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The Replacement

Prologue

Buffy, Riley, Anya and Xander are all in Xander’s basement watching a kung fu movie on TV. Xander and Riley are on the sofa, while their girlfriends sit on the floor in front of them. Buffy isn’t paying any attention to the movie. She has her nose buried in a history textbook. Anya’s arm is in a sling, a souvenir from her encounter with a vampire a week earlier. Xander tells them all that he would offer them something to eat, but the cat peed on his hot plate the other day.

Xander’s parents arrive home. The sound of them arguing can be heard from upstairs, accompanied by the sound of breaking dishes. Xander and the others try to ignore it until the vibrations of a door slamming knock loose some dust from the rafters which showers down around them.

“Maybe it’s time to start looking for a new place,” says Xander. “Something a little nicer. Buffy, you’ve been to hell. They had one-bedrooms, right?”

Buffy doesn’t notice the question. She’s still engrossed in her book. Riley tries to get her attention, but she still doesn’t notice until he reaches down and covers the pages with his hands. “Hey! I’m enjoying the studying,” she tells him.

“Who are you lately?” asks Riley. “Give it up and watch the movie.”

“I guess it has been a long day with the Crusades. I can take a little break from the violence for some—” Buffy notices the movie for the first time. “Oh, fighting.” She starts to watch the movie.

Riley starts to massage Buffy’s shoulders, and she sighs in contentment.

Xander notices Buffy’s reaction, and decides to do the same for Anya.

“Ow!” says Anya. “What are you doing? I have a dislocated shoulder!” She is also trying to concentrate on the kicking movie.

Buffy starts to get upset with the movie. She doesn’t like the hero’s fighting technique. “Oh, give me a break! This is all wrong. See, first you would get the big guy, like a flying kick, then you would take out all the little ones—bam, bam. See? Now with the flying kick? From a dead stop. What’s powering it? Raw enthusiasm?”

Riley thinks Buffy’s taking this much too seriously. She isn’t on Slayer duty all the time.

“It would drive you crazy if we were watching an army movie and they were all saluting backwards and invading all willy-nilly,” says Buffy.

Xander’s parents’ fight starts to pick up again, and the group in the basement tries hard to pretend not to notice it. Buffy asks Xander to back her up on the movie thing. Willow gets all upset over movies getting witch stuff wrong.

“What?” asks Xander. “Oh, yeah. She’s all, like, ‘what’s that, a cauldron? Who uses a cauldron anymore?’”

A demon stands before a boiling cauldron. He’s tall, with glowing blue eyes and teeth, and wearing a black robe. He is holding a two foot rod in his hand.

“The last step in thy forging is my pain.
The price with which I purchase the death of the Slayer!”

He plunges the rod, and his hand into the boiling cauldron, and screams from the pain.

Act I

Xander leads Willow, Buffy, Riley and Anya down the hallway of an apartment building to look at the apartment he’s thinking of renting. He warns them not to get their hopes up though, he isn’t sure he’ll be able to afford it. They reach the door and go inside.

The apartment is large, airy and furnished. “It’s nice,” says Buffy. “And not subterranean. It’s very, uh, above-terranean.”

“I want it,” says Anya. “Pay anything.”

The rental agent comes out of the bedroom, and spots Riley. “Mr. Harris?” She extends her hand to him. Riley shakes her hand, and points out the real Mr. Harris to her. Xander wipes his palm on his Hawaiian shirt, and steps forward to shake her hand.

While the rental agent tells Xander about the features of the apartment his friends spread out to check things out for themselves.

Xander goes into the bedroom and finds that Buffy and Riley got there ahead of him. They’re sitting on the bed kissing. “Guys, you can’t save it for the bedroom?”

Buffy and Riley look around.

“Okay. Good point,” says Xander.

Xander goes back out into the living room, and the rental agent hands him an application form. Xander is a little surprised by that. He was hoping they would just ask for references. She tells him that they need the application information to run a credit check on him.

“Oh! Credit check,” says Xander. “Little check on the credit. See how credible my checks are.”

All of Xander’s friends force a laugh at his joke. The rental agent tells Xander that they will also be needing him to pay for the first, and last month’s rent, plus a security and cleaning deposit. She points out the total amount at the bottom of the form.

“He’ll take it,” says Anya. “Xander, go get the furniture. I’ll wait here. He’s been living in his drunken parents’ basement where something urinated on the hot plate,” she tells the agent.

Xander pulls Anya aside for a private talk. His other friends try to distract the rental agent away from their conversation.

Anya doesn’t want to talk quietly. She doesn’t like what Xander is telling her. Xander doesn’t think he can afford this place. His construction job is coming to an end and he won’t have any more money coming in, and anyway, she does have her own place.

“So when I want to visit you, I have to be in that awful basement?” asks Anya.

“Not forever,” says Xander. “Just until things come together.”

At the current rate, Anya thinks that may take some time. Xander asks her what’s really going on with her.

“What’s going on with me…is my arm hurts, and I’m tired, and I don’t really feel like taking a tour of beautiful things that I can’t have,” says Anya.

Xander comes back to the rental agent. “I guess I’ll just start on that application.” He takes the forms from her. “I think you’ll like it. I’ve been told I have lovely penmanship.” She looks doubtful.

Giles is preparing for his new magic shop to open for business. He sorts through a box labeled “Charms, Orbs, Misc Curses” containing a tangled mish-mash of items.

“Miscellaneous Curses,” Giles mutters to himself. “Be lucky if I don’t curse me hand off at the wrist.” He is startled by something behind him. He spins around and sees the demon, pointing the rod at him.

“The Slayer’s not here,” says the demon.

Giles reaches into the box and tries to find something to protect himself with. He comes up with a rabbit’s foot. The demon is not impressed. It knocks the box away from him. Giles picks up a statue off a nearby shelf, and holds it up in front of the demon.

“That is a fertility god,” says the demon. “Feeble man. You are not likely to strike mortal—”

Giles bashes the demon on the head with the statue, and it staggers back. Giles hits it a few more times, but the demon quickly recovers and knocks Giles aside into a stack of emptied boxes.

“You are not the Slayer. You do not concern me.” The demon turns away from Giles and sweeps out of the shop.

Giles describes his fight with the demon to Buffy, Willow, Riley, and Xander, demonstrating his attack on the demon with the statue. Riley notes that the statue looks heavy.

“That’s Oofdar,” says Willow. “Goddess of childbirth. She’s got some nice heft to her.”

Buffy asks Giles how badly he hurt the demon. He doesn’t think he hurt it at all.

“Well, I’m sure he was startled,” says Willow.

“Uh, yes, yes. I’d imagine it gave him rather a turn,” says Giles.

“He ran away, huh?” asks Buffy.

“Um…sort of more…turned and swept out majestically, I suppose,” says Giles. “He said I didn’t concern him.”

“So a mythic triumph over a completely indifferent foe?” asks Buffy.

“Well, I’m not dead or unconscious,” says Giles, “so I say bravo for me.”

Willow has been going through books, and hands one of them to Giles. She tells him that it has some good demons in it. He sets down the statue and takes the book from her.

“So you bought the magic shop, and you were attacked before it opened,” says Xander. “Who’s up for a swinging chorus of the We Told You So Symphony?”

Riley picks up the statue of Oofdar and takes a few test swings with it. “Owning this place does seem kind of dangerous.”

“Toth!” says Giles.

“What?” asks Riley.

“He called you a toth,” says Buffy. “It’s a British expression. It means, like, moron.”

“No,” says Giles. “Toth is the name of the demon.” He consults what the book Willow gave him has to say about the demon. He is the last survivor of the Tothic clan, and is supposed to be very sophisticated—for a demon.

“Sophisticated,” says Buffy. “So I should discuss men’s fashions with him before I chop his head off?”

“They’re referring to the fact that he does not fight bare-handed,” says Giles. “He uses tools, devices. He’s also supposed to be very focused. And since he mentioned the Slayer, I think we know what the focus is.”

Riley wants to know where to find this demon.

The book doesn’t contain any information about Toth’s preferred haunts, but Giles has an idea of where to look. “He had a very specific olfactory presence.”

“Well, I guess we’re off to the old factory,” says Xander. “I hate that place.” Everyone looks at him. “I’m joking. I know what it means. He smelled. Right?”

Willow asks what sort of smell it was. Some magic rituals make use of scented oils and such.

Giles tells Willow it wasn’t that sort of smell at all. “But he was very, um…distinctive.”

The group arrives at the Sunnydale city dump, and starts searching for the demon. They find Spike. He’s loading some mannequin parts and some other stuff into a shopping cart.

Riley asks Spike what he’s doing there. Spike thinks that’s a stupid question. He’s scavenging for stuff. He holds up an ornate lamp he’s found to show to them.

Giles asks Spike if he’s seen any demons around.

“You mean a great tall robe-y thing like that one?” Spike points behind them.

They spin around and see Toth. He raises the rod and aims at Buffy. A bolt of green fire erupts from the end of it. Buffy and everyone else jumps out of the way.

Spike watches while Buffy and her friends dodge more blasts of green fire from the rod. He’s cheering for the demon until one of the bolts hits the lamp in his hand and shatters it. “Oh, very nice! I was on your side!” he complains.

The demon takes aim at Buffy again. Xander pushes her aside as it fires, and the bolt catches him squarely in the chest. Xander goes flying into a stack of garbage. Toth vanishes.

Everyone goes to check on Xander while looking around to see if they can spot Toth, but there’s no sign of him.

Riley and Giles help Xander to his feet. He’s pretty shaky, but he seems to be okay. They all escort Xander away from the dump.

No one notices that there’s another Xander lying unconscious in the pile of garbage.

Act II

Xander wakes up to the buzzing of flies, and the smell of garbage. “Anya, are you trying to use the hot plate again?” he asks before he has his eyes open. He opens his eyes and looks around to see where he is. “Uh-oh.”

Xander arrives home, and finds that his door is bolted from the inside. He knocks on it, and calls for Anya, but he gets no answer. He kicks at the door, and stubs his toe. He turns away and hops back up the stairs.

Xander goes around to the back of the house to look in one of the basement windows. He wipes the dirt away and looks inside. What he sees dumfounds him. He sees himself, fresh from the shower and getting dressed.

Xander decides that this is a situation that needs Buffy. He hops to his feet, spins around, trips over one of the stones paving the walkway beside the house, and falls flat on his face.

Xander tries to call Buffy from a phone booth. The phone ate his first quarter. He desperately searches his pockets for another while he tries to talk an operator into putting his call through. He finds another quarter, hangs up on the operator, and dials Buffy’s number.

Xander sees himself walking down the street toward him while waiting for Buffy to answer her phone. This new Xander is dressed in nice, clean clothes: a blue shirt and khaki pants, in contrast to Xander’s filthy Hawaiian shirt over a yellow jersey, and orange pants. The other Xander’s hair is also neatly combed.

Xander turns away, hiding his face so his double won’t see him. The double walks past him as Buffy answers her phone. Xander is uncertain about what to do, but decides to follow his double instead of talking to Buffy. He hangs up on her without saying anything.

Buffy tells Riley that whoever it was just hung up on her and goes back to packing her weapons bag in her bedroom at home. Next time she meets this demon she plans to be well armed. Riley seems to be pretty nervous anyway. Buffy thinks he should relax a bit, and starts to kiss him.

They are interrupted by gagging noises coming from the doorway to her room. Buffy looks up and sees Dawn standing there, leaning on the doorframe.

“My friend Sharon’s older brother knows a girl who died because she choked on her boyfriend’s tongue,” says Dawn.

Buffy tells Dawn to go away. Dawn steps back into the hallway, but doesn’t go any farther. She can stand in the hallway all she wants. Buffy doesn’t own it.

Joyce comes out of the bathroom across the hall from Buffy’s room. “Mom, I can stand in the hallway, right?” asks Dawn.

“She’s watching us like a big freak!” says Buffy.

Joyce rubs her temple. “This must be my two teenage girls in the house headache. I thought it felt familiar.”

“Good work, Dawn,” says Buffy. “You gave her a headache.”

“I did not,” says Dawn. She looks at her mother. “I’m sure part of it is Buffy’s.”

“But part of it is Dawn’s,” says Buffy.

Joyce is pleased that the girls have learned to share. She tells them that they will have to sort this out for themselves, and goes downstairs.

“She didn’t say I couldn’t stand here,” says Dawn.

Buffy has a solution for that. She shuts her door.

“Ow!” Dawn was standing a bit too close.

Spike puts the finishing touches on the upper half of the mannequin he found in the dump. A blue halter top, and a blonde wig. “Very posh!” He turns away.

Spike’s foot lashes out, kicking the mannequin, and knocking pieces flying. Spike catches the head before it stops bouncing and looks at it. He brushes his finger tips across its cheek. “Oh, Slayer. One of these days…”

The neat and clean Xander arrives at a construction site, picks up his hard hat off the rack, and goes to work.

While Xander’s working with a grinder—removing the rough edges off a piece of metal—the site foreman comes up to him and asks him to come into the trailer. “I’m talking to all the guys today. The job’s winding down.” Xander puts down the grinder, and follows the foreman toward the trailer.

Xander watches himself with the foreman from a hiding spot behind a porta-potty. He thinks he knows what the foreman wants to talk about. “Welcome to payback Mr. Evil-Plan-Face-Stealer,” he mutters to himself. “You take my life, you get my being fired absolutely free!” He slowly circles around the porta-potty to keep himself in sight.

A workman comes out of the porta-potty, and the door catches Xander in the face. The workman looks around to see what he hit, and isn’t too surprised. “Harris! Where’s your hard hat?”

The foreman asks Xander to take a seat inside the trailer, while he sits on the edge of the desk.

The Xander outside tries to jump up to the window in the back of the trailer to see what’s going on inside, but that isn’t working, so he builds himself a rickety platform from a couple of saw horses and a piece of plywood. He climbs up and looks inside.

“…and you haven’t done much construction work before this. Is that right?” asks the foreman.

“I knew they were going to notice that!” Xander tells himself outside.

“I have to tell you that’s surprising,” the foreman tells the Xander inside the trailer. “’cause your work here has been first-rate. We have another job lined up in Carleton when you finish here. You ever think about staying on full-time?”

Outside the trailer Xander is very surprised. “Why isn’t he firing me?” Then he notices a shiny metal disk that his double is fiddling with in his fingers, reflecting light into the foreman’s eyes.

“I was thinking that I’d have you head up our interior carpentry crew,” the foreman tells Xander. “See how it goes. It’s more responsibility, but the pay is better.”

Outside Xander is shocked. Not only didn’t he get fired, he got a promotion! He thinks it must be because of the shiny thing. His platform collapses under him, and Xander falls to the ground.

Inside the trailer the foreman congratulates Xander, and suggests that he should take his girlfriend out to celebrate. Xander knows just what he’s going to do.

That evening Xander signs the lease for his new apartment. The sunny day is giving way to what looks like a stormy night. Thunder can be heard in the distance. Xander is still wearing his blue shirt, but he has a nice sport coat on over top of it.

The rental agent is a little surprised Xander’s taking the apartment, she hadn’t thought it likely that he would when he’d been there the day before, but his credit checked out fine. “I’m sure you’ll like the building. I think someone said you’re currently in your parents’ basement?”

“Right,” says Xander. “There comes a point where you either have to move on, or just buy yourself a Klingon costume and go with it.”

She laughs at his joke. “Well, I hope you’ll be happy here, Mr. Harris. We’re certainly happy to have you.”

Xander is listening through the door from the hallway. “‘Mr. Harris.’” he mutters to himself. “Yeah, right!”

The rental agent packs the paperwork into her briefcase. Xander pulls the disk out of his pocket and starts to fiddle with it, reflecting light into her eyes. She tells Xander that he can call her any time, and she gives him her home phone number.

“She’s coming on to him—me!” says Xander in the hallway.

“Call me,” she tells Xander. “Even for, you know, non-business stuff. Maybe we could, uh, do something?”

“Please, lady. That is so not me,” mutters Xander. “He’s too clean for one thing, and his socks are all matchy—”

The door starts to open as the rental agent leaves, and Xander scrambles away from it. She doesn’t notice him. She’s looking back into the apartment. “Remember,” she tells Xander. “Any time.” Xander scrambles out of sight around the corner before she leaves the apartment.

Inside the apartment Xander phones Anya. He gets her answering machine. “I know you’re still mad,” he tells it, “but I figure you’re probably sitting there pretending you’re not home but listening anyway.”

Anya is standing beside the machine. “Am not.”

“Look, I have something to show you,” she hears Xander tell her machine. “Meet me at the apartment. You know the one. Nine o’clock.”

Xander leaves his new apartment, and gets jumped by Xander. He gives himself a quick, startled look over, and then the neat, clean Xander punches the filthy one, knocking him to the floor.

Xander looks up at himself. “I won’t let you do this! You can’t do this to me!”

One of the other tenants in the building starts to come out into the hallway to see what’s going on. The clean Xander runs away.

The filthy Xander is still lying on the floor. “Oh, man. I need Buffy.” He rubs the spot where he got punched.

It’s pouring rain when Xander arrives at Giles’ apartment. The rain isn’t doing much for his appearance, but maybe it’s washing some of the garbage stink away. He looks in through the window beside Giles’ door. He doesn’t like what he sees. The other Xander has gotten there first.

“No, no!” the other Xander tells Giles, Buffy and Riley. “He looked exactly like me! It stole my face! We have to find it, and we have to kill it!”

Xander rolls away from the window, and leans against the wall. “She sees it’s not me. Please, Buffy. Resist his spell. Do this for me.” He looks back inside.

“Don’t worry, Xander.” Buffy is telling his double. “Whatever stole your face…it has to deal with the Slayer now.”

Xander’s hopes sink.

Act III

It’s still pouring rain when Willow arrives back at her new dorm room. Xander comes bursting in, even wetter than he was before. “Don’t be scared Will! Just listen.”

Willow calmly puts her books down on her bed and looks at Xander with raised eyebrows.

“It’s me, Xander! And I can prove it!”

“Uh, okay.” Willow sits on the edge of her bed, and waits.

Xander starts to pace back and forth. “Let’s see. Stuff only you and me know… Okay! On my seventh birthday, I wanted a toy fire truck, and I didn’t get it, and you were real nice about it, and then the house next door burnt down and then real fire trucks came, and for years I thought you set the fire for me. And if you did, you can tell me.” He thinks for a bit to come up with something else. “For a while last year, I thought I was lactose-intolerant, but it was just some bad brie. Oh! Every Christmas we watch Charlie Brown together, and I do the Snoopy Dance.” He starts to do the Snoopy Dance for her.

Willow watches for a while, smiling, and then gets up off the bed. “Xander, stop dancing!”

“Aha! You called me Xander!”

“Xander, shut up. Why wouldn’t I think you were Xander? What’s going on?”

“Okay,” says Xander. “I woke up in the dump this morning.”

“Xander, the basement isn’t a dump. It—it’s more like a really nice hovel.”

“No. The dump,” says Xander. “The city dump. I got hit last night. Fall down, boom. Woke up this morning.”

“Nuh-uh,” says Willow. “We walked you home last night, remember?”

“You walked?” asks Xander. “Will, did I do anything weird? Did I wave any shiny things around?”

“Shiny things? What are you talking about?”

“Last night. That wasn’t me,” says Xander. “There’s a double out there. Some…thing has stolen my face and it’s going around pretending to be me, and it’s hypnotising people. It even got to Buffy and Giles and Riley. It’s over there right now, and they have no idea.”

Giles is aware of several demons who have the ability to imitate people, but he is curious about why a demon might want to imitate Xander.

Xander doesn’t care. He just wants Buffy to find his imposter and kill it.

Riley sides with Xander. Once they kill this thing it will probably revert back to its original form, and they’ll find out what it is then.

“Toth!” says Buffy. Everyone looks at her. “The demon with the creepy stick thing.”

“Toth,” says Xander.

“It’s got to be,” says Buffy. “He hit Xander with that blast, and somehow it allowed him to take Xander’s form. Couldn’t that be what the creepy stick thing did?”

“Yes. I suppose,” says Giles. “Yes. Yes, it makes sense. A shape-shifting device.”

“It does make sense,” says Xander. “It must be Toth.”

Xander sits on Willow’s bed wringing his socks out into her waste basket. “It’s a robot. It’s an evil robot constructed from evil parts that look like me designed to do evil.”

“Uh-huh,” says Willow. “Or it’s Toth.”

“Or…it’s Toth!” says Xander.

Buffy decides that it’s time to start looking for Toth, only now she will be looking for something that looks like Xander. Xander asks if he should come along. He was supposed to be meeting with Anya, and he doesn’t want to leave her on her own with an imposter running around.

Buffy tells Xander to go. “If you were out there looking for the double, too— Let’s just say that I wouldn’t want to run into you and kill the wrong one.”

“Good thinking,” says Xander. “When you kill this thing, you’d better make sure you got the one who’s actually…”

“…a demon!” says Xander. “A demon has taken my life from me, and he’s living it better than I do.” He shakes out his shirt, spraying Willow with water. She tries to reassure him. There must be some way for them to get to Buffy and un-hypnotise her. She’ll try and find a spell to snap them out of it. Xander isn’t very hopeful. Willow tries to tell him that she’ll need his help.

“But I never help,” says Xander. “I get in trouble and Buffy saves me.”

“That’s not true!” says Willow. “Sometimes we all helped save you.” She realizes that doesn’t sound very encouraging, “And sometimes you’re not in trouble.”

Xander is just getting more discouraged. His life seems to be one humiliation after another lately. And now this demon has come along, and it’s living his life better than he ever could. “Maybe I should just let him have it. Take my life, please.”

“Xander, no!” Willow puts her hand on his shoulder. “You’re just tired and all soggy. That’s why it seems so hard, but you can’t let him just take your whole existence.”

“Why not?” asks Xander. “It’s not like I was doing anything so great with it. What have I got that’s even worth— Anya!”

“You think he’s after her?” asks Willow.

“She won’t know!” says Xander. “He can just… No. No way! No way. He can take anything, but he can’t have her! I need her!”

“Really?” asks Willow.

Xander says he has to go. His double could be with Anya right now. He tells Willow to work on finding something to make the demon reveal itself, and starts to go.

“Xander, you already knew he was taking over your life, and you didn’t think about Anya until just now?” asks Willow.

“Hey, wait till you have an evil twin. See how you handle it.” Xander leaves.

“I handled it fine.” Willow tells herself.

Xander enters Anya’s room, but she’s gone. He notices there’s a message on her answering machine, so he plays it back. He hears himself inviting her to come over to the apartment.

Xander starts searching through Anya’s drawers looking for something. “It’s got to be here,” he tells himself. “Where is it?”

Anya doesn’t believe Xander when he tells her that he’s got the apartment. She figures that it must be some sort of trick. He tells her that he got the place because she wanted him to. He has lain out a blanket on his living room floor. He has a picnic basket, and a bottle of champagne on ice. They sit on the blanket together.

“So…what happens next?” asks Anya.

“Well, at some point, we take off our clothes,” says Xander.

“I mean what happens next in our lives?” asks Anya. “When do we get a car?”

“A car?” asks Xander.

“And a boat. No, wait. I don’t mean a boat. I mean a puppy or a child. I have a list somewhere.”

Xander wonders what Anya is talking about. She tells him that they have to get moving. She doesn’t have time to just let things happen. Xander doesn’t think that there is any hurry.

“Yes, there is!” says Anya. “There’s a hurry, Xander. I’m dying.” Xander’s shocked. “I may have as few as fifty years left.”

“Fifty years? What is this?” asks Xander. “Oh, wait a minute. This is about this.” He points to Anya’s sling. “You haven’t been hurt like this since you became human. Maybe it’s finally hitting you what being human means.”

Anya tells Xander that isn’t it, but Xander thinks it is. “You were going to live for thousands of years. And now you’re going to age and die. That must be terrifying.”

“You don’t understand what it’s like,” says Anya.

“Being suddenly human?” asks Xander. “I think I can get what that would be like. And we can get through it together.”

“You can’t make it any different,” says Anya. “I’m going to get old. And you can’t promise you’ll be with me when I’m wrinkly and my teeth are artificial and stuck into my wrinkly mouth with an adhesive.”

“No, I can’t promise that,” says Xander. “But it doesn’t sound terrible. And that’s saying something. I promise you, Anya, very soon you won’t be thinking about getting older.” He leans forward and gives her a kiss.

The door bursts open, and Xander rushes in, looking filthy and bedraggled. “Get away from her!”

Xander and Anya jump to their feet.

“Xander!” Anya looks at the Xander by the door. Then she looks at the Xander beside her. “Xander?”

“Get out,” says the Xander with Anya. “You don’t belong here.”

“Anya, it’s me,” says the Xander by the door. Anya looks uncertainly back and forth between the two Xanders, and steps toward the new Xander who just came in.

“It’s a demon,” says the clean Xander. “He stole my face. He’s trying to trick you. Anya, you know I’m me, right?”

“No!” says the other Xander.

Anya makes her decision. She steps back up beside the Xander who had just been so understanding with her. “What is it?” she asks, looking at the other Xander. “Make it go away.”

Buffy and Riley are about to leave Giles’ apartment to start their Toth/Xander hunt when Willow bursts through the door. Giles looks up from the book he’s been reading. “I swear, this time I know I had that locked.”

Willow doesn’t have time for that. “Buffy, Toth looks like Xander!”

“We already know,” says Riley. “We’re on our way.”

“Wait a second,” says Buffy. “How did you know about this?”

“He came to me,” says Willow. “I mean, Xander did. And he’s in terrible shape. We need to help him.”

“He came to us, too,” says Riley.

“No,” says Willow. “We each had a Xander. I mean, you didn’t have a Xander. You had a demon in a Xander suit.”

“What makes you so sure that yours is the right one?” asks Buffy.

“He knew stuff,” says Willow. “He did the Snoopy Dance. Buffy, it was Xander, and he needs us.”

“Oh, dear Lord,” says Giles. He has just found something in his book. Everyone ignores him. Buffy and Riley are starting to realize that the Xander who they met seemed unusually forceful and confidant.

“That’s not Xander,” says Willow.

“I said ‘Oh, dear Lord.’” repeats Giles.

“You always say that,” says Buffy.

“Well, it’s always important,” says Giles. “Neither Xander is a demon.”

“Um…is one of them a robot?” asks Willow.

“What? No,” says Giles. “The rod device, it’s called a ferula-gemina. It splits one person into half, distilling personality traits into two separate bodies. As near as I can tell, Toth was attempting to split the Slayer into two different entities.”

“Two Buffies?” asks Buffy.

“Yes,” says Giles. “One with all the qualities inherent in Buffy Summers. The other with everything that belongs to the Slayer alone: the strength, the speed, the heritage. And when it hit Xander, I think it separated him into his strongest points and his weakest.”

“But which one’s the real one?” asks Riley.

“They’re both real,” says Giles. “They’re both Xander. Neither one of them is evil. There’s nothing in either of them that our Xander didn’t already possess.”

Riley still doesn’t understand why Toth would do it though. The Slayer half of Buffy would be Slayer concentrate, pretty much unkillable.

“But the two halves can’t exist without each other,” says Giles. “Kill the weaker Buffy half, and the Slayer half dies.”

“So the same goes for the Xanders,” says Buffy. “We lose one, we lose them both.”

The filthy Xander pleads with Anya, trying to get her to believe that the other one is a demon, or maybe a robot. “Look at me. Look in my eyes. Can’t you see it’s me?” Anya starts to doubt her first choice. “Please. Look at him! Listen to him! He’s all smooth. You have to know it’s me!”

The smooth Xander steps between Anya and his double. “Don’t worry, Anya. I’ll get rid of this thing. I’m thinking this is going to last about 15 seconds.”

The filthy Xander pulls out a pistol and aims it at him. “I’m thinking less.”

Act IV

Anya grabs at the gun. She lifts it toward the ceiling. The other Xander rushes forward and grabs at it too. The three of them struggle for control of the gun.

Buffy and Riley rush toward Xander’s apartment in Giles’ car, with Riley driving. Buffy looks at him. “Riley, do you wish—”

“No,” says Riley before she finishes.

“No? You don’t even know what I was going to say.”

“Yes, I do,” says Riley. “You wanted to know if I wished you got hit by the ferula-gemina, got split in two.”

“Well, you have been kind of rankly about the whole Slayer gig,” says Buffy. “Instead of having Slayer Buffy, you could have Buffy Buffy.”

“I have Buffy Buffy,” says Riley. “Being the Slayer’s part of who you are. You keep thinking I don’t get that, but…if you led a perfectly normal life, you wouldn’t be half as crazy as you are. I got to have that. I got to have it all. Talking toes, elbows, the whole bad ice skating movie obsession. Everything. There’s no part of you I’m not in love with.”

Buffy doesn’t say anything for a while. She smiles at Riley. “We’d better get there soon. If Xander kills himself, he’s dead,” says Buffy. “You know what I mean.”

Xander, Anya, and Xander struggle for the gun. It comes loose, and Suave Xander picks it up and levels it at the other Xander. Anya blocks his shot, and he tells her to get out of the way.

Buffy and Riley burst into the apartment. The gun-holding Xander tells them that he has everything under control.

“My gun! He’s got my gun!” says Anya.

“You own a gun?” asks Riley.

Buffy steps toward gun-holding Xander and tells him to give it to her. Xander is uncertain at first but he quickly makes his decision. He flips open the revolver, dumps the bullets out onto the floor in one smooth move, and hands the gun to her. Buffy is impressed, and hands the empty pistol to Riley. Anya asks Buffy which Xander is real.

“I am!” says Xander.

“No, I am!” says the other Xander.

The filthy Xander lunges at his double, but Buffy catches him, and throws him against the island separating the living room from the kitchen. “Ow!”

“Thank you!” says the other Xander, but Buffy grabs hold of him too, and tosses him over beside himself. “Ow!”

Buffy and Riley step up in front of the two Xanders and look back and forth between them. “Wild,” says Riley.

“Yeah,” says Buffy. She addresses the two Xanders in front of her. “Okay, Xander-s you’ve been split in two, but you’re both Xander. And you can’t kill each other. You could, but it would be really bad.”

The two Xanders look at each other. Neither of them wants to believe what Buffy is telling him. Riley tells them that they can prove that they are both Xander.

“Yeah!” says Buffy, then she looks at Riley. “How?”

Riley is sure that there must be a way, but he can’t think of one right away.

Buffy gets an idea. “Oh! What number am I thinking of?” she asks the Xanders.

“I don’t think that’s going to do it,” says Riley.

“Eleven and a half,” say both Xanders together.

“Wrong,” says Buffy, “But see!”

Xander still doesn’t want to believe it. The two of them seem totally different. Riley explains that different properties just went into each of them, but they are both Xander.

Xander and Anya want to know what sort of properties.

“Uh, you know,” says Buffy. “Sense of direction. Good night vision. Stuff like that.”

“But he has a thing in his pocket,” says Xander. “A shiny disk that stuns and disorients!”

“What disk?” Xander reaches into his pocket, “This?” He holds the disk out to Buffy.

“Cover your eyes!” Xander puts his hands over his eyes. “It’ll melt your brain!”

Buffy takes the disk from Xander, and looks at it, then she holds it out to the other Xander for him to look at.

“It’s a nickel someone flattened on the railroad track,” says Xander. “I found it on the construction site. I thought it was cool. It’s not magic.”

“No, I—” Xander takes the disk from Buffy and looks at it for himself. “Huh. It is kind of cool. Washington’s still there, but he’s all smushy. And he may be Jefferson.”

Anya wants more of an explanation for what happened, and Buffy promises to give her one on the way back to Giles’.

The door of the apartment gets blasted into pieces. Toth is back. Xander and Anya hide behind Xander.

Toth aims his rod at Buffy. “I will not miss again, Slayer.”

Buffy dives and rolls as Toth fires. He misses, and blasts a hole in the carpet.

“Hey, I just made a small cleaning deposit!” says Xander.

Riley jumps Toth from behind, and manages to knock the rod from his hands before Toth throws him across the apartment.

Buffy attacks Toth with a quick series of kicks and punches. Toth isn’t bothered too much by them, and he grabs Buffy and slams her down on the floor.

Buffy kicks up with both feet. She catches Toth in the head, and knocks him to the floor, stunned. She flips back to her feet.

“Sword!” calls out Buffy. Riley reaches into her weapons bag, pulls out a short sword, and tosses it to her. Buffy plunges it into Toth’s heart.

Xander looks at the dead demon lying in the middle of his living room. “Oh, yeah. That cleaning deposit’s gone.”

“I was thinking the same thing!” says Xander. “Hey, do you suppose we’re both Xander?”

Buffy, Willow and Anya stand in front of the two Xanders in the Magic Box, looking back and forth between them. Both Xanders are now wearing the same outfit that they’d been wearing when split, but one of them is much cleaner, and his hair is still nice and neat. The girls are amazed. Both Xanders are identical. Right down to having the same zit, and the same funny hair growing the wrong way out of his cheek.

The Xanders decide that the examination has gone on long enough, and ask the girls to back off.

“Psychologically, this is fascinating,” says Riley. “Doesn’t it make everyone want to lock them in separate rooms and do experiments on them?” No one says anything. They just look at him. “Just me, then.”

Anya is curious to find out if both Xanders really have all the same physical attributes. The cleaner Xander tells her they do.

“Yeah. We checked out some stuff in the car on the way over,” says the other Xander. The girls look at him. “Fingerprints,” he quickly tells them.

Anya is starting to like the idea of two Xanders. Maybe they should hold off on putting them back together for a while. She can take them both home and have sex with them together. They can slap them back together in the morning.

“She’s joking,” says Xander.

“No, she’s not!” says the other Xander. “She entirely wants to have sex with us together, which is…wrong and…and it would be very confusing!”

Giles has finished drawing a pentagram on the floor with chalk. “We just need to arrange the candles,” he tells the others. “Also, we should continue to pretend we heard none of the disturbing sex talk.”

“Check,” says Willow. “Candles and pretense.”

“It’s not like it’d be cheating,” says Anya. “They’re both Xander.”

While Giles and the others light five large candles and place one at each of the points of the pentagram Xander asks himself how he got the promotion if he didn’t put the whammy on the foreman.

“Well, I’m good at that stuff,” he tells himself. “And, hey, how ’bout that lady, huh? The apartment manager?”

“How weird was it when she called me ‘Mr.’?” asks the other Xander.

Willow tells the Xanders that they’re ready to put them back together. Anya asks what they should do if it doesn’t work.

“Kill us both, Spock!” both Xanders say together. They start laughing at each other.

“They’re…kind of the same now,” says Buffy.

“Yes,” says Giles. “He’s clearly a bad influence on himself.”

Willow positions the two Xanders inside the pentagram. This isn’t going to be difficult. Toth’s spell is what’s keeping them separate. All she has to do is break it. “Stand right here. Side by side. We don’t want you to end up with two fronts, now, do we?” She steps away from the Xanders and tells them to brace themselves. They both close their eyes and wait.

“Let the spell be ended!” says Willow.

“You got to be kidding,” says Xander. “‘Let the spell be ended?’ That’s not going to work.” He opens his eyes and looks around. He’s alone in the pentagram. “Oh.”

“I liked it the other way,” says Anya. “Put him back.”

Epilogue

Xander’s friends help him pack and move his stuff out of his parents’ basement. Xander and Riley stop by the door, and Xander looks back over the place where he has spent much of the past year.

“Getting nostalgic?” asks Riley.

“I don’t know,” says Xander. “At first it’s just a place, then you start to make memories, and then you’re like…that’s where Spike slept, and there, that’s where Anya and I drowned the Separvo demon. Oh! And right there, that’s where I got my heart all ripped out. I really hate this place.” He turns away and carries a box of stuff upstairs.

Anya is sitting on a stool by the workbench, reading a magazine. Buffy notices that her arm is out of its sling.

“Yes,” says Anya. “I’m feeling better. And I anticipate many years before my death. Excepting disease or air bag failure.”

“That sounds nice.” Buffy carries a box away.

Xander approaches Anya and hands her a box. She thinks it’s a present.

Xander explains that it’s his collection of Babylon 5 commemorative plates, which she can not have. “I just thought you could help carry a little.”

“Me?” asks Anya. “Buffy has super strength. Why don’t we just load her up like one of those little horses?”

“Anya. Please.”

“Fine. I’m just your slave.” Anya carries the box toward the stairs.

Xander watches Anya go. “How is it that she can always make me feel suave Xander’s left the building?” he asks Riley, who’s packing a box of bedding.

“You two have your friction,” says Riley, “but she digs the whole package. It’s obvious.”

“Still, I do envy you sometimes,” says Xander. “I mean for the sanity. Not that I’m still into Buffy. Not that I ever was.”

“I’m well aware of how lucky I am,” says Riley. “Like lottery lucky. Buffy’s like nobody else in the world. When I’m with her it’s like— It’s like I’m split in two. Half of me is just on fire, going crazy if I’m not touching her. The other half is so still and peaceful, just perfectly content…just knows: this is the one.” Riley pauses for a couple of seconds. “But she doesn’t love me.”

Buffy comes back into the basement. “Got something else for me to carry?” she asks. Riley tells her she can help him pack up the box.

“Sure.” Buffy gives Riley a kiss, and starts packing stuff into the box. Xander watches the two of them together.

Death Toll