Xander gave him a hard glare with his remaining eye. "Wow. You're an original."

"Don't get me wrong, I'm appreciative." Pacey upended a glass and sat it in front of the dark-haired man. "I mean, normally, I get tons of stories. Cheating assholes, date rapes, money-hungry bitches, your normal, everyday bitches that rip your still beating heart out of your chest, ex-boyfriends who are now women, ex-girlfriends who are now lesbians. You name it, I've heard it. You name it, I've probably dated, been related or hung out with it. But I have to say a guy with one eye is a new story for me."

"You wouldn't believe it if I told you."

"Come on. My brother was a closeted homosexual until he was 35."

"My best friend who was in love with me since high school decided in college that she was a lesbian after her werewolf boyfriend and the werewolf girl he cheated on her with decided to try and kill her."

"My ex-girlfriend decided during college that she was a lesbian and she lived with the girl I had a fling with in high school."

"My ex-girlfriend was a demon. Or the high school Queen snob. Your choice."

"My best friend is a self-involved, egotistical asshole who is really only my friend when I can be of some use."

"Your best friend's name Buffy by chance?"

"Dawson."

Xander shrugged. "Same diff."

Pacey hooked his ankle around the stool he kept behind the bar and tugged it toward him, sinking down. "What are you drinking?"

"Whiskey."

"Sounds good." He poured three fingers in the glass then grabbed another, fixing a drink for himself. "So…demon, huh?"

"Vengeance demon."

"Ah."

"Your brother's gay?"

"It doesn't have the same impact, does it?" Pacey laughed. "But if it helps at all, he's still the extremely closeted sheriff of our home town and living with another ex-girlfriend's ex-boyfriend."

"Wow. Really small town."

"He's yet another ex-girlfriend's brother."

"And where's she?"

"Crazy."

"Interesting."

Pacey nodded and gestured toward the door. "I'm going to lock up, if you don't mind. You're welcome to stay and enjoy your drink, but I'm trying desperately to avoid any more customers tonight."

"I can go."

"Nah. You're here. You stay." Pacey turned the latch on the door and lowered the shade; rolling his neck and listening to it pop quietly. He could feel the dark brown eye of the other man on him, a strange sensation, knowing that there was only one. "So, you from around here?"

"California, actually."

"Nice?"

"Weather was good. But there was the whole demon thing."

"You mentioned that."

"You're surprisingly nonchalant about the discussion given that I've mentioned demons three times."

"You've never met some of the girls I've dated."

"I'm not being metaphorical."

Pacey shrugged. "Who says I am?" He tossed back half his drink and poured more into the glass. "So, what's a demon like in bed?"

"Pretty fucking amazing." Xander laughed, the sound tinged just slightly with hurt and hysteria. "I mean, stamina you'd expect from a demon, but Jesus, just the damn inventiveness."

"Well, it'd help being a couple of centuries old, I'd imagine."

"Yeah, well, vampires aren't nearly as imaginative."

"They're also dead. Maybe you can't teach a dead body new tricks."

Xander paused for a moment and sipped his drink, nodding slightly. "Maybe." He lifted his eye to Pacey. "What about you?"

"Older woman, virgin, near miss with a well-educated young woman, virgin and hellcat. There were a few others in there, but they didn't mean much of anything."

"Older woman," Xander sighed. "Yeah. They're nice."

"Experience, my friend." Pacey refilled both glasses. "You?"

"Well-educated, near-miss with a virgin, hellcat, older woman."

"Which one's the lesbian?"

"Virgin."

"Hellcat." Pacey laughed. "And the near-miss, although they're nice enough to make a little room between them if the right guy comes along."

"And you're that right guy?"

"Well, one of them." Pacey grabbed a bowl of peanuts and set it between them. "What about you? Still with the demon?"

"She's dead."

"Ouch."

"You?"

"Well, after the hellcat, I kind of went back to the second virgin, although she was anything but by that time. But she got all empowered and hauled her ass to Paris."

"Let me guess, the other two? The ones that went all Sapphic? Right about the same time?"

"Yeah." Pacey's brow furrowed. "How'd you guess?"

"Well, uh, yeah. That was sort of our fault. Not mine, per se, but…you remember the near miss that I mentioned turned out to be a lesbian?"

"Yeah."

"She's also a witch."

"You know, I always thought I had interesting exes." Pacey's blue eyes were thoughtful as he watched Xander take a drink. His eye was focused off in the distance, his mind miles away. "So you made 'em all lesbians?"

Xander shook his head, landing back in the bar. "No. We made them all powerful."

"Any particular reason?"

"We were fighting an army of super-powerful vampires."

"And that helped?"

"Well, it didn't quite go as planned. We were supposed to just endow a certain group of girls with the power." Xander shrugged. "Magic never did work too well for us."

"Hmmm." Pacey took a drink. "And the eye?"

"I wondered when we were going to get to that."

"I'm just curious as to which ex got powerful enough…not to mention pissed off enough to do that to you."

"Actually this was done by a psychotic ex-preacher being controlled by the most ancient evil of all."

Pacey scratched the back of his neck; the only sound in the room the soft scraping of his short nails. "It certainly rules out me challenging you to a game of pool or darts, doesn't it?"

"I'm not big on the depth perception." Xander laughed at Pacey's smirk. "It's kind of fitting, if you're an ironical bastard, because I used to be pretty shallow."

"And are you?"

"Ironical?"

"Yeah."

"Well, I mentioned what my life is like, right? If I'm not, then I'm in a shitload of trouble."

"Sounds like that might be the case regardless."

"True enough." Xander pushed his glass toward Pacey who refilled it. "You want to know what's really ironic?"

"You have no idea how much I want to know what's really ironic."

Xander swallowed the liquid and pushed the empty glass back for another. He shuddered slightly as fire swam down his throat then gave a short bark of laughter. "He did it, the preacher, because he thought I was the one who sees things."

"And so he stabbed your eye out?"

"Which I thought was pretty shitty for many reasons, not the least of which was the fact that I didn't see anything other than what was right in front of my eyes. And in some cases, not even that."

"Life's a bitch out there in sunny California, huh?"

"That's not the ironic part."

"No?"

"About two years after he did this, I woke up one morning with the biggest hard on of my life because I had a dream I was having sex with the near miss, you know? Two days later, it comes true. Almost identical to the dream."

"Nice."

"Yeah. I'm thinking it is. Rock solid nice. So nice you can brush your teeth with it." Xander laughed and tossed back the refill. "Then afterwards, in our typical, life-changing, horrific and terrifying way, Willow tells me that she felt it."

"Mmm," Pacey nodded. "I know that kind of sentence."

"She used magic to guide my sperm because she and her girlfriend wanted to have a baby."

"Ah. Ouch."

"A week or so later, I have a dream that the girlfriend's going to die." Xander held out his glass, his hand shaking slightly as Pacey refilled it. "I don't think to warn anyone, not thinking anything more than coincidence, you know?"

"Right."

"I should have known better."

"She died."

"I killed her."

"Oh. Shit." Pacey tossed back his own drink and did another round of refills. "On purpose?"

"Nah, that'd be too easy. I killed her because she'd been bitten in the middle of the night while she was helping Willow patrol. Willow couldn't do it. Just stood there when the bitch turned on her. She sank her teeth into Willow's neck and I acted on instinct. I got her before she could…" He stopped, tears flooding his eye. Pacey sat silently as they streamed down his cheek, the oddness of the lack of symmetry somehow focusing his attention more on the dried cheek. "Willow's fine, you know? Mostly fine. But she doesn't want to see me again."

"Bitch of a gift you've got there."

"That it is." Xander raised his glass in toast. "But the sex was damn good."

"Worth it?"

"No." Xander sighed. "But you take the victories where you can find them."

"Because they're few and far between?"

"Hell, no. I've been helping save the world since I was fifteen. You take 'em where you can find them because you never know if you're going to live to see the next one." Xander let out a long sigh. "You?"

"Me what?" Pacey's mouth curled into a half smile. "My tale of woe? Let's see. My first girlfriend was 20 years my senior and left town rather than face criminal charges. My second went insane. My third was my best friends ex-girlfriend and self-professed soulmate…"

"God save us from the soulmates."

"No fucking kidding." Pacey drank. "That ended with a nice round of self-doubt. Then I dated the hellcat and she was nice until I realized I wasn't in love with her."

"God save us from love."

"No fucking kidding." He ran his hand through his hair and thought for a moment. "That ended when the ex, Joey - just to make things easier here - decided she wasn't still in love with me, she was in love with the other guy that had left her."

"The soulmate?"

"No. Surprisingly, I doubt very seriously if those two ever do anything more than a fantastically horrific one-night stand." He couldn't help his grin. "Now she's in Paris, probably dating someone who smells odd and doesn't shave."

"That can happen." Xander sighed and gestured toward a table. "You mind?"

"Not at all." Pacey grabbed the glasses and a couple of bottles, following Xander. They sat down and he poured fresh drinks for them both. "So, what brings you out this way?"

"Just running away. I figured I'd go east this time, since I've been to the west coast and I didn't have any desire to get stuck in Oxnard again."

"Do I even want to know what that means?" Pacey sipped his drink cautiously. "More demon stuff?"

"Strip club."

"You stripped?"

"Only when it became inevitable."

"Everything becomes inevitable." Pacey sighed and closed his eyes, leaning his head over the back of the seat. "I did my time in a strip club before I hit this place. Paying my way through business school."

Xander grabbed one of the paper menus off the table and began folding it, turning his head to focus and keep his lines straight. He held it up, examining it critically before letting the airplane sail toward the bar. It landed smoothly on top of the long surface and he smiled. "Not bad for a Cyclops, huh?"

"And yet you say you suck at darts?"

"I never actually said that." Xander laughed and finished another drink, grabbing for the bottle carefully and pouring more into his glass. "You inferred that, possibly incorrectly."

"You want to play darts?"

"No. I actually suck at darts." He laughed. "You'd think I'd have some skill, given that I've been aiming stakes at vampire's chest for several years now, but," he shrugged, "no such luck."

"Where is she now?"

"Ah." Xander nodded and refilled Pacey's glass. "Now the bartender in you comes out, right? I've confided so you're going for the confession? Well, I have to warn you, you're no Willy the Snitch."

"I'll play along with that and say that you're right in that regard." Pacey held his airplane aloft and tossed it, smiling as it landed just behind Xander's. "But you didn't just randomly walk into this bar for no reason right before I closed. And I say this because there's no sign on the door marking it as a bar and there was no traffic streaming out the doors, and there are no glaring, flashy lights to make you think it's a place to drown your troubles. So you walked in here on purpose, knowing what it is and I want to know why."

"I came in here to get drunk." Xander held up his glass then drained it. "Are you kicking me out?"

"No. I'm just curious."

"Curiosity killed the cat. And a hell of a lot of friends of mine."

"We're not friends."

"No." Xander's lips curled in a knowing smile. "We're not."

Pacey laughed and got up from the table, grabbing a handful of darts and moving toward the board. Xander turned in his seat and watched him as he aimed and hit the bull's-eye. "Was it a dream?"

"That led me here?"

"Yeah."

"Would it freak you out if it was?"

"Considering the last two involved sex and killing, maybe a little." He threw another dart, the scraping sound of it sliding along the first one muted in the strange heat of the room. "Was it?"

Xander got to his feet and nodded. "Yeah."

Pacey turned and crossed his arms over his chest, watching Xander approach. "You gonna kill me?"

"No."

"Fuck me?"

"Not as far as I can tell. We made all the girls switch teams. We pretty much left the guys alone."

"All the girls?"

"I wouldn't be surprised if a few of them experimented in the wake of our little spell. I know previously straight Buffy and Faith started dancing a little closer from time to time."

"I need to meet these women."

"You'd have to go to Cleveland."

"I don't need to meet them that badly." Pacey stood there for a moment before returning to his dart game. "So what are you going to do to me?"

"Nothing."

Pacey nodded then walked to the board to retrieve his darts. He took a deep breath, expelling it slowly. "What am I going to do to you?"

"I explained it all badly earlier." Xander returned to the table and picked up the bottle, not bothering with the glass this time as he poured a healthy amount down his throat. "The girl I killed…Willow's girlfriend. She…she was something more than just an empowered girl."

"She was a lesbian too. I did get that part. I'm not as stupid as I look."

"No. We gave all the girls the power to stand up for themselves, right? But there were a few girls that had something special. They had the potential to be Slayers."

"Slayers. Okay, you've lost me with that one."

"There's only one."

"Like the Highlander."

"Right, only just as bastardized, because now there are a ton of them. Potentials, Slayers-in-Training, whatever you want to call them. They've got this extra power inside them that, if thing had stayed the way they were, would be activated in one of them when the Slayer died. Kennedy was one of them."

"Kennedy? Like the VJ?"

"Let's not go there, okay?" Xander drained the bottle and set it on the edge of the table, not noticing as it trembled and fell to the floor. He laughed once as it smash to pieces around his feet. "When she turned…when I killed her…I was watching them. I mean, I wasn't there by chance. I was freaked out when Willow told me I'd been a fucking sperm donor and I wanted to confront them. It was night, so I was armed. Kennedy was sitting on a tombstone and Willow was standing between her legs and they were talking about their baby, how excited they were about their family and I was about to lose it when it happened. Kennedy…changed. Willow had turned and had her back to her and Kennedy vamped out. None of us knew," tears choked his voice and he stopped, sucking in huge gulps of air. "She wouldn't let Willow go. She wouldn't release her and Willow was screaming and…"

Pacey's voice was quiet. "You killed her?"

"I ripped Kennedy back, pulled her away from Willow. I didn't wait. I didn't care. I just stabbed her in the chest, you know? Plunged the stake in again and again until she shifted and then it speared her heart. I stabbed her until she turned to dust and it took for-fucking-ever." He was shaking as he grabbed for another bottle, ripping the lid off of it and swallowing it down. "And the entire time, Willow's screaming at me and grabbing at my arm and I just lost it, you know? Everything fell down around me and I turned and slapped her." He sucked in air then sucked in booze. "And everything stopped."

Pacey didn't say anything, simply took the bottle from Xander's loose grip. Xander watched him, his eyes distracted, then he sank down into a chair.

"You ever been possessed by the soul of a hyena?"

"Not that I recall."

"You'd recall." He closed his eyes. "I've hurt Willow so many times in my life, but I'd never seen that look. I'd never seen her be scared of me."

"What did she say?"

"She told me that I needed to get the fuck away from her. Which, if you knew Willow, you'd know just the use of the word fuck would be surprising enough. Right about then, Buffy showed up and Willow ran to her and told her I'd killed Kennedy. They both just looked at me, you know? Like I was no better than the vampire I'd just killed. Of course, Buffy's been fucking vamps since she first became the Slayer, so that might not be the best comparison."

There was a heavy pause, filled with sadness and tension, shattering when Pacey spoke softly. "I'm not going to kill you."

"You are. I saw it."

"I don't even know your name."

"Xander. Alexander Harris." Xander grabbed his coat off the barstool next to the one he'd first sat on, pulling out a long knife. "We make it look like a robbery. I'll just hurt you a little and then you act in self-defense."

"The cops show up and find us both drunk and one of us dead, I'm going to jail for killing my gay boyfriend."

Tears filled Xander's eye again. "You have to kill me. I fucking saw it!"

"Willow's still carrying your child, Xander."

The sob was wrenched out of him, the painful sound filling the bar, echoing again and again. "You think I don't fucking know that? You think I've forgotten that fact? But maybe you didn't fucking hear the part where I killed her fucking girlfriend. She doesn't even want to see me."

"Did she say that to you, Xander? Or are you just having a hard time looking at yourself?"

Xander turned away, shaking his head. After several moments of silence, he stopped and faced Pacey. "What's your name?"

"Pacey."

"You ever wanted to die, Pacey?"

"My father, for the first 18 years of my life, was a world class asshole. He was the sheriff of a small town and I didn't give a shit, so I did my own thing. A lot of that put me directly in his line of fire. Of course, that was the only time he noticed me."

"That didn't answer my question. A lot of people have a shitty family life."

"I've never killed the lesbian lover of the woman I love, if that's what you're asking. But I've never killed anyone, so I don't know that I'm the person to judge you here." Pacey was quiet as Xander shook his head. "I don't know that I would say that I ever wanted to die, Xander." He looked up at Pacey's words. "But I've thought about killing myself from time to time."

"I've seen death up close and personal for the past nine years. I've killed demons and vamps and zombies and just about every other nightmare you can imagine. But I knew I was doing the right thing every time." He watched Pacey move over to the table and pour two more drinks, handing Xander a glass. "If I had waited…if I had held Willow and just sat there until she awoke, it wouldn't have been like this."

"And then you would have had to fight a vampire who had been a Slayer?" Pacey shook his head. "From what you've said about this girl, you did the right thing. I'd bet that your Willow," he ignored Xander's choked sob, "will understand. I bet she's done something in the course of her life that she's not proud of, that she wishes she hadn't done."

"…yeah."

"Did you forgive her for it?"

Xander looked away, staring at the dark window buried in the dark walnut. "She's a lesbian."

"You're still the father."

"She doesn't love me."

"I don't even have to know this girl to know she loves you." Pacey smiled and tapped the side of his head. "Bartender's intuition." He laughed at Xander's skeptical look. "I've bought vamps and demons and Slayers from you and you don't believe in intuition?" He held up his glass and toasted Xander. "She could have just asked you for the sperm, right? She could have just asked and you'd have jerked off for her, right?" When Xander didn't answer, Pacey lowered his glass and took his drink. "She wanted to fuck you. Be with you. Make love to you. And I'd bet money I don't have that she loves you. Maybe you're not going to live happily ever after the way the fairy tales say…"

"Have you ever read any fairy tales?"

"I'm not going to kill you, Xander."

"I did have a dream."

"And what happened in it?"

Xander laughed. "Nothing. I saw myself walking into the bar, which is how I knew where to come."

"Given the ironical nature of your dreams, should that scare me?"

"We'll see in a week or two, huh?"

"Maybe you'll be stopping by with Willow, celebrating a happy ending."

Xander opened his wallet and tossed several bills on the table before looking up at Pacey, his expression solemn, his eye dark. "There are no happy endings, Pacey. No matter what the storybooks say."

"I beg to differ."

Xander shrugged. "What are the odds?"

Pacey took the money and walked over to the cash register, hitting a button and opening it, placing the bills inside. "I don't know, Xander. What are the odds that you'd walk into a random bar you saw in your dream and the guy in there would actually believe the story you just spun for me."

"Pretty fucking bad."

"Enjoy your happy ending."

06/05/03