Fanfiction: Lanciname

You gotta love Slayer healing.

That’s what I tell myself every night anyway.

I lay here in this little room, wrapped in the darkness and the thin blanket that smells like piss and sweat and some other things I don’t even want to know about, and I listen for the sounds of my cellmate to slow and settle. She’ll rustle around like a puppy, trying to find just the right spot on the sorry excuse for a mattress, then she’ll sigh a few times, like she’s pushing out all the bad shit from the day so she can fall asleep without that in there to pollute her dreams. Finally she’ll get still, and her breathing levels off and then I know I’m as alone as I can get in here.

I keep my new best friend hidden inside my own mattress. My fingers know exactly where to find it every time, they just creep right over to it no matter how many times the thing has been moved around. They know the shape of it by heart. Every time I pull it out, every time my hand feels the weight of it, the chill of it, the rusty bumps on the blunt end, my heart stops. It’s like the one split second before you kiss a new lover for the first time; all the anticipation is right there, frozen in that tiny space, and no matter how good the kiss is, nothing is ever as good as the possibility of it.

It hums in my hand with a life of its own, like it’s as anxious for the ritual as I am. I slip the cover off my arms, cock my blanketed legs up so that the top of my body is in deeper shadow, and then everything narrows down to a pinpoint. The metal in my right hand. The bare skin of my left forearm. Both of them shine with their own light, and I swear to God it’s a rush to see them come together. The gray slides right into the white and the darkness comes out behind it, a trail of heat and wetness.

I don’t know why I didn’t think of this sooner. I mean, I’ve been going insane in here, playing the good girl. I walk away from the urge to kill someone or something on an hourly basis, and the stress of it is enough to make me rip out my own hair until I’m bald and bleeding, screaming. Crying. I think about how they would all look at me then; they’d really see me for the nutjob they think I am.

Oh yeah, I hear the whispers. Psycho. Killer. Bitch. The first few times I had to reassert my rep, it got ugly. Some broken arms, one broken jaw. I blinded some bitch who tried to throw down with me in the laundry. A bottle of bleach will do that when it hits a person’s head with the force of an extremely pissed off Slayer behind it. After that, they pretty much left me alone. And it should have made things better, right?

But it didn’t. It got worse then, because then there was nothing for me. No outlet, no place for the hostility. In the exercise room, I lift like some steroid crazed Mr. Universe wanna be, but there’s no way that’s gonna get it done. I run outside when we have yard time; fuck, I think I logged enough miles to have made it all the way to Mexico and back. Twice. But that’s just burning fuel. It’s burning up bad meatloaf and lumpy mashed potatoes.

The anger is still there.

When the girls were still testing me, when they wanted to see if I’d stand up and fight or lay down and fuck to make my place in here, there was contact. A brush in the chow line, a shove in the shower. Flesh meeting flesh, whether it was an open handed caress or a clenched fisted blow. And the contact makes it better somehow. The connection of skin on skin was something I always had out there. I had my rough studs and my pretty girls and anything in between, anytime I needed the contact. They took the anger down, they kept the cage locked.

And I can’t really say I’m totally without touch in here. There’s this rabbity little girl that’s attached herself to me. After the whole thing went down in the laundry, and people put my personal space perimeter at about five feet, this chick came up to me at dinner and sort of hovered there. I could feel her shaking all over, could smell how scared she was, and I remember she flinched when I looked up at her and asked her what the hell she wanted.

In the end she wanted protection. She wanted me to take care of her so none of the other nut cases would get to her and work her over. Guess I was the lesser of about a million other evils. I came close to laughing at her, almost told her that she was Little Red Riding Hood asking the wolf to save her from Grandma. But I didn’t do it, because she looked like … well, she had this blonde hair and these green eyes and if B had led a hard life, this chick was wearing the face she would have had.

This bunny rabbit girlie, she follows me around, she gives me the food off her plate, she looks at me with B’s eyes, and I see something there that I never saw in the real thing. If B had ever looked at me, even once, with half of the respect this girl has, I know I’d never be here now. Sometimes it gets to be too much, ya know? When she’s down on her knees for me, working her fingers or her tongue, doing whatever we can get away with in the five minutes of hurried, rushed down and dirtiness, I know she thinks I’m loving it. She hears me grunting at the feeling of her rubbing me, getting me off, and she thinks it’s doing me some good. She doesn’t know that my eyes are closed because I don’t want to see her. The almost-B face around me all the time, never the real thing but giving me something I could never have. I’m trying so fucking hard not to cry and scream. It hurts someplace I can’t touch.

Yeah, so when all the hurts that I can’t get at start to be too much for me, and when I think that one more look from my shadow is gonna send me straight off the deep end, I have to get out my toy and do it. I have to make the cuts, make the wounds there in my own skin so it’s a hurt that I can reach.

Sometime one or two is enough. Mostly it’s not.

Tonight I know right after I make that first slice through the top layer and the stinging barely registers with me, it’s going to take a lot more. This is one of those times to be grateful for the Slayer healing. When I wake up tomorrow, there won’t be a mark on me anywhere; no one will know, even if they somehow break the circle and get close enough to look. It’s a relief to know that I can do it, do it there, and there. And there. Lick up the trail of blood that each tear in the skin leaves behind so it won’t mark the blanket or stain the uniform.

Cut. Lick. Feel the burning of each slice, taste the hot copper. Sting of spit in the raw open places. Over and over until my whole arm feels like it’s on fire, like it’s cut to the bone and slivers of me are hanging off everywhere. Now I can feel it, now I can touch it, this is a pain I can deal with. I can see it, I can control it.

It’s mine.

And when I finally make myself drop the rusty bedspring that I’ve sharpened, dragging it over and over on the floor or the wall in the dead of night, the better to tear myself open with, I clutch my aching arm to my chest and close my eyes tight. I think about how I spent weeks honing that jagged piece of metal until it was the perfect edge, sharp enough to rend flesh neatly. I concentrate on every zing of protest from broken nerve endings and torn and wounded skin. It makes me forget about the things I can’t reach, like the place where B lives inside me. And the place that just screams itself raw when Angel looks at me and tells me he knows me.

That’s pretty fucking funny when you get right down to it. He says he knows me because he thinks we have this bond of evil pasts. That we both want the same things; acceptance by the great humanity, peace inside when we go to sleep at night. Would he look at me in the same way if he saw me in here drinking my own blood, swallowing up the pain back inside myself, eating myself alive just to feel something again? Would that scare the shit out of him, the way it scares me, get me a look of pity maybe? Or would that make us connected somehow, more than we are now, more than he ever could with her? He thinks he has such a handle on me, thinks I’m in here out of some big gesture to be a bigger better Faith. Might even think I’m here because of him and B. Like I owed them something for all they went through, and maybe I do. But that’s not what got me here, and that’s not what keeps me here.

I’m just afraid.

What’s going to happen when I get back to the outside? When I have to stand next to Angel, and B, and everyone can see? Because when you get right down to it, she’s always been the Golden Girl. That’s my B, shining star, my true mirror image. And Angel - he might have been a monster back in the bygones, but he’s not anymore. He’s got his demon in a soul cage, and all those eyes on him hold more love and trust than I’ve ever known. And then there’s me. I’m the shadow to their brightness, the dark part they hide. If they bring me forward to stand beside them, what’s their light going to show inside me?

I don’t want to know. That’s another hurt I don’t know if I can take. I sure as hell know I don’t need it. It’s easier to stay here, safe in my own little cage. Because when I get out there, and things turn the way they always do, I know the time to fail will come on me. And the things I will need to do to make the pain mine will be bigger, too. This bedspring won’t be nearly enough… and all I can think of then is the knife, that thing of beauty that I had back in the darker, clearer times. The way I want it back in my hands - when I think about the way it looked, the heft of it in my palm, the clean oiled smell of it - is terrifying.

Right now I have my grip on the darkness, I have it pinned right where it needs to be, and I can taste it in my mouth all night long. I can lay here and listen to the sounds of the pain thrumming in my ears, and I can lick my wounds and know they’ll be gone tomorrow. That’s what takes me down into sleep, the sounds of hurt and the taste of blood. I don’t have to think about the glare of Angel’s light, or the shadows inside me that don’t want to be exposed.

Whatever they are, I’m pretty sure I can’t cut them out of me.

~end

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