The Mark of a Hero

[madimpossibledreamer]

Main Points:
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Shadowed Suspicions (Buffy/JJBA crossover) related.
Summary: Character study of Xander and how he's handling this whole hero business.
Word Count: 741
Rating: T
Note: Possible spoilers, mostly for Xander's Joestar name and possibly Volume II.  As with main fic, other spoilers from main series may show up.  However, this is...well, honestly I'm not sure in what universe it falls, hence the 'related' up there.  The timeline stuff is weird and there's some foreshadowing.  Maybe.  Also, Xander, why are you so much chattier than your mother?  You need to have a talk with her!  (Though I did actually figure out some things for next chapter which should help a lot.)  Mainly I say this because this was supposed to be a drabble.  It's kind of...not.
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            Sometimes Xander wonders whether he’s a disappointment.

            He’d heard enough of it growing up, though it makes a difference that his mom firmly disagrees now, when she’d gotten her sanity back.  And being shut out when he’d been the normal one…well, he’s not about to forget that feeling anytime soon.

            It’s just…okay, it’s mostly about his new best friend.  Fitz.

            The guy had grown up on stories of the Joestars.  And he’d started all wide-eyed and worshipful, at the beginning.  Xander, Johan now, was a perfect hero because he had the blood for it.  Fitz had soon figured out that Johan was anything but perfect, but never mentioned if his expectations were disappointed or just…Xander turned out to be equal, just different.

            Given the way Fitz has relaxed along the way, smiling a little when he’s being goofy just to make people happy, talking to him as if he’s an equal, even relaxing (after all that hard work) from the prim and proper outer shell, he’s pretty sure that it’s like what he had with Buffy.

            Buffy was the Slayer.  The hero.  So that meant she had to be perfect.

            Except for the fact that she totally wasn’t, and the fact that she had flaws and, gasp, wasn’t perfectly heroic and rational as a teenager gave him just a teensiest bit of a crisis when he was sixteen.

            If he really thinks about it, Silver Age is his favorite comic era, because it’s serious, not like the Golden Age where you can’t even take anything seriously, but it also is goofy and just makes you smile now and then, and if he’d figured anything out by being a Scooby it was that being the mascot was a necessary (because if absent the weight of teenage angst and fears about impending apocalypses—which they still have yet to sit down and find the proper plural for—would have crushed them all) yet thankless (they probably didn’t notice everything he did, like making Dawn hot cocoa just like Joyce had for him or secretly sticking smiley face sticky notes in his friends’ lockers) job.  He really doesn’t like the new doom-and-gloom attitude, the so-called heroes operating with so many flaws it’s a wonder they don’t collapse on the spot.  He really doesn’t want to be the emo, brooding, whiny protagonist.  Those kinds of stories are just depressing, and Angel pretty much has that angle covered anyway.  (And then he feels a pang of guilt for thinking that, even in jest, because once he realized that a) he wasn’t majorly in love with Buffy anymore, at least not romantic ‘I want to kiss you’ love, and b) other than that, a lot of his issues were just with the fact that the guy is a vampire, which he’s starting to actually work through, he actually doesn’t think Angel is a bad guy anymore.  Still doesn’t trust Angelus, but they haven’t had an Angelus-related mishap for a while, and he knocks on his nearby bedside table, just to be safe.)

            …Though laying around worrying that he’s a disappointment probably isn’t a good start to not being the brooding hero.

            If he thinks of it like he’s the flawed hero, who’s messed up but with any luck has learned from his mistakes, like he’s like Buffy, he feels hope again.  It hurt at first, and maybe he’d been a bit (a lot) harsh with criticism, but once he’d actually gotten to know her as a person, not a perfect hero, not the woman on a pedestal, she was suddenly a lot more likeable.  So was he.

            He stands up and stretches carefully, every joint popping into place, and wanders over to the couch in the main room where Fitz is looking over their plans, a frown on his face.  “You’re finally awake, Jojo,” he grumbles, but Johan doesn’t miss the slight smile appearing on his face.  “I don’t suppose you were dreaming anything useful.”

            “It depends on how you define ‘useful’,” Johan responds with a knowing grin of his own, and Fitz relaxes ever so slightly.  So he’d been worried.  And Xander’s worries were probably silly, which is really nice to know.

            “Well, perhaps you could make yourself useful now and help me with this,” Fitz begins as Jojo joins him on the couch, staring at the papers spread over the coffee table.  And for the first time since Sunnydale fell, he feels like he's home.