Fanfiction: Five by Three

Faith has crossed this threshold any number of times in the last couple of weeks, but this time it feels like she’s standing at a border. It’s not as though Giles’s will be the first hostile face she’s seen since she got back. But his disapproval carries more weight. For the reason she outlined to Xander, but she left the other big one off the list. Rupert Giles is Richard Wilkins’ opposite number. Not in the whole boring Good vs. Evil way, but something more important. Rupert could have been to her what Wilkins was — mentor, father figure. But he hadn’t offered her quite the same deal. No unconditional adoration — Giles expected her to earn his approval, and she fell way short.

Pausing at the door, Faith sucks in a deep breath. She’s been a little short on air since the kissing session. Xander touches her briefly at the small of her back. It gives her courage, but doesn’t help the breath situation.

When they enter, Giles is sitting alone in the parlor (“paaaaah-luh,” the potentials shriek in glee whenever she says it out loud), one hand to his face, his glasses dangling from the fingers of the other.

Willow is rounding the corner from the dining room, carrying a tray with teapot and cups. “Hey, I’m glad you finally made it,” she says quietly to Xander and Faith. “He’s pretty jet-lagged.” She kneels to set the tray on the coffee table, talking loud enough to wake Giles while not letting on she knows he’s asleep. “So I hope English breakfast is okay. I mean, you’re English, which works out great, but it’s so not the breakfast hour. Unless it is, Bombay-time, then we’re good.”

Giles rouses and puts on his glasses, and Faith is relieved that it’s Xander his gaze falls on first. His haggard face lights up and he surges to his feet. “Good God. Xander. I’m delighted to see you looking so well.” He charges over, hand extended for a manly British handclasp, but then he changes the plan, embracing Xander instead. Much Anglo/American male back-thumping. “Willow made things sound rather grave.”

“They were,” Xander says, instead of making a joke. “I’m lucky. Faith, actually, has a lot to do with that.” He puts his arm around her — careful not to hurt her injured shoulder — and draws her to his side.

“Hello, Faith,” Giles says neutrally.

She’s filled with gratitude, though, for his obvious love of Xander, and it calms her fear. “Good seeing you, Rupert.”

He takes in Xander’s arm over her shoulder, decides to misinterpret. “Here, Xander, you must sit.”

He does — they all do. Xander slings his arm over the back of the sofa, lightly resting his hand on the back of her neck. At this moment she loves him more than she could possibly say.

In many ways, Giles looks little changed from when she first met him. The same comic book action hero chin and slightly prissy mouth, a contrast that always cracked her up. Tweeds, wire-rimmed glasses, slightly pinched look of worry — she never had determined whether that was a trait of the English or just watchers — all as she remembered. But he’s aged in the last three years. No surprise, she supposes, considering the death of his slayer and his favorite protege’s balls-out plunge into evil. What Willow put him through physically was in itself enough to mark him permanently.

“So did you bring us another potential to squeeze in upstairs?” Faith asks.

“No,” he says, and a few more years seem to press upon him. “The Bringers got there first.”

“Shit,” Xander murmurs. Faith feels a slight tremor ripple through his muscles.

“It was all very carefully orchestrated so I’d arrive just moments after they’d left.”

Xander shifts on the couch, rubbing his injured leg. “I hate to say it, but we’ve all fought an enemy this sadistic before. Who leads us around by the nose and plants —” Something he sees in Giles face brings him to a halt. After a pause he continues, “I say no more chasing after new potentials. This thing wants us split up. If it can’t do it psychologically, it’ll do it physically. It’s time we stopped giving the First what it wants.”

“He’s right,” Faith says.

Giles is silent for a moment, exhaustion seeming to roll off him in waves. “Yes. I believe he is.”

“Faith and I both had our experiences with the First while you were away,” Xander tells him. “Each of us saw it as Buffy. It nearly did major damage both times. We all have to be on our guard. I know you’re tired, Giles. We can give you the details later. But you should know, since this thing comes when you’re at your lowest ebb.”

Giles nods and sets his tea cup down. “I think perhaps a walk would revive me.”

“But don’t you think you should —” Willow cuts herself off as he gets to his feet.

He lifts an eyebrow and says, “Faith?” and without comment she accompanies him out the door.

The next-door-neighbor is home from work, getting out of his car as she cuts across the lawn to the sidewalk. Faith raises an arm in greeting as she waits for Giles, who travels via the front walk. “Bless you, Brother Randy. His time is coming, hallelujah.” Randy scurries inside his house.

Giles fixes her with a look and Faith grins. “Just a little friendly chain-yanking. He thinks we’re a doomsday cult.”

“And whyever would he think such a thing?” he says drily.

“Could be because Xander told him.” She sees the curtains twitch as Mrs. Randy checks out the music minister and the new convert, leather and tweed out for a stroll. Faith waves. “He needs something to do, Giles. He’s got talents that are going to waste around here, and the stakes are too high for that to be okay. He’ll never say anything to Buffy, and I can’t — that would be the end of the subject, now and forever.”

“I’ll speak with her. She takes too much on herself, and it’s only grown worse these last months.”

“Make it soon.” She surprises herself, laying down orders to Giles. Another thing she’ll do for Xander’s sake, it seems. “Something’s eating at him. I haven’t found out what, not yet, but I know he’s better when he’s focused on someone else.”

“Things have progressed rather quickly between you and Xander.”

“It might seem that way to you,” she says, “but from where we stand it feels like months.”

“I’d just hope that you’d—”

Faith cuts in. “Be careful? Not hurt him? Way ahead of you.”

Something, apparently, tells him not to pursue it. They walk, and she can feel him working around to whatever his purpose is for this stroll. She could wait, but she has her own agenda. “I wrote you a dozen letters when I was in prison,” she says.

Giles looks at her, startled. “I never received a one.”

“I know.” She smiles, but knows it looks pained. She wishes he’d turn his attention elsewhere. “I never sent any of them.”

He doesn’t answer for a moment. “Soul searching is never an easy thing.”

“Gets easier when you’ve got three years or so to do nothin’ else. You might not get good at answers, but you can become frickin’ wicked at questions. Some you keep for yourself, some are for the people who are important to you. If you’re lucky, you might get to ask some of those, maybe of someone who has answers.”

This appeals to Giles, who’s made a career of having the answers. “If there’s anything I can clarify for you—”

One of the neighbor dogs, a border collie with a red bandanna around his neck, comes to sniff at her ankles. Faith drops to her heels to rub her hands along his sides. “One of the big searches I’ve had for my soul is for the reason it’s so difficult to—” love, she wants to say — “to look after.” She murmurs to the collie, gives it a last pat on its flank and comes to her feet. “Oh, I know I’m a handful. Always have been.”

They resume walking and she keeps her gaze on the sidewalk ahead, the houses along the way and the kids pinballing across their front yards — anywhere but Giles. “You get in prison, and you hear everyone’s story. Then you start putting things together, seeing how things look from outside. Context, the big picture, whatever. And so I start asking, why’s a girl who’s gone to her protectors — and a minor, don’t forget — living at the Hot Sheets Spa and Resort? Why is it that the first person to see I need a decent place to live and the occasional real meal is the guy who’s planning to eat the entire population of Sunnydale? How do the crazy rogue watchers and the wet work division know how to find me, but the Council can’t seem to send me a watcher of my own? I’ve gotta think it’s me, something I did or didn’t do, because for about five minutes there, you thought I was the shit. So how did I fall through the cracks?” Her hands are in the pockets of her jacket, the nails biting half moons into her palms. “Something I did, something I was. Something changed everything, and I still can’t put my finger on it.”

She chances a glance at him now, and has to look away. There’s dawning realization, followed by defeat and horror and pity all mixed together — the same expression he had when he spoke of the slaughtered potential in Bombay. Part of her feels sorry for him. The rest (a lot more of her) wants to fucking slap him. How can this be news to you?

“It was what you were,” Giles says, his voice half strangled.

She thought nothing could wound her further, but she was wrong. The words are a blow as savage as the vampire’s chain slash in last night’s fight, and just as completely rob her of her breath. She stumbles to a stop in the middle of the sidewalk.

Giles turns to face her. “You were too much like me.”

Faith laughs, but that doesn’t feel like what’s happening in her chest.

“It’s true.” He begins walking again, and Faith is forced to tag along. “I went through a wild, dark period in my youth. My destiny was laid out for me from the time I was a child, and I rebelled against my training. I did stupid things, called on forces I couldn’t control. People died because of what I did. When I saw that same sort of wildness in you, I backed away.” He stops once more, his gaze searching her face. “I’m so terribly sorry. I failed you in so many ways.”

Here it is, what Faith has wanted for so long now, handed to her on a silver platter. And she doesn’t know what to do with it. She shrugs. “Water under the bridge. Over the dam. However that fucking expression goes.”

They walk for blocks in silence. When they’re back in sight of Buffy’s house, Faith says, “Guess I hijacked your conversation. What was it you wanted to talk to me about?”

A bitter laugh from Giles. “Oh, it was a wonderful post-prison speech, really. All about how I’d had a troubled past too, and rose above it. Filled with inspiration about how you could be — a grand failure — like me.” Now it’s Giles who refuses to make eye contact, even a sideways glance.

“Well, you make it sound so appealing,” she says breezily.

He manages a laugh, however brief, that sounds almost real. Faith cuts across the lawn toward Buffy’s front porch, and after the slightest hesitation, he steps onto the grass and walks by her side.

Xander’s given up on sleep. The ache in his leg has flared up in the night — another thing Dr. Michaels told him was completely normal. The black mood that’s sunk its claws into him is stronger in darkness too — the only thing that seems to loosen its grip is the sound of Faith’s voice. She’s stayed awake with him, indulging him with a late-night talkfest that has so far rambled all over the map.

They talk a bit about the year they met, but there’s not all that much material that’s safe. He dredges up the memory of the Christmas snowstorm.

“I thought that was such a crackup at the time,” she says. “I couldn’t get over how nuts it made everyone. It’s just snow, I kept thinking. For crissakes, it’s Christmas. Hell, I was used to a nor’easter every other week. I was so busy bein’ cool about it, oh yeah, snow, yawn that I forgot there was something amazing about it.”

Xander strokes the bare skin of her arm, thinking about how she was out of sync with them in so many ways back then, even small ones like this. The whole mood of Sunnydale was transformed that day, and she stood outside it. He feels her loneliness as if it were his, as if it were now, and the emotion is so strong it’s almost physical.

“While I was in the joint, though, I went back to that day a lot. That’s one of the things you do, when you have all that time. Pick the days — or moments — when you were happy or would have been happy, if you’d known enough to stop and let yourself be. You go back, inhabit ‘em, sometimes you do things a little differently.”

“So what did you change about that day?”

“Don’t make me say.” But he strokes her face, teases at her lips with his fingertips until she says, “Aw, just small dorky stuff. Snow angels and hot cocoa with Joyce. Once or twice I think I looked you up and we built a snow fort in your backyard.”

“That would be a lifetime first, but it sounds good to me.” He wishes now that she had come looking for him. Give them a few more things to talk about than hey, remember that time we went to kill Angel together? Some different Christmas memory to replace one of his Hit Parade of Depression standards.

Xander can sense Faith starting to drift into sleep, and he should let her go, but Lonely & Awake is not the corner where he wants to be dropped off. Besides, she told him she’d keep him company as long as he needed. “Did you ever play Anywhere But Here while you were in prison?”

She rouses herself to answer him. “Sure, lots of times. Though it didn’t really work as well without the other part.”

“What part is that?”

“Well, I never gave it a name, but I guess you’d call it Anyone But Me. The old geographic cure has one problem; wherever you go, there you are. So I started imagining I was somewhere else and someone else.”

“Like who?”

“Not like that, nobody real. I’d just, y’know, make up a life.”

“Tell me one.”

“No. Jesus, what a loser thing to do. ‘Let me introduce you to my imaginary friends from the joint.’”

“You think that’s how I see it?” He puts an extra helping of aggrieved on that.

“I don’t know. No. It’s just — this is the stuff you think about to get through, it’s not something you ever talk about.”

“You’re not in there anymore,” he says softly.

“No,” she agrees. She shifts position, curls herself against him, head on his chest. She says nothing for a long time, but he can tell from the tension in her body that she’s not fading into sleep. He strokes her hair, lets her be.

“There’s this tattoo artist, a girl,” she finally says. “Nobody knows where she comes from or what her name is. She just calls herself Obsession. She goes from place to place, no real plan. She shows up in a town and presents herself at the nearest tattoo shop, says she’ll work there or not, whatever, it’s up to them, she doesn’t really give a fuck. They always take her on, though, because she’s as famous as you can get in the underground. Within a day of hitting town she’s booked solid for a month. The deal is this, though: you don’t tell Obsession what you want. She just — reads you, then she gets the gun and inks the piece on you freehand. You submit to her, in this wholly personal way, without ever speaking to her. It’s permanent commitment, but she’s gone in a few weeks.” Faith uncurls herself, stretches her arms and legs, still nestled up close to Xander. “I got a lot of mileage outta that one,” she says dismissively. “Since I could pick her up and take her anywhere. Worked our way through every National Geographic in the library.”

Xander is not willing to let this go — or maybe it’s that her story won’t let him go. “Suppose I went to Obsession,” he says. “What kind of tattoo would she give me?”

“Full back piece,” she says without hesitation. “Turn over.”

Xander stretches out on his belly and Faith begins tracing a finger along the blank canvas of his back. What she draws is nothing like he expected, no sketchy tiger or coiled dragon. It’s pure line, dense and intricate, labyrinthine and mysterious. It spooks him a little that this is what Faith sees when she tries to read him. He has to admit he also finds her light touch fantastically sexy. She’s still working on a tightly filigreed section of his left shoulder when he turns beneath her hand and pulls her down to him.

Where they go is nothing like the dark place they went last night. This is languid, underwater sex, slow-moving and dreamlike. When they disengage, Xander falls into the first deep sleep he’s had in two nights.

He does not dream.

He awakens later in the night to throbbing in his left leg. He left the pain pills in the bathroom, and since he’s reluctant to rouse Faith, he tries to ride it out, fall back to sleep on his own. Thoughts start nagging at him, though, even more insistent than the ache.

The one thing they haven’t talked about in the hours they lay awake was what happened between her and Giles. They returned from their walk around dinner time. Giles turned in as soon as they came back, pleading jet lag, but Xander caught sight of him and he looked like shit. Faith wouldn’t say what they’d talked about, telling him it was as much Giles’ story to reveal as hers. So. It had been about Xander. He made another try each time Faith was close to fading into sleep, but each time she was sharp enough to resist. “Cut it out,” she said on his last attempt. “Jesus.”

Xander carefully removes himself from beneath Faith’s outflung arm and slips out of bed. After a stop in the bathroom to toss down a couple of pain pills, he makes his way to the kitchen. He’s not exactly hungry, but he pokes around in the refrigerator and unearths some pasta with chicken and vegetables. Smells okay, so he grabs a fork and eats it cold from the Tupperware, leaning against the counter, occasionally flexing his leg.

He’s worked his way through half the pasta when Buffy wanders into the kitchen in rumpled sweatpants and tee. “I thought I was the only midnight rambler around here,” he says. A thought occurs to him: “I didn’t wake you, did I?”

“No. I’ve been thrashing around for a while. I heard you come down, and decided I might as well have some company.” She glances around the kitchen as if something is there other than the pots and pans and knickknacks and the stacks of Costco supplies they can’t find storage space for. “I can feel it gathering, can’t you? I’m not going to get much sleep until this is over.”

Xander offers the plastic container. “Here, finish this off. Pasta — the great coma-inducer.”

“No. Thanks. I’m not much for eating right now, either.”

“Willow’s got some kind of nasty, meadowy tea around here. That’s supposed to work.”

She shakes her head. “I just wanted to talk.”

But then she doesn’t, so he fills in. “Faith and I were talking earlier tonight. About that Christmas snowstorm, back when you first kicked the First’s ass. Remember that day?”

“I never kicked the First’s ass — where’d you get an idea like that?”

Xander puts the Tupperware bowl on the counter. “You didn’t die, Angel didn’t — uh, well, get any deader. No one else died. That’s usually what we call winning.”

“The First got bored with us. Or decided to keep us around for entertainment at some later date, like right now. It can wipe us all out any time it wants — it’s got all eternity, so what’s the big hurry?”

This might be Buffy’s idea of good company in the middle of the night, but it isn’t Xander’s favorite insomnia cure. “Yeah, right, the whole primordial evil, dawn-of-time thing. I keep forgetting that. Hard to hold eternity in the human brain.” Dawn of time. Funny coincidence, Dawn being the other entity he knows who’s been rattling around since before time was even a notion. Something sparks in his head, a beginning of an idea about eternal energies, and he struggles to shape it into words. Before he can even get it fully developed, much less mention it to Buffy, she breaks into his thoughts.

“How are things going with Faith?” Obviously working a little harder on the company concept. He’s grateful — since their fight, she’s mostly been ignoring the fact of Xander-and-Faith. She sits on one of the breakfast bar stools.

“They’re great, they’re great,” he says. “I think they’re going great.”

“Uh-huh,” she says dubiously. “You just said that three times. Why don’t you tell me what’s really going on.”

“Well, I don’t know for sure. I mean, it has been going great. She’s changed a lot, Buffy. I wish you’d get to know her again.”

“But—?”

“I think maybe she’s keeping things from me.”

“Like what?”

“The only one I’m sure of is what’s actually going on with my leg.” He realizes he’s been unconsciously rubbing it this whole time, ever since he put down the pasta bowl. He crosses his arms over his chest, hands jammed into armpits.

“Didn’t you see the doctor today?”

“Yeah, and I got this big song and dance about how well it’s healing. He even showed me an x-ray, pretty convincing looking, but how the hell would I know if it was the one they just took, or a ringer? Nobody will explain to me why it feels like there’s something wrong, something still in there. They just tell me I’m fine and to shut up about it.”

“Well, why would the doctor tell you it’s okay if it’s not?”

Xander shakes his head. “Beats fuck out of me. But Faith talked to him first, she’s the one who got me worked into his schedule today.”

Buffy rubs at her neck, lost in thought. “You know, there’s a vibe in the house I’ve been picking up on. Something secretive, you know? Goddammit. This is not the time to let something like that slip out of my notice, but I did.”

“I think she’s got Giles involved in this too.”

“Shit,” she says. “I’m glad you trusted me enough to tell me this, Xander. But be careful who else you talk to, okay? I’ll see if I can figure out what’s happening.”

The idea that someone’s finally taking him seriously suddenly makes him want to weep with relief, but he masks it. “Yeah, well, hurry, would you?”

“Count on it.”

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