still_grrr | Prompt 052 fic: True Love? (Reply)

Title: True Love?
Author:

firefly_124
Rating: G
Word Count: 315
Prompt: 052, a pairing I’ve never written before
Characters/Pairing (if any): Xander/Buffy
A/N: Xander’s thoughts during a scene in comic #3.

Xander closed his eye.

True love’s kiss. Could Amy be more cliché? Well, no, probably not.

The big money question as far as he could see, lack of depth perception notwithstanding, was whether his feelings qualified as true love.

Sometimes he thought so. What else could last so long? Through Angel. Through Riley. Through even Spike.

God, that had hurt. The smoldering, half-crushed cigarette butt of hope he’d held on to from the moment Riley said she didn’t love him had been stomped hard then. It was obvious that even if she was destroyed and desperate, she’d turn to an undead thing rather than him.

But he’d stuck by her, once he’d dunked his brain in a nice, healthy bucket of bleach a few dozen times. So, even if she’d never think of him that way, wasn’t that true love?

Sometimes he thought not. It had taken awhile to rebuild their old camaraderie after everything that had happened. But they had, and it was good. When he woke up in the morning, he looked forward to seeing her over breakfast, even if she still wasn’t big with the conversation before coffee unless she’d been out staking vamps for old time’s sake the night before. But it was a whole different kind of looking forward than he’d had with Anya. Not a more or less kind of different. Sort of a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen versus Astonishing X-Men kind of different. So maybe it really was just a best-friendy love.

But wasn’t that a kind of true love too?

And he’d wanted to kiss her since forever. Possibly longer.

He opened his eye and made to lean over her.

“Cinnamon buns!” she exclaimed as she sat bolt upright.

Startled, he took a step backward into the nice, comfy, best-friendy spot he’d been standing in two minutes ago. She was awake, and that was all that mattered.