Exploding Inside

EXPLODING INSIDE
by Liz Barr
May 2001
Xander/Anya
rated [PG-13]

feedback: always appreciated – elizabeth_barr@yahoo.com.au
homepage: http://www.geocities.com/elizabeth_barr/
archive: sure. Just let me know
characters: not mine. Joss's.

Summary: Anya contemplates Xander, romance and this whole humanity Thing. And uncharacteristically sappy piece … my angst bunny's on holidays.

By all rights, I should hate you. I mean, if it weren't for you and Willow, I'd have never come to Sunnydale, and ended up stuck in this twenty-year old body with sharp eyes and a piercing voice and the dim knowledge of inevitable death.

By all rights, I should hate you. You make peculiar jokes, and obsess about Buffy and Willow to the point where your *real* girlfriend becomes insecure. You stare at other women's breasts, and watch television shows about unnaturally beautiful women wearing impractical, tight clothing.

Once I would have melted your eyeballs just on principle. Instead, you smile at me, and I feel as if I could explode inside. Something within me expands, and I feel as thought I could become large enough to embrace the world, even the ugly, smelly parts.

You smile at me, and nothing matters. Willow, Buffy, the other women in the street and on television, the demons and the pain and the fact that one day we'll both be dead … it doesn't disappear, but it doesn't scare me any more.

By all rights I should hate you. Instead I love you, and of all the strange things about being human, that's the strangest.

END

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