Finally the hero of his own story
Heart and Eye is a completed What If? Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfic that explores what might have happened if Xander travelled to Los Angeles after Season Seven. He is still depressed over losing Anya and disillusioned with the Scoobies (especially Buffy and Giles). He ends up working for Angel at Wolfram and Hart as Wesley's assistant and attempts to rebuild his life.
Link found here.
Tropes:
- All Just a Dream: Xander's conversation with Willow turns out to be nothing more than the product of heavy painkillers and and a serious amount of justified bitterness and anger at the Scoobies.
- Badass Normal: The inspiration for this story (as revealed by the author in the epilogue) was that despite having no supernatural powers (one of the only two characters in the main cast), Xander was the only character in the core cast to never stop fighting. Buffy and Giles both left at different times and Willow turned evil and left afterwards, but Xander always stayed no matter how crappy his life was.
- Casual Kink: Harmony indicates that she wants to be handcuffed during sex at one point.
- Dead Guy Junior: Wesley and Fred name their baby daughter Alex after Xander dies.
- Driven to Suicide: Xander attempts this after Harmony's death. Angel catches him with a pistol and after a fist fight, he manages to talk him down.
- Formula-Breaking Episode: After twenty-seven chapters of simply being a re-telling of Angel with the cast of Buffy in it, the story takes a sudden change of direction when they get transported to another dimension that turns vampires back to humans with souls..
- Heroic Sacrifice: After killing the resurrected Jesse, Xander's heart gives out due to an overdose of adrenaline combined with a massive injury to the chest that he received three weeks before.
- Precision F-Strike: In a (usually) profanity free story, Xander finally snaps at the hallucination of Buffy and the gang.
- Unrequited Love Lasts Forever: The epilogue heavily implies that Dawn never lets go of her feelings for Xander, even after his death.
