Title: Happily Never After (five breakups Giles and Xander never had)
Author: Mireille (mireille719)
Fandom: BtVS
Pairing: Giles/Xander (references to canon pairings; also mention of Xander/OFC)
Rating: FRT
Word Count: 2,400
Summary: There are way too many ways that this could end badly. Five different ways it could have ended, from five distinct universes.
Spoilers: Everything all the way through post-Chosen. No comics spoilers.
Disclaimer: They belong to Joss. You can tell I'm not him because he's read the S8 comics. ;)
Feedback/Concrit: Both welcome, either here or at mireille719 {at} gmail {dot} com
Notes: This story is not happy. It contains (off-screen) character death, infidelity, and other bad things. You have been warned. Thanks to bethynyc for beta-reading. Written for summer_of_giles.

Xander walks out of the room and into Willow's arms. His face must tell her everything she needs to know, because she doesn't ask questions, just murmurs, "Oh, sweetie," and hugs him, leaving the front of his shirt wet with tears.

Xander doesn't cry. He's far too old to break down in public, he tells himself.

Willow makes the phone calls: Buffy in New York, where she can avoid the baby Slayers who look at her like she's some kind of legend; Dawn across the city, at work behind the desk she's been refusing to put her name on. She'll have no reason not to, now.

Xander sits in the waiting room, trying not to just yell to random passersby that it's not fair to have had to do this twice before his fifty-third birthday.

He stays calm when the doctor comes out and talks to him; he manages to sound normal afterward, when he makes his own telephone calls. There's not much for him to do; Rupert made all the arrangements himself years ago and has kept them up-to-date as circumstances changed. All Xander has to do is put things in motion. Everyone's very polite and very helpful, and Xander manages to respond to every "I'm sorry for your loss," without his voice breaking.

After he hangs up the phone, he congratulates himself on holding together so well.

Once he's done everything he has to do at the hospital, he takes Willow back to her hotel so she can shower and change, and then he goes home. He'll be all right, he assures her, and he's been doing well enough so far that she believes him. He's been doing well enough so far that he believes himself.

And he is fine when he walks through the door; he's fine when he tosses his coat over the back of a chair--although he doesn't let himself wonder why he doesn't hang it next to the other one in the closet. There's no reason for Willow to be worried about him; he's going to be okay. He knows how to get through this. He's done it before, after all, even if it was thirty years ago.

But he didn't do it alone, he remembers, and that's when he falls apart.

"Where were you?" Rupert asks in a dull flat voice. The apartment's dark; Xander had thought Rupert would already be in bed.

But he's sitting there in the living room, all the lights out, waiting for Xander. Waiting to hear the answer to the question he'd asked in a voice that made it clear he already knows what Xander's going to say.

For a minute, Xander's tempted to lie. There are so many places he could have been. They'll fight no matter what he says, but they can fight over his being too inconsiderate to call, too careless to remember whether or not they'd made plans for tonight.

They won't have to fight over anything that's real. He won't have to explain that he loves Rupert, he honestly does--loves him so much that sometimes it makes it hard for him to breathe, which is sort of why he's been doing this.

He doesn't really know why he's been doing this, to be honest, but it sounds like as good an explanation as any. It might even be the right one.

Then Rupert says, still sounding unnaturally calm, "Sabrina rang me just now. I'd... I'd had my concerns, but I told myself I was being ridiculous. Suspicious. Insecure. And then Sabrina rang, just now, because she felt guilty."

Xander has hated himself so often over the past two months that he's surprised to find that he's furious with Sabrina for this, for being brave enough, finally, to tell Rupert what they've been doing. He just shakes his head, not knowing what to say. Not knowing if there's anything he can say.

It isn't as though this is the first time he's done something like this; just the first time he's done it to Rupert.

He's going to apologize, he decides. Offer to go to counseling--the two of them together, if Rupert wants, or just him. He'll never see Sabrina again. He'll even quit the Council, just to make certain that he won't run into her in the corridors, if that's what Rupert wants. It isn't as though there's really anything between them. There's only one person in the world that he's in love with, and he's spent the past twenty minutes or so waiting in the dark for Xander to come home.

Xander switches on a light, wanting to look Rupert in the eye when he tries to make things right.

And then he stands there, looking at the lines at the corners of Rupert's mouth, at the blank tired acceptance in his eyes, and his mouth tastes like it's full of ashes.

He wants to say, You knew this would happen; you've always known I would do this one day. He's Xander Harris, and he does this. Cheats on Cordelia. Leaves Anya at the altar. It's who he is, and if they don't both face that now, he'll never be able to make himself change.

But Rupert says it first, in that flat voice that hurts more than shouting ever could, and Xander forgets all about apologizing. Before Rupert can tell him to go, he turns to leave, stumbling when he's suddenly blinded by tears.

Willow sounds worried about him when he calls, but Xander doesn't really get why. Things are fine.

They're both busy. Tired. Rupert works late; Xander needs to spend time out in the field. It's not such a big thing that they don't eat dinner together any more, or that Rupert's started going to bed in the spare room when he's been working late; he's being thoughtful. Xander always wakes up when he comes to bed, after all.

Xander falls asleep on the couch watching television sometimes, and if he wakes up at three a.m., he just fumbles for the remote and turns off the set. No point in climbing all those stairs to the bedroom; he'd only wake himself up enough that he'd never get back to sleep.

He spends Christmas in Rome. Rupert can't get away from work, but that's no reason for Xander to go another year without seeing his friends, especially since Dawn flew back from the States for the first time since she went to college.

Nothing's actually wrong. They've been together ten years now; what would be abnormal would be if they were still having sex on a regular basis. Familiarity breeds something-or-other, and it's hard to still want to rip someone's clothes off after watching him brush his teeth seven thousand, three hundred times--give or take a few for leap years. And it's not like they've started hating one another or anything. They haven't. He's sure of that.

They're good. It's just one of those things. He only feels claustrophobic because the weather's been so bad he's had to stay in the flat most of the time. Let him get outside every now and then, and it'll be okay.

And when Rupert looks at him, one rare night that they're both at home and sitting in the same room, and says softly, "Let's be honest. This isn't working any more, is it?" it's absolutely natural for his first thought to be, Oh, thank God.

If the window in Dawn's bedroom hadn't been sticking, no one would have been around to take the call. Buffy's machine would have picked up, and Xander would have been willing to bet that Giles wouldn't have even left a number for them to call him back, just the information on Willow's flight.

But the window's right next to Dawn's desk, where her phone is, and Xander spent enough time here over the summer that he doesn't think twice about picking up the phone and saying, "Summers residence"--and then, when he's greeted with silence, repeating, "Hello," in a slightly louder voice.

"Xander," is all Giles says, but that's enough to start Xander's heart pounding in that stupid way that only Giles can cause. He tells himself that it's just because it's been a couple of months. Giles has been pretty much incommunicado since he took Willow back to England; Buffy's heard from him, but only once. Xander hasn't heard from him at all, but he hasn't let that worry him.

Well, not much, anyway. Giles told him before he left not to expect phone calls, and Xander gets that. He does have priorities, and he does get that fixing whatever went so seriously wrong with Willow is way more important than talking to him.

But it's been a couple of months now and there are times when Xander almost convinces himself he imagined everything that happened earlier that summer, before Willow had recovered enough for Giles to take her back to England. Maybe he has imagined it, he thinks, because Giles isn't saying anything else, and that's not the kind of behavior he's been expecting.

Giles had talked to him a few months ago. Giles had listened to him. And one night, about a week before he and Willow had left, Giles had kissed him.

The next night, Xander had asked him over to the apartment and he'd agreed. And for six days, Xander had started feeling like everything he'd screwed up in his life had all been for a good cause: to make him and Giles possible.

Then Giles had taken Willow to England, and that was the last Xander had heard from him until now.

"Yeah, it's me," Xander says softly, trying not to sound happy until he finds out what's going on.

"I, er...I was calling to tell you that it's--it's time for Willow to come back to Sunnydale," Giles says, and even if Willow did just try to end the world last May, Xander can't help but smile. If Willow's coming back, that means Willow's doing better, and he still loves her, can't help but be happy that she's not as broken as she was when she'd left.

But Giles sounds a lot more hesitant than that statement really deserves, so Xander knows there's something Giles isn't telling him. "She's doing better, right?"

"She's made a great deal of progress," Giles says, and Xander thinks he'd know if Giles was lying to him. "I won't pretend she doesn't have a lot of work ahead of her, but she's done all she can here."

Which, Xander figures, makes Willow sound like all the rest of them: not okay, but doing better. And he's missed her, doesn't like that it's been months since he's seen his best friend. "So when are you guys getting here?" he asks, grabbing a pen and a pad of post-it notes from Dawn's desk to write down flight numbers and times.

There's a long, long silence, and when Giles speaks, Xander knows what he's going to say even before the words come out. "Willow's flying back alone," he says.

"What about you?"

Giles sighs. "Xander, I never meant to come back permanently; if I hadn't needed to deal with Willow, I wouldn't have come back at all."

But you did come back, Xander thinks. And then he thinks that it's not that stupid of a comment, so he says it out loud, then adds, "And I kind of got the idea, when you were here, that you had a reason to come back, now."

"I do," Giles says, softly. "But Xander, all the reasons I had for leaving in the first place--they haven't gone away. This is where I belong, not Sunnydale."

For a second, Xander thinks Giles is going to ask him to come to England. For a second, he wonders whether or not he should do it.

But the second passes, and Giles doesn't; he just says, "I'll... I'll ring Buffy later with the details of Willow's flight," instead, and when he says, "Goodbye," Xander knows it means more than just "I'm hanging up."

Willow's upstairs in the room she used to share with Tara; she lets Buffy in, and sometimes Dawn, but not Giles, and not Xander. When they're not with her, Buffy and Dawn have a lot to talk about, which makes sense, Xander knows, but it means he and Giles are at loose ends most of the time.

That's okay with him, to be honest, because he and Giles are getting along better than Xander ever expected. Maybe it's the time away from Sunnydale, but Giles is treating him like an equal, like the decades separating them don't mean any more than the months between his age and Buffy's.

Xander's not as dumb as he looks; he thinks he knows what it is he's been seeing in Giles' eyes sometimes when they're talking. And he's had a lot of time to think over the past few months, to figure out why his love life has always gone so disastrously wrong, so it's not like he's surprised at the thought that he likes the way Giles has been looking at him, either.

But the thing is, Xander knows himself pretty well by now. And sure, he can put part of the blame for all the mistakes he made with Anya and Cordy on the fact that he's been denial-guy for a long time, but he also knows that deciding that he's at least mostly gay doesn't stop him from being a screw-up.

There are way too many ways that this could end badly. There isn't any way for it to end well, that Xander can see; the badness could come sooner or later, but it's going to happen eventually.

There's only one way, as far as Xander can tell, to avoid this ending, and that's to never let it start in the first place.

So when Giles pauses for a second, studying Xander's expression as though trying to decide what his next move should be, Xander jumps up and makes some excuse about something he needs to do in another room.

He tries to avoid Giles for the rest of the time he's in Sunnydale, and pretends he doesn't notice the hurt expression Giles gives him when their gazes accidentally meet.

Giles might not understand it, but Xander's sure it's for the best.