TITLE: How Many Years Bad Luck?
AUTHOR: Ragna (writinggoddess@aol.com)
RATING: FRT
CLASSIFICATION: Xander POV, past Xander/Anya, past Xander/Cordelia.
SUMMARY: Xander thinks he really is the Zeppo....
SPOILERS: Takes place in the not-so-distant future of A:tS season 5; directly spoils events in the BtVS episode "Chosen" and the A:tS episode "You're Welcome."
DISTRIBUTION: Any sites with my fic up; you all have unspoken permission. I write it, you can post it. Everyone else just keep my name on it and let me know.
DISCLAIMER: If you don't recognize it, chances are it's my own creation. If you do, I don't own it. Joss Whedon, Kazui Sandollar, The WB, UPN, et. al. most likely do.
FEEDBACK: Please send it offlist and let me know it's feedback; I do rapid delete on my account due to a lot of spam.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: Went to Challenge In A Can and ended up with "Anya," "furious" and "mirror." For Xander Appreciation Day, May 1st 2004.
DEDICATED TO: The writers on the Sunnydale Writers list who answered a question about some lyrics from "I Hate Everything About You" by Three Days Grace, and kept saying it's be good for a Xander/Cordelia fic. I ended up using Wes/Lilah instead, but before I changed my mind I'd written most of this.

***

It's times like these when I wonder why I automatically got chosen to be...I guess the Zeppo is as good a term as any. Buffy, Faith, Robin & Dawn went to Australia because there's a large batch of Slayers there, and they're rounding them up to bring to England for training.

Andrew's somewhere. I think he felt guilty about Anya...yeah, well he's not the only one.

Kennedy and Willow are somewhere, too. I think in England, maybe with Giles, maybe not.

As for me? I'm in Los Angeles. I just found out I lost two women I loved, in one fell swoop. I mean, Anya's in that hole in the ground, and...I don't want to go there. She'd probably laugh at me if she knew how much I wanted to cry about it. Say it's more economical that we didn't have to bury her.

And Cordy...I wanted to sock Angel when he told me about everything that had happened. Not because I think it's his fault, but because I got so angry. I hated both of them, in that instant; I hated Cordelia for getting herself into that mess that left her in a coma and I hated Anya for getting herself killed.

Mind you, I love them both. Never can say I've hated either of them, though I'm pretty sure they both hated me at some point. And they had every right to. Should have been furious with me.

I know you get seven years bad luck for breaking a mirror, but how many years of bad luck do you get for breaking a heart? No make that two hearts. God, double the bad luck, the bad feelings, double all the shit and hand it over to me because I deserve it.

I'm not a hero. I'm barely even helping to gather the Slayers. I just...I just want to crawl into a hole and lie in the dark for a while until I die, and then have everyone forget about me while I try and forget about everyone else.

I think I really, really need another drink...