Becoming Eliot Spencer

If there's one thing Xander knew about the criminal underworld, it was that people who had a lot of ties to the law-abiding world didn't tend to join it. People with friends and family who followed the law and worked 9-to-5 jobs didn't just give it all up to break the law. They had reasons not to do anything too bad. No, the people who got deep into crime either had ties to criminals or didn't have close ties to anybody.

Granted, from the time Xander had first started dusting vampires, he'd been breaking the law- if nothing else, stealing that rocket launcher hadn't exactly been legal. But there had always been a line in his mind: you broke the law only as much as you had to for Slaying. Dawn stealing was wrong in a way that stealing the rocket launcher hadn't been because she hadn't been stealing for Slaying purposes.
But he'd lost his anchors to the more-or-less legal world one by one, as Sunnydale fell and after. By the time he returned to the Council after his time in Africa, he's been all but forgotten by the baby Slayers, who were worse about forcing him to stop Slaying than Buffy and Willow ever had been. Wood hadn't wanted him involved in the first place. Willow was the last of the Scoobies, her last present to him before her death his eye back. And then he was alone, kicked out of the Council and with no friends remaining alive.

He didn't legally exist outside of the Council, every form of identification he'd had lost when Sunnydale had gone down and no way to get new ones. He couldn't legally buy a drink or get a job. And he didn’t have much money to start with.

Xander stumbled his way into the underworld, using the skills he'd gained fighting vampires and demons (which were…fighting. Not much use for reading dead languages on the streets) to make enough money for his first fake ID. He went for the deluxe model, costly as all hell but the next best thing to real. Eliot Spencer was his new name; he could even do an accent well enough that people believed he was really from Kentucky.

He'd planned for that to be the end of it: no more than was absolutely necessary to survive. With his new ID he went out and got a new job…he quit after a week, returning to busting heads and working his way up the ladder. Nothing too dirty- he wasn't an assassin- but if people died when he did his job, he didn’t really care. Why should he care? He'd lost his moral compass when he'd lost the people he lived for. At least in this job he got the adrenaline rush he'd gotten addicted to.

Slowly he fleshed out Eliot Spencer as a person separate from Xander Harris. Eliot Spencer had never fought demons (okay, maybe a couple, but never on a regular basis, just when they got in his way). He was charming and Southern, kept his hair long, didn't like guns, and liked to cook. And he always worked alone. He wouldn't allow himself to get attached to anybody else. That rule came along after Aimee-

It was a role, like any of the others he played to get his job done. Maybe more fleshed out than the rest, but still, it was a role, something to keep him insulated from the life he led.