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Title: Small New Things 
By: Jessica Harris 
Rating: PG-ish, Xander/Riley 
Disclaimer: The boys aren't mine. 
Feedback: I'm a hopeless junky: lumpj@hotmail.com 
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Small New Things 
By: Jessica Harris 
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Xander leans back in his chair and feels his shirt pull 
tight across his shoulders. They've gotten broader with all 
his work over the summer, and his old clothes don't fit so 
well anymore. 

His shoulders and arms are bigger, and he has calluses on 
his hands. He can feel the thickened skin on his finger-
tips if he runs his thumb across them, something which he 
does from time to time just so that he *can* feel them. He 
likes them. They make him think of... 

Of the new vision in his head, something important but 
still vague enough that trying to articulate it feels 
almost dangerous. 

Buffy and Willow are across the table from him, heads bent 
close together over girl-talk, college-talk, maybe magic-
talk, one of the many kinds of talk he can't really be a 
part of. He can feel the ghost of the pain this would once 
have caused him, the echo of the urge to talk too loud, 
force them to laugh, hurl wrong-headed love at them, 
anything to make himself feel less invisible. But he runs 
his thumb across his calluses again, and knows that 
eventually they'll look up and see him and smile. And if 
they don't know exactly who he is anymore, well, that's 
something that's only just started to become clear to him, 
too, and there's plenty of time now for all of them to work 
it out. 

Because things *are* getting clearer. That's what's in his 
mind these days - the shape of things starting to come 
together, like... like blue-prints, or the elaborate plans 
he's learned to decipher at work. Mitred corners and planed 
surfaces and careful angles bringing all the parts together 
into something that's more than their simple sum. 

Like maybe, just maybe, all his own parts are starting to 
add up to something he can be proud of. 

The calluses on his hands have paid for the new apartment, 
and it's big and bright and blessedly free of his parents' 
voices. He's built himself bookshelves, and while he 
doesn't actually have much in the way of books, he knows 
that there's time for that, too, and he likes the way they 
look, pale fresh pine and straight lines and solid corners. 
He's bought himself a book on Mission-Style furniture, 
drawn to its simple lines, and he's working on a chair for 
himself, enjoying the challenge of its simplicity, the way 
that there aren't any flashy extras to hide shoddy 
workmanship. It's all about putting it together properly. 

Riley helped him cart home the lumber for the shelves and 
the chair, and they've been hanging out a little recently, 
engaging in ritual guy acts of beer and TV and mockery. 
It's been a long time since Xander had a real guy-friend, 
someone he could just be, well, a *guy* with. Oz had come 
close, but Willow and then the wolf had gotten in the way 
of that, and now Oz was gone again, on the road with his 
van and his laconic cool and the wolf beneath his skin. And 
maybe that was another reason that the whole friends thing 
had never really happened with Oz - both the wolf and the 
coolness had somehow qualified as a Special Power, had made 
Oz another member of that gifted inner circle, putting 
Xander on the outside once again. 

Though if that's the case he should probably resent 
soldier-boy Riley too. But he doesn't. One way and another 
Riley's been cast out of his own inner circle, and Xander's 
started to think that might be even harder to handle than 
never having been on the inside at all. 

So he's been making an effort with Riley, trying to get to 
know him better. It's a kind of hanging out that he hasn't 
had a chance to do since Jesse. Since Jesse died. 

Since he *killed* Jesse, or what had damn well looked and 
felt like Jesse, even if his mind knew full well that it 
had just been an evil thing wearing Jesse's gawky body. And 
that's another piece of his life that he's started trying 
to make sense of these days, not just killing Jesse - he 
knows, truly *knows* after all these years, that he didn't 
really have a choice in that. But about the other things 
that had just started to happen in his life then, and that 
had somehow gotten lost in the big good-and-evil, avert-
the-apocalypse business that has filled it ever since. 

It's understandable, he supposes - what's a little teenage 
sexual confusion in the face of the end of the world, after 
all? But he knows now that it was important, in *his* grand 
scheme of things if not *the* grand scheme of things, and 
that he has to go back to it if he's serious about trying 
to make it all make sense. 

It hadn't been much. One drunken basement jerk-off, 
listening for his parents the whole time and distracted by 
the dawning realisation that the cheap wine he'd drunk was 
going to make an ugly reappearance in the not so distant 
future. A few awkward kisses, dry-mouthed with fear, both 
of them half-pretending it wasn't really happening. And a 
few nights when they had simply stayed up late to watch TV 
or silently wander the night-time streets of Sunnydale, 
firm in the knowledge that neither one of them wanted to be 
anywhere else but there, together. 

Not much. But in his own frightened, inarticulate way 
Xander had loved Jesse. And whatever might have grown out 
of that had died with him, and that deserved, Xander now 
thinks, some mourning, some acknowledgement. And some 
examination, of where that put Xander-of-the-moment, with 
his job and new apartment and Anya and the small warm new 
thing that was growing up between him and Riley. 

Anya loves him. Xander knows that. And he... is grateful to 
her. Wouldn't have gotten through this past year without 
her. Sometimes even thinks that loving her is inevitable, 
that it will come if he just gives it time. But it feels 
like all his life things have simply happened to him, 
without his having much say in the matter, and Anya, no 
matter how wonderful she is, is another one of those 
things. And he thinks that for once he'd like to make 
something happen for himself. To *know* what he wants and 
*choose* to go after it and... see what happens. 

Which brings him back to Riley. What *does* he want here? 
The TV and the guy-talk are all good, and maybe that's all 
he should ask from this friendship. God knows it would be 
less complicated, and then there's Buffy... 

But Buffy doesn't love Riley. And Xander can feel the need 
for love coming off of Riley in waves, so familiar to him 
that it makes him want to do whatever he can to make it 
stop. 

And he thinks... he thinks that maybe *he* could love 
Riley. Love Riley for the way that Riley loves Buffy and 
her strength, love him for his uniqueness and his ordinary 
guyness and for his wildly transparent attempts to act like 
everything is OK. And yes, even for his pain and his 
lostness. 

He *could* love Riley, but he doesn't, not yet, and that, 
strangely, is a nice feeling in itself. This isn't one of 
the helpless irrational passions that seized him as a 
teenager. He can make choices here, and if he chooses to 
pursue this there will be complication and pain and quite 
possibly a broken heart or two, and he's thinking about 
these things, thinking about them carefully. But when he 
looks a Riley he can't help the small warm feeling that 
tells him that if he *does* pursue it, there's something 
here that could be good. That here is someone he could be 
strong for, and strong with, someone who needs love and can 
give love and isn't too busy saving the world to laugh at 
his jokes. 

He still doesn't know what he's going to do about it all. 
But for the first time in his life it feels like a whole 
range of different futures is opening up before him. And 
after years of the sneaking suspicion that he had no future 
at all, that feels like a blessing, no matter what he makes 
of it in the end.