Title: Maybe Here’s Okay
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Rating: PG
Length: 295 words
Content notes: Pre-slash, Xander/Graham
Author notes: Just scraping in on the deadline again.
Summary: They’d always played ‘anywhere but here,’ and he’d always said the same thing.


Amy Yip, in the water park. For years, whenever he, Jesse and Willow, and later he, Willow and Buffy had played their game of ‘anywhere but here,’ that had been his solid answer. Others (looking at you, Willow and Buffy) might be fickle in their affections, but he had always been ‘Amy Yip, in the water park.’

Solid. Rock solid. Also known as stubbornly clinging to an appropriately masculine/hetero fantasy that he could easily pimp out to anyone who asked, because fantasising about Angel in leather pants and a skin-tight white tee slow-dancing with him at the Bronze, or Spike in his thank-God-you-don’t-need-to-breathe jeans, his duster, and nothing else ‘teaching’ him how to play pool really weren’t anything he wanted to talk to the girls about. Or aforementioned vampires. Seriously not.

This was so not what he had thought about in any of his illicit ‘anywhere but here’ fantasies. This was … horrific. It was beyond his worst nightmares. Well, okay, not beyond his worst nightmares, but beyond his little death-by-embarrassment nightmares. This was him outing himself to the world! (Way to over-dramatize there, Xan.) And to a human, too, of all things. Beings. Er…

“I’m not offended,” Graham offered.

Xander glanced over, and … was that a grin? “Are you grinning at me?” he frowned.

Pretty lips twitched straight. “No,” Graham shot back reflexively.

Xander scowled. “Yes you were. You were totally grinning at me.”

“Maybe?” Graham offered. He rolled his eyes. “Oh, come on, Xander, you’re very cute when you’re babbling, and, well, I’m so far from being offended as to want to ask you out.”

“Ask me out?” Xander repeated doubtfully. “Like, as in a date?”

“Like, as in a date,” Graham grinned.

Actually, here wasn’t such a bad place to be.