needsaparrot | MCA0: Sunday Night

Xander's got an e-mail home open, half-written, as he lounges on the couch with the laptop. Oddly, it's not to Willow, this time - not that it's always to her, but she tends to get the bulk of them due to BFF privileges.

This time, though, it's to the other best friend.

Dear Buffy:

So I met Bridge's parents. His mom pulled a knife on me. Good times. I'm not in tiny card jail, though, which I think I'm supposed to take as a sign that they like me. In other news, mini-Fandom-Andrew got the lead in the school play. I'm not sure if I should warn him about possible fairy possession or warn the school about possible monkey-demons. I'm not sure this school would even notice possible monkey-demons; it's not like we did.

64,000$ question: What if Angel'd still been evil after he got the soul back? What would you have done? Except you did, when you killed him, so I guess I'm asking what should I have done to hel---

If you think, given how close that gets to mentioning things he's never mentioned, that this letter's going nowhere fast, you're not wrong.

[OOC: For the guy whose parents haven't put Xander in tiny card jail yet.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Just... been trying to figure out how I can help Mel. If I can help Mel, even."

Bridge frowns a little. "With what happened to her brother and... everything?" he's a little hazy on the details, since he wasn't there for the final fight with Harth, but he'd seen how Mel looked after, and he knew the basics.

Xander nods, his head shifting under Bridge's fingers. "Yeah. From my experience of a whole two vampire resoulings, that's not how it was supposed to go."

"Having the soul is supposed to equal good, and a happy ending. But it didn't, not this time."

"I dunno about happy ending," Xander says, thinking of the ongoing Buffy and Angel Days of Our Afterlives show. "But it's not supposed to equal more people dying."

"Well, I meant happy relatively speaking, the no-people-dying thing."

"That's the idea. That's what happened with Angel. I mean, he's still a vampire; he's still trouble." He can only bend so far. Not-dirty. "But he tries to be one of the good guys."

"It sucks," Bridge says, "that some people don't need the excuse of being demons or monsters to be evil." Yeah, it's kind of an obvious statement, but even after two years in Fandom, knowing plenty of people from Sunnydale, and even being possessed by one, demons are still something he doesn't really understand fully.

"I don't know if Harth was evil before he was dead, or just..." Xander's hand describes a vague frustrated arc in the air. "Messed up? I do know it's messing Mel up."

"I haven't seen her, not since we got back," Bridge says guiltily. "I really... I should."

"She went off on some road-trip with Rikku while we were gone," Xander says. "There was grand theft auto. And possibly other things I shouldn't know about in case I get called to testify."

"...Yeah, I can definitely believe that of the two of them," Bridge says, smiling a little.

"Not that I'm all yay property-damage, but I'd be yayer if it seemed to have made her feel better."

"Right. The whole, 'try and keep yourself busy and maybe you'll forget' thing."

"I was more thinking the whole 'smash a skeleton into dust molecules with a big-ass hammer' thing," Xander says, rubbing his nose, "But it's not like she's got one of those."

"...Okay, now I'm confused." Bridge admits.

"S'what Buffy did the summer after sophomore year, after the Master killed her," Xander explains, possibly not helpfully.

"I thought that dying thing happened *after* you graduated?" Yeah, still confused.

"She died twice." As you do. "The first one was just for a couple minutes. And then there was CPR."

"Oh," Bridge blinks. "That makes much more sense." It doesn't really, but he's just going to go with it.

"The Master drowned her, the first time. She wasn't exactly happy about that, even after she killed him. Pounding his bones into cornmeal seemed to help."

"...You come from a very interesting place." Says the person destined to wear brightly-coloured spandex and pilot a giant robot.

"Vampires'll do that."

"Speaking of vampires, or at least, of people with a tendency to suck the life out of things, though as far as I know she hasn't actually drank anyone's blood, it's more of a metaphorical trying to lower morale kind of way... have you heard about the person they brought in to cover Principal Washburn during her maternity leave?"