winterlive | Rebel Prince, Part 2 (Reply)

And to ease you past the angst, there's Rebel Prince 2. Let me also stress at this point how much I am JUST SCREWING AROUND. En was all, eee! Fic idea! And I was all, EEE! FABULOUS! This is the story in which I goof off. :) Warnings for underage!

ETA: Also, SKEERY! No sex in this part, it's all setup. Be afraid! Ahh!

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Disclaim! These, also, are not mine.

Notes: All En, all the time. Also, underage! Eee! Set pre-series. X/Lindsey.

Previous parts here.

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The L.A. streets flashed by, gold, dirty and slick outside the limo’s window. Xander watched them pass with idle interest, scrunched up in one corner of his seat. His head was spinning, he was faintly queasy, and he couldn’t think straight. Mercer, with his thinning hair and sweaty lips, had been edging steadily closer to him since they’d got onto the highway, and Xander’d curled himself up in the corner out of a vague sense of self-preservation. The guy had a strange scent about him, like the biology lab’s cabinets, and nobody trusted them. Mercer wouldn’t answer questions about whatever it was Xander was supposed to do, and Xander didn’t really feel like talking about anything else.

I still can’t believe I’m doing this. I mean, I’m fifteen, and I’m on a road trip to L.A. so I can be a pretty guy at a party. And Creepy Limo Guy is totally hitting on me. Freak. Xander knew that there was some reason he should be losing it over that fact, but beyond the fact that Mercer was, indeed, creepy, he couldn’t think of what it was, and couldn’t bring himself to care. His brain was foggy and he could barely remember anything. He did, however, remember sitting in the limo as Mercer went into his house to talk to his parents. When he’d come out, they’d come with him, and stood on the front porch waving at the limo like it was the bus, come to take Xander to summer camp. The confused welter of miserable feelings that usually accompanied thoughts of his parents were also dulled, and Xander was thankful for that, if nothing else.

They drove through the city for what seemed like hours before they finally reached a tall, glass building. The limo pulled up to a garage door, which opened for them, and they pulled in slowly. They moved at a crawl, until Xander spotted a big, burly guy standing by a door, waving them in. The driver must have spotted him at the same time, because they picked up a little speed as they cruised over to park near the man waving at them.

“Come on,” coaxed Mercer, sounding too nice. Perhaps it was because Xander’d lived in Sunnydale his whole life, but he was a suspicious kind of person. All the same, he reached for the handle and opened the door. A wave of cool air rushed into the car, and breathing deeply, Xander began to feel better. He hurried to get out, and Mercer followed him.

“Another one, Mr. Mercer?” The guy at the door sounded weary and bored.

“Yes,” stressed Mercer, “another party guest, Richard.” He leveled a meaningful look at the guy.

“All right,” said Richard, sounding just as bored. “He go with the others?”

“Of course,” said Mercer prissily, as he fussed with his suit. “Appropriate attire, customary facility use, all that.” His tone took on the faintest cast of leering innuendo, his frog mouth smiling thinly as he added, “Best make sure he’s well prepared, Richard.”

Richard shifted uncomfortably. “Yes sir, Mr. Mercer.” He beckoned to Xander. “Come on, kid.”

“But…” Mercer was walking off toward a set of steel doors, different than the one Richard stood in front of. Despite the fact that he was Creepy Limo Guy, Lee Mercer was the only person Xander knew in L.A., and it was a little disconcerting to have him just wander off.

“Trust me,” said Richard in a confidential tone, sneering at Mercer’s back, “you’re better off with him gone.”

Xander blinked at him, still a little fuzzy, thinking-wise. Richard peered at Xander, rolled his eyes and beckoned again. “Come on, kid. They’ll get you cleaned up and feeling a million times better than I’ll bet you do now.”

That did sound like a good idea, and Richard didn’t seem like a bad guy, so Xander acquiesced and approached. Richard opened the door and went through, gesturing for Xander to follow him, and together they walked down a long hallway. It looked like the inside of an office building, perfectly normal carpeted halls and ambient light in tones of gray and beige. Richard’s presence at Xander’s side was vaguely comforting – Xander noted that the guy was huge, and could easily take down half the Razorbacks without breaking a sweat. And he was nice. Xander felt a strange heat crawl through him, and shivered.

“So,” he started, “what’s the deal with this thing, anyway? I mean, I didn’t get a lot of detail.”

Richard looked startled. “You mean you don’t know?”

“Show up, look pretty, go home. That’s the extent of my knowledge.”

The other man shook his head sympathetically. “That’s crazy. You’d think they’d at least…” He broke off as they arrived at a big set of double doors and harrumphed, looking like he’d been caught gossiping. “Rrr-hm. Okay, then. Here you go.”

“Oh. Okay. Thanks.”

“Yeah. Hey, kid, listen. Word of advice.” Richard leaned in to Xander, tone low and confidential again.

“Uh-huh?”

“Stay away from Mr. Mercer if you can. That guy’s… well, he’s bad news for a kid like you.”

Xander was utterly nonplussed. Gosh, thanks, man. Hadn’t figured that one out all on my own, no sir.

When Xander pushed the door open, he was immediately assaulted by a cloud of chlorine-smelling steam. The scent of sweat lingered in the air as well, along with other smells that Xander didn’t want to even try to identify. As he squinted his way into the room, he made out a desk, with a bottle-blond gym bunny seated behind it, sedately filing her nails. She looked up at him perkily.

“Hi!” She put down her nail file and picked up a pen and clipboard. Too much energy. And I see no coffee. And she’s perky. She’s obviously a servitor of evil. “Who are you assigned to?”

“Uh…” Experience told Xander this was the kind of question he wanted to have the answer to, but he couldn’t come up with any plausible lies except for Mercer’s name, and he emphatically did not want to be ‘assigned’ to Limo Guy, whatever the hell that meant. “I don’t think I am, assigned, exactly.”

“Oh,” she said, her peppy tone slumping. She sighed, looking dejected. “I wish they’d told me there were going to be so many up for grabs. It’s hard keeping all the rooms in order if there isn’t a name for everybody.” She put down her clipboard and leveled one of her talon-esque fingernails at a door opposite her. “Look, just go through there and take the second door on your left. I’ll send someone to you in a bit, okay?”

“Sure,” agreed Xander, wanting to get out of her hair. “I’ll just wait there, then.” She marked something down on her clipboard, then set it down, along with the pen. She picked up her nail file, smiled at him – the completely fake smile of someone not being paid enough to put up with this crap – and went back to her nails. He ran through the door, only to be confronted by more steamy, weird smelling hallway on the other side. He carefully made his way to the second door on his left, and walked into a doctor’s office.

This place is like Bizarro world.

He peered through the steam, which was making his head swimmy. And, also, steam in a doctor’s office? In the corner was the customary paper-covered bed, and he stumbled over to it, sitting down carefully. A glint of metal caught his eye, and he looked toward it, only to see a huge pair of stirrups rising from the end of the bed like big shiny insects, and he leaped up from the crinkling paper like it was electrocuted. What the hell is this place?

Xander backed up from the bed and promptly bumped into a counter. It jingled, and he turned a horrified gaze on a row of metal and rubber implements, which had no purpose that Xander could detect, and he was about ten seconds from fleeing the room when the door opened.

In walked four officious-looking people in loose, white scrubs. One of them, a woman with a tight bun of red hair, looked him over critically. “Why aren’t you undressed yet?”

“What?” Xander could hear the panic in his voice, but his head was really woozing all over the place, and is woozing really a word? Woozy is a word, but it really shouldn’t be, with all those consonants, at least not a word in English, and…

“Your clothes,” enunciated the woman, prissily peering at him through a thick pair of spectacles. “They are still on you, and I can’t do my job until they are off.”

“Whoa. Back up.” Xander’s head was now distinctly feeling foggy, but he wasn’t about to just lay down for these people without getting some very serious panic on. “I think I need a few ‘who’s and ‘why’s and most especially ‘how’s here! All I know is I’m supposed to look pretty at some party, and nobody explained anything, especially not anything pertaining to clothes-removal, and why am I all swimming head and not talking right?”

The three remaining officious types rolled their eyes at each other. The auburn-bunned, bespectacled woman rolled her eyes too, and then said something to them in low tones. They nodded and left, looking used to this sort of thing, as though it were all just too familiar. Meantime, the woman went to the counter, opened a drawer and retrieved a clipboard.

“Listen,” she said, in the slow and patient way one talks to someone who is obviously hysterical. “I’m just going to ask a few questions, okay? Have you or any of your family had any heart conditions or high blood pressure?”

“No,” replied Xander, “not that I know of.” He was having trouble remembering why he was upset, exactly, but he knew he should be, and being upset was a thing he was completely comfortable with when he couldn’t remember something as important as that.

“Good. Any mental illness, nervous disorders, anxiety?”

“I am having anxiety right now.”

She looked at him pointedly, her eyes big and blinking in her lenses like an owl. “Medically.”

“No.”

“Okay. Are you habitually using any drugs, stimulants or alcohol?”

He snorted ungracefully. “Oh, yeah, Junkie Xander, that's practically my name. Or, well, it is my name, but just the last...”

“I’ll take that for a ‘no’.” She was scribbling on her clipboard, checking things off and flipping papers, and Xander was peering at them, trying to read what she’d written. “And are you currently sexually active?”

Xander blushed furiously, and she lifted one eyebrow and then checked something on her clipboard. “Okay.”

With the air of being finished, she clicked her pen, put down her clipboard on the cabinet and tucked the pen in her lapel pocket.

“Okay? Okay? Not okay! What were those questions for? What did you write on the clipboard? What is this place? Who the hell are you people?”

She pulled something else, that looked like a pen, from her lapel pocket. “Just relax, Xander.” She held the pen up to his face, and he looked at it stupidly, not sure what she was doing waving a pen in his face but too surprised at it to do anything other than stare. There was a slight puff of air on his face, and the scent of rotted roses, and then he was sinking down into darkness, his eyes drifting closed, his limbs heavy. Her voice came to him through the dimming haze.

“It’ll all be over soon.”