Chapter Sixteen: English Twix
July 2004
They don’t ask about what happened and you don’t tell. It’s not like it’s any of their business. This is a private matter between you, Faith and… the various people you found her in bed with. Ok, so you desperately want to tell them. You want to cry on Willow’s shoulder and have Xander get all flustered while he promises to protect you (even though you’re the one he calls when there’s a spider in his room).
But, telling them means they know what Faith did, means they’ll think badly of her and it took you so damn long to get them to give her a chance you’re not going to ruin all that hard work.
So you play mad yet come at the drop of a hat when Giles calls. ‘We have a problem- it’s Faith.’ He’d said as soon as you picked up the phone. Obviously it had crossed your mind to reply with a snarky ‘well she’s your problem now’ but something about his voice had stopped you.
This phone call was his last resort.
You’d taken the first train down to Bath- a hideously long journey, even in the supposed comforts of First Class, though faster than the next flight from Edinburgh to Bristol, the car journeys either end and the waiting times at the airports.
The last time you saw her, a month ago, magic zipped you through the air in a matter of milliseconds.
You feel no less sick this time.
When Giles meets you at the door, cash in hand to pay for the taxi, your eyes search his visible flesh for scratches and bite-marks. If he managed to keep her in the house once she’d lost it he must have used considerable force. You know what it’s like when she looks at you and all she sees is the enemy. It’s terrifying.
So you’re here to help strap her down until her rabid madness passes. When the unscathed form of your ex-watcher finally leads you up the stairs, after many minutes of awkward small talk, the sight that meets your eyes makes you nothing but confused.
Huddled under a duvet like a small child Faith stares out the window of the cosy, cottage bedroom, her eyes unblinking. Or if they do blink then it must be so fast you can’t tell. Or so far apart that your own eyes water and you have to turn away before it happens.
She doesn’t look up when you enter nor when Giles explains that she’s been like this for days- here in this bed, completely unresponsive.
He pre-empts your question about catatonia. This isn’t like that apparently; she sleeps so she’s still here. You want to ask about food and… other bodily things but you don’t really want the answer.
She’s as beautiful as always but now more like a porcelain doll; paler and still. If the bed cover didn’t move up and down with her near-silent breath you’d almost believe she wasn’t real. Her brow is sweaty, her hair plastered to it, you’re not surprised- the room is boiling. With almost a mind of it’s own your body is drawn to her, hands smoothing back the rats-tails of hair.
You pull back the covers and a flustered Giles wanders off. Her clothes, a t-shirt and flannel pyjama bottoms, smell awful- that sort of smell you get from fear or a difficult exam. They’re too hot in this summer weather- isn’t England meant to be cold?
A search of the dresser, the only other object in the room, reveals a pair of silk boxers with Santas on, still in their torn wrapping paper, and about a thousand wool jumpers. You swap her dirty clothes for the boxers and the strap top you were wearing under your thin shirt. It leaves you a little exposed but as long as no direct light shines on you it’ll be fine.
There’s no bathroom upstairs that you can find so you settle for using the make up wipes in your bag to cool her neck and clean her armpits.
As soon as you roll her back over your head starts to swim as you realise what you just did. You striped and cleaned her but barely noticed. Almost like it was natural.
It hurts to look at her again so you wedge yourself in between the bed and the wall, stare at the limp curtains instead. They hang lifeless in the window, not even a wisp of breeze to move them. It would have been your one-year anniversary last week… if you’d stayed together.
It’s so weird to think of it like that… not even half a year.
Those four months had been Faith’s longest ever relationship and your… well, not ‘longest’- that was Angel, and not weirdest, or most confusing, or heart breaking or air-ripped-from-your-lungs-fantastic (although it was all of those things). ‘Best’ certainly, regardless of the bone-crushing, organ-stabbing pain you’d felt at the end.
She instinctively knew you better than it’s possible for a person to be aware of himself or herself. Though the hurt you felt when someone mentioned their father made you believe you wanted to be alone, an island, her hand slipping into yours made it better, made the bad go away. She gave you thoughtful little gifts; ‘just because’ presents. Her smile lit up the room on the dark days when a girl didn’t make it home from patrol- never disrespectful, just remembering the Slayer, as she’d have wanted to be.
But then… that was when she was herself.
Those few weeks together and alone in Italy were never going to be enough to prepare you for the ‘new’ Faith you suddenly found yourself living with. Her moods swung rapidly and without reason, she put the other girls in danger time and time again, recklessly going off on a limb. They loved her for it, loved how she broke the rules… but then they would, they never saw the other side. They never saw how violent and dark and withdrawn she could become because she’d taken it too far on patrol or your friends were cruel to her or the television broke or any other kind of menial little thing. Sometimes she’d laugh, shrug it off, and sometimes she’d curl up into a ball, loose herself mentally in the feeling that’s worse than suicidal because she just doesn’t care enough to kill herself.
She just doesn’t care.
And that’s the worst part- loving someone so completely and so desperately that you’d give up everything, die for her, kill an army if she’d only ask… loving her like that and not being able to save her.
Your face doesn’t calm her down, your voice won’t bring her out of a stupor and your love will never be able to keep her safe because it just doesn’t matter.
So yes, you’ve seen her like this before, and yes, it breaks your heart but when you walked in on her with some loutish blockhead doing it on the couch your tears were half for joy. You finally had ‘the excuse’. She wasn’t your problem anymore.
Maybe that makes you a bad person but it doesn’t matter. That wasn’t what you’d signed up for.
She might still love you when she’s run off into the freezing night with no money, no coat and a delirious look in her eye but screwing an Orpheus dealer in a back alley and coming home three days later with cracked ribs and a black eye just to fall into yet another depression, well, that’s really no way of showing it. You couldn’t blame her mental state for you leaving but it was oh so easy to point the finger at the sex. Impugn her to your friends, tell them she’s ‘not on our side’ again. She was even nice enough to provide a paradigm- trying to drown you in some posh-yet-evil slayer’s pool.
According to Giles they ‘dealt with the threat’- you were almost expecting him to say ‘terminated’ but that was the general gist anyway.
Faith killed again.
It’s eating her up from the inside so bad that it’s almost left her a corpse, this breathing, living thing that doesn’t move or even stir as you stroke her hair or touch her cheek. Her eyes are blank, spark firmly extinguished.
The room is hot, insufferably so, especially for England. But stuffy too… which probably isn’t so different… You really need to slay-solo more, your ‘quips when scared’ are really going downhill!
There’s only one sash window in the little room and even though it’s as open as it can be not enough of the minimal breeze outside is getting in.
She doesn’t rouse as you kiss her forehead and then her lips. The thought crosses your mind that she might be doing this on purpose but Faith kisses back even in her sleep. You wonder if she dreams, what she thinks of, so alone in her head.
In Italy it took four weeks for her nightmares to calm down… and only a day for them to return in LA. It had appeared unfair, heart-wrenchingly so, that there was nothing you could do, seemingly no reason for it. You’d lain, that first night back, with your arms wrapped around her, blinking back tears and wondering what the hell you were supposed to do now.
“Don’t dream.” You tell her, “Just rest.”
There’s no reply but you don’t mind.
Sometimes, when you had a lot on your mind, you used to lie awake until you were sure she was asleep and then talk to her unresponsive form. She wasn’t exactly the best of listeners when awake and it had been so nice to have someone to talk to when she was in the coma…
On bad days now, you still do it. Except it’s to an empty room.
“I dreamt about you last night.”
And the night before. And the one before that. And the one… ok, there’ve been a lot of dreams. Only a few of them good.
Mostly you hurt her, over and over again. It’s worse than anything she could do to you… because it’s happening, right now. She said she didn’t want you to leave because without you she’s only half a person- unfortunately it’s the sane half.
In last night’s dream you battled above the First’s seal in the school basement, no weapons, just fists smacking against flesh. And then suddenly your hand didn’t hit flesh but went straight though! And then the seal was open and she was falling through into the open arms of the waiting Ubervamps. As they tore into her flesh she’d looked into your eyes, so hurt, blood still pouring out of her front. “Make it stop?”
The dream had ended before you could reply and you were left, sweaty and yet cold, gripping a torn sheet in a freezing castle. They haunted you; every night… she haunted you, her image seared into your eyelids so that you couldn’t even blink without thinking of her.
But you didn’t want to. You really, really didn’t want to.
So the next night you made sure you didn’t sleep alone.
They have nothing in common, nothing at all. Satsu’s Japanese for Christ sakes and Faith is… well, no one’s entirely sure what Faith is. Not that it’s about race, it isn’t. It’s just… it’s so easy to compare and contrast their outsides when you know so little of what’s within them. Either of them. Oh sure, you’ve known Faith for years and you can pretty much guess whatever Satsu is feeling- you’re perceptive like that- but when it comes to actually knowing them? … Then the girl you took into your bed for the first time last week is just the same as the one you met when you were a teenager.
But there are still differences.
You try to ignore how it feels that every kiss not with Faith is cheating, that every date is some kind of illicit affair. The first time you went out with a guy after Faith you almost squealed that you were a lesbian when he tried to touch you. You’re not- hello, Angel/Spike/Cute barista guy! - you’re just very used to saying that in Italian clubs. As evidenced by the fact you wanted to squeal ‘lesbica!’
That little anecdote doesn’t raise a smile. Or even an eyebrow. Or even any clue that she’s listening at all!
You tell her about Dawn being a giant and about Kennedy dieing… it even crosses you mind to talk about the new big bad. But you don’t want to pressure her, make her think she has to help you.
That’s a complete lie- you do want to… but she’s pretty useless right now.
God, there’s a lot of ‘but’s today.
“I slept with her. Satsu. You- you probably have no idea who she is… uh… she’s the Japanese girl with the amazing hair. I think you puked on her shoes once. She’s nice. Not you, but nice. And… and she smells good!”
Satsu is the first person since her you’ve slept with. The first person since it all went wrong and you started pretending you’d never even kissed a girl before.
You’d like to believe it was all Faith’s fault, though of course it wasn’t. It was yours. Or… or maybe just the circumstance. The impossibility of being both her lover and General Buffy; so in love yet so alone.
Depressing much?!
“I’m sorry I lied to you, I said nothing would change- but it did.” Her eyes slip closed but it feels more like relief than despair. “Why did you pull away? If you were so unhappy in LA, why didn’t you tell me?”
You want to add an ‘I would have dropped everything if you had’ but it seems unnecessary. Partly because it’s not true- you were angry with her for the way she acted. Here were your friends, you hadn’t seen them in a month and a half, and you wanted to spend time with them. In fact, in those first two weeks after you’d shut down the gateway, all you did was spend time with them. By the time you noticed you’d slipped back into the behaviours that had so excluded Faith the first time, it was already too late.
It was a Sunday morning. The two of you were pressed close together in the small hotel bathroom (huge suite, tiny bathroom, go figure). You’d just stepped out of the shower and even though you thought it strange she hadn’t joined you it wasn’t vocalised. Faith stood by the sink, brushing her teeth.
Even now it’s hard to say what it was that caught your attention- hindsight doesn’t make it any clearer, it just fills in the blanks as to what it was you were actually looking at.
The scars on her wrists are always whiter than her naturally tanned skin and they go even more so as her hands move. But that morning they were red. She was wearing a long sleeved top, tucked into her pants- not even a hint of cleavage or midriff, so very unlike her. And also unseasonably warm.
A bruise peaked out from the cuff of her other arm, the one resting against the sink. You remember thinking it was strange how it hadn’t faded yet- that slayer healing should have taken care of it. She spat in the sink and itched her right arm. You realised for the first time you had absolutely no idea what she’d been doing for the past week.
Through out the next few days your suspicions grew and grew; bruises from ‘slaying’ that just didn’t make sense, the new ‘friends’ you never got to meet, her dwindling hunger and your missing cash…
She tried to tell you, though you didn’t understand, how she felt she was slipping under, being dragged back down and that without you to hold on to she had no chance. But you were too busy with your friends and setting up the new school, you’d assumed she’d be ok, had almost forgotten you were actually two people and she couldn’t read your mind. She needed the reassurance of your presence whereas you’d foolishly thought everything would be fine. Even though you’d left Italy you still felt the same adoration and devotion to her you had there- you’d thought she’d know. In the end Faith hadn’t known, couldn’t have know, had no possible way to see past your actions to the emotions.
A flash of lightning from the window makes you jump, the thunder that follows makes you sigh in relief. Perhaps now the heat wave will break. Sure enough a few minutes later rain begins to pelt down making the tiles on the cottage’s roof dance.
Water. Always water.
She tried to drown you, in that posh psycho’s pool. Every mouthful of water brought rushing back yet another nightmare that had burnt itself into your mind… Allan Finch gripping your foot and dragging you down with him, Faith holding your head under the water…
But you did it. You were there the first time and you judged the second.
“I’m sorry, for everything I did… and said… and felt. I’m sorry I jumped to conclusions. Again. I should have listened to you. I should have asked why you were there rather than assuming that… that you were protecting her. Or- actually, that’s not what I assumed. I thought you were probably sleeping with her. It hurt.”
You wonder if her lips miss yours too or if it’s just your skin that aches to be touching hers. A few months back you kissed Robin Wood- ‘kissed’ in the sense of ‘accidentally on the lips in jubilation’ but it still made you feel awful. If she’d been there she would have laughed, made a few jokes about how he’d better not try anything with her girl or she’d kick his ass, and then taken the helpful information he’d been offering. Without her it was suddenly awkward as you both remembered the only thing other than slaying you have in common.
He hadn’t seen her taking up with you as a betrayal- claimed to have known there was something there all along.
“Any change?” Giles shifts rather awkwardly around the door, a small tray balanced on his hip.
“No.” You shuffle over on your knees to the bed. Her eyes are closed now but she’s not asleep, breath still too uneven.
He rests the tray on the bed next to where you’re kneeling, stroking her hair. There’s a glass of milk and a Twix bar on it… which makes you feel both too old and too young at the same time. Your Daddy’s bringing you milk and cookies.
“Milk, huh?”
“Well, there’s nothing really in the fridge.” He pauses for you to take a sip, “And I saw a cow in the next field, so…”
You spit your mouthful back out and gag slightly. “Giles! You can’t just-” A chuckle escapes him and you glare playfully back. “You big meanie.”
And Giles just reclaimed his place as Best Father Figure Ever… though considering he’s only up against your actual dad; it’s probably not the best accolade.
The change in mood is nice, better to be happy than slip into a little spiral of depression. After all, that bed doesn’t look big enough for two people.
“I thought- if anyone could talk her out of it…”
You snort, “It would be the girl who stabbed her?”
“It would be the girl she’s in love with.” He settles on the opposite side of the bed to you, smirking chastisingly as you gape like a goldfish. “Oh now, you really thought I didn’t know?”
Yes! “We- well, I know that Xander and… and Willow… uh… I thought you weren’t paying attention! That time with the… shoes…”
He frowns, “As I have no idea what you’re talking about I obviously wasn’t. But, I know you’ve liked her since she first came to Sunnydale- do the others know that?”
So he’s freakishly observant too?
But- but if he’s known all along then those times you lied to his face- told him you were going to see Angel, said your mother wanted a family dinner, claimed you were blushing because it was hot and it had nothing whatsoever to do with Faith sitting so damned close- he must have known! Crap!
“You never said anything.” Your voice comes out tiny and little girlish. “If you knew so long, why didn’t you say?’
“Well, at first I didn’t think you’d act on it… she’s not exactly your type.” He stops to stare at her. “Actually, she’s exactly your type but female.” Your eyes follow where he’s looking to see your hand has migrated back into Faith’s hair without you noticing. “And then once it was obvious you were acting on it but not telling anyone I didn’t want to cause an unnecessary scene.”
“Aw!” You grin, “I love how British you are.”
“Of course, I was hoping it would go away once she’d switched sides. Which it did- for you.”
Did it? Maybe. Not right away though. There was still a heavy level of denial it had to get through first.
Even when you were fake-chained to the wall of the mansion, watching her wave sharp instruments around with a crazy look in her eye that said she might actually use them… there was still a part of you thinking ‘how does she make her layers bounce like that?’ and making a mental note to ask her later. It seemed that the lighter, jokier element of your relationship that should have died… didn’t. Until you put a stop to it anyway.
You crushed her heart and a cupcake in the school hall.
But it all came back so easily; her innuendoes and your giggles. So easily that you think it was never gone, never truly died- just buried, lying dormant, just under the surface. Is that what love is? A cord that stretches between two people, binds them together, no matter what. Something you can hide but never quite cut. Not even when you want to?
“It didn’t. I wanted it to, but it never really went away.”
He takes his glasses off to clean and it reminds you that even though you love him, your rope is hidden, or cut, or gone. He’s sent two people you love to their deaths. He sent them and claimed that wasn’t the intention with her, but now… he knew you love her, he knew she loves you, that she’d do anything to save you from Lady Psycho and you’d immediately jump to the wrong conclusions.
It’s a thing you do. The jumping to conclusions. Also you’re stubborn. And don’t really change your first lasting opinion of someone. Lucky Faith left a good one… after the first bad one that is. Ok, so that doesn’t work, but she’s really hot!
You should get an award for holding out so long.
“Actually, Giles? If you don’t mind, I’d like to be alone with…” This empty room, “Her.”
“Oh!” He looks flustered, as if he has no idea why you wouldn’t want to be near him. “Ok then, I’ll… I’ll just be going.” Thankfully he leaves the chocolate.
Even after he’s gone the frosty atmosphere remains. Unfortunately it’s not a literal thing- that would probably be quite pleasant at this point. “Hey, do you remember that weekend in Italy it was so hot we went round completely naked?”
Faith blindfolded the Immortal’s ever-present servants and the big man himself was polite enough to vacate the place for the week. You remind her that you played games with the poor waiting staff, going so far as standing at opposite ends of the palatial complex, calling them to you and giggling as they stumbled over tables and rugs.
“And you! Dancing in front of the poor guys humming stripper songs!” You can’t help but laugh. The poor men had been only too aware of what was going on.
Her eye twitches slightly and you jump. For a second you could have sworn there was eye contact.
“Faith?” But no, nothing. Perhaps it was just a trick of the light? You have been staring at her for an awfully long time. Or maybe it wasn’t, maybe it was Italy that caught her attention?
It had torn you apart to leave, to have to let go of the few weeks of blissful heaven that you’d shared.
“Italy? You want me to talk about Italy?”
You pretend she replies. Not like you haven’t done that before.
“Okay… Uh… Do you remember the painted ceiling in the hall? ‘Fresco’. Did I say that right? All those little naked cherubs using the chandelier as a maypole. Kinda weird if you ask me but then that’s art… Do… Do you remember how the mint wallpaper actually smelt like mint? Or the beautiful wisteria out on the terrace?”
The bed flirts enticingly with your weary bones. You peel your sweaty back off the wall and climb over her to snuggle in, resting your face in the crook of her neck.
“Come on, get up.” You mumble, “Can’t go home if you don’t come with me… Mimtal would probably jump to the right conclusions and kill me anyway…” The sleep you fall into is dreamless but warm, comfortable, safe.
An hour later you wake up to find her still on the bed and still looking blindly out the window. But half a Twix stick is gone and you’d like to call that progress.
