's man through and through, but he'd gotten Willow to help him do it. She'd mis-stepped badly, going in two months from the girl who could steal Cordelia Chase's boyfriend to the witch who got to decide all by herself if Cordelia would live or stay dead to the fake-brave little girl who had toed the edge of the tile and said "if you want to - you and Xander - and - and me-"

Was she too stupid to realize that Cordelia was the one granting a favor now, and Xander was the one living out every guy's fantasy, and Willow was getting taken for everything she was worth? Jesus, Cordelia should feel *sorry* for the girl. Willow had never been any good at the politics of relationships. So why didn't she feel sorry for Willow? Why didn't she feel stronger, better than before? Cordelia was taking back control, proving that Xander would still do the unthinkable to have her, that Willow was still too weak to keep Cordelia from making her look like a loser.

Because it felt good. Because it felt *so much better* than all the nights alone in her room, not knowing how it was supposed to feel or who she was supposed to be now, jealous of everyone, missing Xander, so bitterly alone that she almost missed the bleak silence of death. Cordelia had been the one granting the favor, but she needed it. More than Willow, more than Xander. She needed it because no one else had offered her any alternative to the loneliness. Which meant that all Cordelia's power was a trick, only existing until someone saw through it. Nothing to rely on - especially when Xander was involved, because Xander had seen right through her before, and never left her with anything that wasn't *her.* That was the good thing about Xander, but also the danger.

Willow - who knew what Willow could do? That was a bottomless pit.

Sooner or later, unless Cordelia found someplace to go to ground, something that she could put up to protect herself, they would know the truth. They would know that Cordelia Chase had whored herself out to them, naked and lonely, not the one they loved or needed, but still giving them what they asked for.

Back in the day, Cordelia chose her companions - pseudo-friends and practically-lovers alike - by how badly they wanted her, how ready they were to lay aside all false idols and swear that Cordelia was everything and forever.

Somehow, Cordelia knew it would never be that way again.***

It would be good to close her eyes, to block out the sight of Xander and Willow gazing raptly into each other's eyes. That way, Cordelia could put herself back in the middle of it instead of on the fringes. In the middle, in the spotlight, Queen and superstar - the Cordelia that she always wanted to be, the one she believed she was, deep inside. If she could close her eyes, blur this bed down to heavy breathing and warm skin against her, she could be all of that for the first time since her fall.

But she couldn't. Her eyelids didn't answer when she spoke to them, ordered them to shut. There was just no response, and she could still see Xander's hands splayed across Willow's curved spine, Willow's slickened and shiny lips parting as she leaned down over him.

Those lips were somehow entrancing. She could see Xander's tongue press up between them for a fleeting moment, before Willow leaned further down and consumed his mouth whole. For the first time since Cordelia had gotten here, there was a moment when she didn't think about herself, her own strange role in all this. She thought about Willow's mouth, how warm and lusciously wet it would be on Xander's tongue as she took it in.

It would feel around Xander's tongue a lot like Cordelia's cunt felt as her first fingertip, then a second, slipped inside it, disappearing into heat and slippery flesh. Cordelia's breath fell out of sequence for a moment as she swirled her fingers in a slow circle, but then she licked up the side of Xander's jaw, and that close to his mouth, she couldn't help but pick up the rhythm again, and join in.

*****
III: XANDER

His orgasm was incredibly wet - not just on and around his dick, which was wet for the obvious reasons, but wet all over him, like he was being licked by dozens of giant, invisible tongues. Of course, on the Hellmouth those kind of thoughts had weirdly plausible dimensions, but always better not to think about things like that.

Just Willow, and they way they were locked together, the perfect latchkey fit, the perfect connection.

In the rush of pride and triumph that muddled up Xander's brain even as it made him feel invincible, he rolled toward Cordelia, only to be brought back to his senses by a yiping little shriek, and Cordelia's sharp fingernails gouging his back. "Get off my hair, you big *loser,*" she said, and somehow her voice was as expressive as always, roaming up and down through the full range of an octave or two for maximum effect, even though she was speaking through gritted teeth.

"Sorry," Xander managed thickly, and he tried to get his elbow off her hair immediately, though it ended up taking longer than a person might think, what with Cordelia having a lot of hair and Willow's arms still around him, weighing him down a little. He could still feel the sting of torn skin warming his shoulder blade.

It ticked him off a little, and it turned him on a little, too. Maximum Cordelia.

The balance of emotions, neither able completely to swamp the other, hit a general midpoint that made Xander not exactly rough and not exactly passionate, but mostly just clumsy. He reached out without much precision, and his hand found Cordelia's face, her lower lip under his thumb, the convex slope of the ball of his hand knocking softly against the mirroring curve of her cheekbone, his fingers vaulted like a high ceiling over the hollow of her eye socket. The touch was awkward, but light - his kiss was not. Xander forced her lips open with his tongue, determined to stick with the things that had always worked on Cordelia before: kissing her until she forgot to be better than him.

Xander and Cordelia were the worst fit ever, a permanently severed connection practically since the second they met.

Kissing her until Cordy kissed him back even harder, his equal here and nowhere else....

***The debate about what Xander saw in Cordelia had been completely monopolized by the Status Symbol faction and the Pure Sex faction. Like a national election, there were only the two choices, unless you wanted to throw your vote away on a third-party candidate. Love, the Ross Perot of Xander's social life.

Xander himself had never really taken sides. He knew it wasn't just the thrill of the class clown being picked by Queen C - it wasn't thrilling enough to make him put up with Cordelia's leonine ego, by a long shot - and it wasn't just that she was hot enough to melt formica. There was something about Cordelia, all spikes and spines and spats aside, that was good to be with, that was just...good.

Although maybe only a class clown could take Cordelia Chase's good and find a place for it. The Zen of comedy, the way Xander saw it, was to take something completely normal and turn it all - funny. Into what it wasn't, or what didn't fit, or something that was a little too much or a little too far afield for ordinary thinking. And when you were the comedian, you were the one everyone wanted to be with. Not a witch like Willow, but a kind of wizard anyway, one who could turn everything crazy. Presto, change-o, watch the puff of smoke disguise the Hellmouth and pretend that the rabbit hiding in the hat was more real than the things no one wanted to watch with eyes wide open.

And then there was Cordelia, who was like comedy anti-matter, because for Cordy, things were only one way. Reality, in all its brutal, competitive, mortal glory. She could see through Xander's tricks like Superman through cotton candy, and what Cordelia saw was the unvarnished truth.

She had her hands up to the elbows in Xander's fear that, deep down, things really were...just what they were. It had to either scare the shit out of him, or make him love her. There was no middle ground with someone who was that immune to Xander's powers of illusion.

So, yeah, Xander had loved her, there at the end. Not enough, he guessed. If he'd loved her enough, he wouldn't have hurt her - at least, that was what Will always said about her and Oz, and it sounded so sensible when Willow said it.

But when you left sensible back in the dark and quiet place where Xander usually liked to keep it, you kept coming back to this weird feeling Xander had been misdirecting himself away from for quite a while now. Like there was two of him, and one was Willow's from the beginning of time to the end, and the other had never met anyone who could love him as purely and truthfully as Cordelia could.

One of him was twelve years old forever, and Willow was the girl in his treehouse. All-American though it seemed, Xander actually did have a treehouse when he was a kid, and he and Willow did hang out there when they were twelve. It faced east, and Xander remembered watching out the window, watching the advancing grey of twilight, the first visible stars, the lights coming on in the kitchen as his parents came home from work. He remembered how much better it was playing Crazy 8s and drawing cartoons of their teachers to impress Willow, how unwelcoming the greyness and the shadows falling across his house had seemed in comparison. He'd never heard of the Hellmouth back then, but he knew that the world on the ground didn't care ten cents for Alexander Harris, and Willow did. She was Door Number Two, what Xander could get and keep if he didn't go home, didn't go back to his life, didn't give in to the inevitable pull of curfew and bedtime and reality.

The other Xander had never been that young, and his universe had certainly never been that small. He was too busy watching the shadows and waiting for the other shoe to fall to make wishes or wonder if there wasn't any more to life than Sunnydale, California. He just took his comfort where he found it, letting himself ease into the little things in life. Good cheesecake, the green-y smell of Cordelia's hand lotion, how his dad let him play poker with his buddies now sometimes and how he'd figured out the suave way to open a car door and help Cordelia in without hitting her head. Little, isolated pockets of normal being alive and even growing more or less on schedule into a man. Real life, which could sometimes seem unspeakably valuable in the face of Bezoar eggs and wife-beating androids and vampires with multiple personality disorder.

Willow was the girl in his treehouse, now more than ever. Cordelia was the girl he'd held in his arms while she bled all over him, the girl who was still alive and staring at him with lost, lonely eyes when the EMTs pried her out of his grasp and lifted her off the stake.

If he'd loved her, he wouldn't have hurt her. If he'd loved her, he wouldn't have driven her away. If he'd loved her, he wouldn't have broken her heart. If he'd loved Cordelia. If he'd loved himself the way he was, instead of himself the self he wanted to be.***

Her hand was so much smaller, more graceful than his, and it seemed like he could fold it up completely inside the hollow of his palm. It stopped moving when Xander cupped it, stroked the backs of her fingers and then nudged them gently aside, just enough to replace them with his own fingers. For once he wasn't clumsy. He stroked a soft, crescent curve along the outside of her clit, back and forth and back and forth with a touch that came -- for once -- as light and easy as words came for Xander.

They were eye to eye, and trying to connect that way, trying one more time and one more time almost figuring out how. It didn't come naturally - nothing seemed to come naturally for Cordelia and Xander, but at least they didn't seem to be losing any ground. He still saw her desire for him in her eyes, saw that she was looking for the way in. There was so much that Cordelia only gave away with her eyes, and only when he was holding her like this.

Even though he was only holding himself up by the strength of one arm, Xander found a way to work it out from underneath him, and better yet without undue interference on the part of Cordelia's hair. He stretched his arm up over his head so that he was still leaning on it, but not on top of it, and his fingers were freed to play with the waves of her hair. It was always so warm, like it was actually alive in and of itself � but the one time he'd tried to tell her that, Cordelia hadn't taken it as a compliment.

Still, Xander wound his fingers into the threads of her hair, and it was almost like making a connection. It almost stood in for knowing what the hell to say to Cordelia, and her eyes softened on his face while he did it, like she knew that he, too, was looking for the way in, and at least they were united in wanting each other and never knowing which way to turn.

*****