Author’s Note: This was written as a response to “Chosen.” Which life is the dream and which is the reality is left up to the reader.

She’s not really dead. Not when he wakes.

No, that’s the part of that final battle that only haunts his nightmares. Nightmares that seem as vivid as reality, but thank whatever gods or powers there may be out there, the sound of him crying out her name in terror in his sleep always wakes her. And when her slumber is disturbed, his is sure to follow. She’ll wake him with a complaint, a grouchy command to stop scaring her. Or better yet, a scolding–if he doesn’t stop dreaming that she’s dead, immediately, she’s going to start to feel that he wishes she were.

But no…this dream has nothing to do with the wishes his heart makes. That dream came true in the long, aimless months when they wandered homeless through the country, the occupancy of the battered yellow school bus slowly dwindling as each refugee found their place in this new, changed world and chose to stay.

She’d come to him one night towards the end of that journey, begging not to be left alone. They’d just left Willow, Kennedy and one other behind in Colorado Springs and were slowly, steadily making their way back to California. He’d tried to turn her away, to be the gentleman despite the increasingly violent protests of his body and heart. But she’d always been blunt, rarely afraid to demand what she wanted from life, and the one thing that held her back had disembarked in the cold, bright winter blue of the Colorado February morning.

Willow and Xander. Xander and Willow. She had realized then that they would always be a matched set, like Will and Grace only–as she’d shortly, bitterly told him that very night–gender-flipped. Willow’s heart might belong to Kennedy now, and a piece of Xander’s still to this broken beauty at his door just as a piece of it still belonged to Buffy, but their loyalty would always belong first and foremost to each other.

That first night, he’d allowed himself to give no more than comfort. It was the only restraint he still had left where she was concerned. So, she slept in his arms all that night and for almost a week of nights to follow, but never did he rest in her warmth.

The nightmares had started the night she finally wore down his resolve. When she’d confessed in her own unique way that she’d “lusted after him unnaturally” since that confused, confusing night in the Magic Box. The night they’d shared their first kiss under the influence of a spell that stripped away their expectations and preconceptions and distilled them to who they were in the purest sense. That, truth be told, she’d harbored a secret fear that Xander had seen into her heart and seen that secret and for that reason turned away.

She’d told him she thought she might be in love with him, but if she was then she’d never really loved Xander because it was like nothing she’d ever felt before.

He knows why they come, the nightmares. Why he can live and breathe her by day and often by night, but when consciousness flees, in his mind’s eye he still sees her fall, cut in two by a blade that shouldn’t be sharp enough to deprive the world of her special light.

Part of it is guilt, that maybe Xander will change his mind and come back to retrieve the fair but freakish maiden who should be his, and will find himself betrayed by the man who tried to be a father to them all but could not. For with her, every time that father-figure began to succeed, she would spew forth some seed of honest wisdom that reminded him that though she was young in humanity and in body, in experience and betrayal she is the oldest of them all.

But mostly it’s just that he’s sure she’s too good to be true. That any day he may awaken to discover this day to day reality, precious as it is, is what he’s been dreaming. That the nightmare that haunts him is reality trying to intrude upon a mind that no longer desires it. If the price of shaking the nightmare from his sleep is waking to it instead, then the cost is too high.

He’d rather wake screaming every night to the comfort of her extraordinary presence than wake reaching for her and give in to the scream upon not finding her there.