Fanfiction: Five by Three

So Faith did this thing. A stupid one, in retrospect. She saw a demon about a truck.

While she’d stayed with Xander at the hospital, Willow had helped try to sort things out with the pickup. No detailer in town would touch it; they all claimed the blood-soaked cab was a hopeless cause. Anya had helped dig up Xander’s insurance papers, but the agent was no help either. According to Willow, if Anya had any remaining influence with the dark powers, there’d be a toad working in insurance adjustments in Sunnydale. Faith asked Willow about a spell, but the only one she could find to get rid of the blood had to be done inside the truck, and that was something Faith wouldn’t dream of asking.

So Faith asked Spike if he had any ideas. He put her onto a sweet but butt-ugly demon named Clem, who introduced her to a couple of demons who were fond of aged blood. She offered them ten bucks each and all they could eat (which she resolutely does not think about), and the deal was done.

So now the demons tell Clem who tells Spike who tells Faith that the truck is ready. Informing Xander that she’s headed out to the packie to get some respectable beer to drink, she sets off on foot to the place they’ve agreed to meet. Clem’s there to facilitate, a real peacemaker of a demon, which is a good thing, since these fermented-blood freaks are a nervy pair of bastards, trying to wheedle a tip out of her. If Clem weren’t there, she’d just behead the annoying fucks, but instead she suggests in vivid terminology that they shut up while she inspects their work.

Faith reaches for the door handle but has to take a couple of deep breaths before she can pull it open. She’s had some dreams about being trapped in the cab, with the sticky heat and smell of all that blood. Sometimes Xander is there with her, dead or dying; sometimes it’s just her and the gore. She has to stay the hell away from the kitchen whenever Spike is anywhere near the microwave, for fear that the scent of hot blood will kick her back into that nightmarish drive to the hospital.

Behind her, she can feel Clem’s sympathy melting off him much as his flesh does, and that makes her butch up. She seizes the handle and yanks.

It looks perfect inside, just as it had been, freshly detailed, when Xander drove her back to Sunnydale from prison. There’s no residual smell, no rusty flecks missed in seams or crevices.

“I told you we do nice work,” one of the demons says as pulls two tens from her pocket. “How about a little extra?”

“Sure,” she tells them. She reaches under her jacket for the blade sheathed at her waistband. “I’ll give you an extra thirty seconds’ head start, on top of the thirty seconds I was gonna give you.”

They don’t stick around to find out if she’s bluffing.

“Sorry,” Clem says. “They’ve cornered the market in this kind of work, so they can afford to be schmucks.”

“No problem. I’ve run into enough of that type in the prison system. Only with these guys I don’t have to put up with their shit.”

Faith gives Clem a lift to the cemetery, stopping first at the store to buy him some beer and junk food as thanks for helping out. She picks up a couple of sixes for Xander, the darker microbrews he seems to favor, for when he can go back to his nighttime beer in the truck ritual. Once she’s alone again, she realizes her hands are clamped, bloodless, on the wheel, her heart racing. Faith has no idea how to do this; she’s no good at gifts. She’s never had any money to buy them, never had a talent for making something out of nothing or even picking up on the dumb little things that make a person feel you’ve noticed what they like. Like those Japanese cookie sticks Willow brought him in the hospital. This is the biggest thing she’s ever had to give to another person, and it scares her.

She pulls up in front of the house and goes in search of Xander. When she finds him, he’s sitting on the back porch steps with Willow, deep in conversation. It looks serious, and she thinks maybe she should leave them undisturbed. Willow senses her presence, though, turning to greet her, so she steps out onto the porch.

“Hey,” Faith says. She feels like puking, though that’s stupid; he’ll be glad to have his truck back. “I’ve got somethin’ to show you. Out front.”

Willow lends him a steadying hand and he rises and follows Faith to the street. Willow tags along, keeping back a bit to let Faith get all the glory.

“My truck,” he says. “I thought everyone said it was a total loss.”

“Yeah, well, I kept asking around till I shook something loose. Look inside, it’s just like after you had it detailed.”

Xander opens the passenger door, strangely quiet. He runs his hands over the seat where he’d sprawled, bleeding almost to death, and the dashboard. “How’d you do this?”

She tries a smile. “Strictly don’t ask, don’t tell.”

He wheels on her, his expression closed down, his eyes hard, unreadable. Instinct pushes her to take a step back, but she fights it and holds her ground.

Willow steps in. “This is fantastic, Xander. You don’t know what Anya and I went through, trying to get this fixed, and everyone told us it was impossible.”

“How’d you do it?” he asks again, and now some of the potentials are drifting out to the front yard, exclaiming over Faith’s surprise, but quickly falling silent as they catch the tension between her and Xander.

“I’m not so sure you’ll want to know,” Faith says again. “One of those ‘ignorance is bliss’ special cases.”

“I want to know,” he says, his voice with that same cold steel it had held two nights ago, when they’d had the fight about his leg. “I want to know everything.”

“Fine.” She shrugs. “Spike’s friend Clem knows a couple of guys.”

“Guys?”

“Demons, if you want to get technical. They have a thing for old blood, you’ve got a shiny new truck again. Everyone’s happy.” Clem, maybe, was happy, but why get all legalistic about it?

“You let demons work over my truck. And I’m supposed to ever want to use it again?”

“Xander—” This from Dawn. “You know she meant—”

Faith can’t bear hearing the end of that sentence. She cuts in: “You do what you want with it, it’s your truck. It was fucked before, it’s no worse than fucked now. Just let me know if you want me to push it over a cliff for you; at least then there might be insurance.” Turning for the house, she pitches the keys into the bushes as she climbs the front steps.

She heads down to the basement, all the while telling herself she should have known better. Never been any fucking good at gifts, she knew that, she’s always fucking known that. She winds a couple of loops of tape around her hands. Why hadn’t she paid attention to the queasy feeling she had on the way back to the house? Or hell, taken the easy way out, left the truck to be scrapped or torched it before she’d gotten those insurance fuckers involved. The bag hangs there on its chain but all desire to lay into it drains from Faith’s muscles. She paces instead. Fucking worthless. Who could love her? Not her mother. Not Giles. Xander gave it the old college try, but she’s seeing now how well that’s going to work out. She’s got one person out of a whole lifetime who she can say loved her, and his heart was connected straight to hell.

Faith slams a fist into the meat of her thigh, as hard as she can, then drops onto the pile of exercise mats and sits with her head in her hands. Only when she watches the skin redden and thread with its first faint purplings does she realize this is the same spot the Bringer’s knife sank into Xander’s leg.

The girls skulk off, embarrassed. A look passes between Willow and Dawn and then Dawn disappears too. “That was pretty harsh,” Willow says quietly. “Faith went to a lot of trouble to do that for you.”

“I didn’t ask her to.”

“No. You didn’t have to ask her to.”

“She went behind my back, Willow.”

“It’s called a surprise.”

“Let’s just stop talking about this, because you don’t understand.”

Willow reaches for his hand, the one that’s not busy white-knuckling the cane. “Make me understand.”

“There’s nowhere private to talk.” The house, the front porch or back, there’s no place to go without someone stumbling over you sooner rather than later.

“There’s your truck,” Willow says. “Sorry. Not funny. Wait — what about this?” She unlatches the pickup’s tailgate and lets it down. “It’s a place to sit, and I suppose it’s demon-free.”

After a moment he hoists himself onto the tailgate, shifting so his back is against the side wall, his legs stretched out on the truck bed. Willow positions herself opposite him, her left leg touching his right.

“So talk to me, Xander,” she says quietly. “What’s got you so worked up?”

“Now there’s a conversation starter that really makes a guy want to open up. It’s almost as good as ‘what’s your fucking problem?’”

Willow bristles. “What is your fucking problem? I’m trying to figure out what’s going on with you, but I’m not getting you at all.”

It always takes him aback when Willow lobs a fuck into a conversation. The F-bomb, she calls it, and with her it is the heavy ordnance because she uses it so sparingly.

He blinks, takes himself out of attack mode. He considers telling her everything, then remembers Buffy’s warning. “I don’t know.” But this is Will, he tells himself. He owes her something. Their friendship is almost old enough to vote. He owes her the truth. “I do know. There’s some piece of that knife still in my leg, Will. I can feel it in there, and it’s doing something to me. I’ve been saying it since I was in the hospital, but nobody will listen. Nobody will tell me the truth. If you know what they’re hiding from me, tell me what it is.”

“All I’ve heard is the same thing you have, that the doctor says you’re doing great.”

“Swear to me.”

“I swear.” Her voice quavers. She reaches out in the gathering darkness to take his hand. “Xander, I don’t think anyone’s keeping things from you—”

“Believe what you want to believe,” he says flatly. “But I need your help.”

“Anything I can.”

“Find out for me. However you have to: get it out of Faith, or do the research on those goddamn Bringers and their knives. Whatever. But I need to know what’s inside of me, and how to get it out.”

Willow promises, and he relaxes just a bit. She says the whole truck thing will be okay, that there’s a ritual she can do to clean the cab of any leftover demon mojo. She talks about Faith, making a case for her. The more she talks, the more his leg aches. Finally he makes his excuses, heads into the house.

He cannot sleep with that thing in his leg, that bitch in his bed.

He couldn’t believe she had the goddamn nerve to show up here as if nothing had changed. She came into the room just as he was pulling a tee shirt over his head and leaned against the door jamb, watching him. Taking in the fine scratches cross-hatching his right forearm.

“Sorry about the keys,” she said. “That was juvenile.” He had nothing to say. She held his gaze. “If you want me to get what the cold black stare is about, you’ll have to tell me. I don’t score so big on the non-verbal comprehension.”

“You’re planning on sleeping here?”

“Fuckin’ A right, Xander,” she said. “Go ahead and be pissed off. It’s your right. But I’m not bunking out there in the dorm. Bed’s big enough for two.”

She sleeps beside him, on his right as always so she doesn’t bump the leg. But she’s curled away from him, not against him, and there’s been no conversation. The effort not to touch her inadvertently in his restless movements spreads tension through his body, and the ache radiates along with it.

To say the pain’s worse would be a joke. It ranges from baseline red-hot to searing white heat. Xander can’t quite locate it — sometimes it seems to be in his head, the kind of broken-glass headache that comes with a high fever; other times it’s in his thigh. Finally he throws back the sheet and gets out of bed — easier without her sprawled all over him. He stops in the bathroom to slam back a few pills, and heads downstairs.

He ransacks the kitchen for the Yellow Pages and hunches over it, leaning on his forearms on the counter. He’s got cousins — the branch of the family that rarely speaks to his side — a couple of them are doctors. Though he’s paid a psychic price for every favor they’ve ever done for him, he thinks he can trust them to help. He riffles through the physicians listings until he finds the handful of Harrises. Topher. Jesus, was there ever a Christopher in the annals of history who went by “Topher” who wasn’t a completely unbearable specimen? Ah, and he’s gone into proctology. Takes one to know one. His brother Jared, mostly an okay guy, but he’s a gynecologist. Huge help.

Another wave hits, worse than any he’s felt since the hospital. Christ. He bows his head over the phone book, trying to deepen his breath, but it’s going shallow, rapid.

“Xander.” It’s Buffy, but he can’t respond, can’t even look up at her. All he can do is try to ride this one out, hope there’s an other side to it. “Xander, listen to me. I got some demon cornered at Willie’s, and he told me what he knew about this thing. You’ve gotta get it out of your leg.”

The pain eases off just a notch, enough to let him speak. “First thing tomorrow, Buffy. I’ve got a cousin who’s a—”

“It’s killing you, Xander. Now.”

“But how—”

She’s standing by the butcher block. Of course, simple. He seizes one of Faith’s big knives — he thinks of them as hers, though they’ve been in this house since he’s known Buffy — and takes a shaky breath.

She keeps her blades so sharp the first cut doesn’t even hurt until he’s already begun the third.

Faith flashes awake as Xander leaves the bed. It hasn’t been the worst sleep in her life — there’s about a thousand nights in prison that vie for that honor — but lying next to someone who loathes her has much of that same flavor. When the door closes behind him, she rolls onto her back, grateful to have a moment where she can take up some space without crossing into his danger zone.

She wishes she’d never opened herself up to this. Her life has taught her pretty well to keep things superficial and — well, maybe not always safe. But she knew better than to leave herself vulnerable to this sort of shit. Xander seemed different, though, and that’s where she got caught.

Different. She sits up in bed. Last fucking thing she wants is to go into any room he’s occupying. But her sense that something’s wrong is so overwhelming that when she makes her move for the door, her feet barely touch the floor on the way there.

Faith races down the stairs and rounds the entryway to the dining room. What she sees through the kitchen door does not surprise her somehow.

Blood. At one time she might have said it was a lot of blood, but now she knows better. Xander’s hand — the one not holding the knife — is covered in it, and his left leg, which he has raised, a foot resting on the low rung of one of the kitchen stools.

She slows her step, not wanting to provoke him into doing anything worse. “Xander. Put that down.”

He seems not to hear her; his attention is focused on a point close by, as if there’s someone with him. Fuck. The First.

“Xander!”

He switches his grip on the knife, readying himself to plunge it deep. Now there’s going to be a lot of blood. Faith abandons caution, running at him full tilt, screaming at him to drop the fucking knife, drop it now.

They crash to the floor together, the stool clattering down beside them. Every bruise on her body feels the impact, and Xander howls and curses. Faith tries to pry his fingers from the knife hilt as his bloody fist winds itself into her hair, yanks hard, breaking her hold.

She grinds her elbow into a pressure point at his shoulder, and he releases her hair. She dives once more for his knife hand. “Xander, listen. You put that blade in your leg and you’ll die.”

“I’m dying now, bitch.”

Blood smears between their bodies, making every point of contact greasy and slick. She locks both hands around his wrist, but before she can try to knock the knife loose, he swings a fist into her ear, and she tumbles off him. Through the roaring in her head, she hears the slap of bare feet and murmur of girl voices. What the fuck do they think, this is another rough sex fest? “A little help, yo,” she calls out, a split second before he clocks her again and she snaps her head against the sink cabinet. Xander raises the knife in his fist, but suddenly Spike is there, twisting his arm up behind him, and she hears the knife clatter on the tile. As she’s trying to rise, a pair of legs flash past her and there’s another howling curse from Xander.

Kennedy stands over him, panting. In the meat of his upper arm quivers the dart she has jabbed into him. “Trank dart,” she huffs, pleased with herself.

Already Xander’s struggles are growing clumsy and weak. “Buffy,” he says. “Tell them.”

Faith shoves past her, yanks the dart out of his arm. “Dumbass,” she snarls. “No way of telling how that shit’ll react with the drugs he’s on.”

Xander slips out of Spike’s grasp, unconscious.

Behind her, she hears Amanda’s reedy voice. “Oh my god, Faith. You’re bleeding.”

A few minutes later, Giles, Willow, Anya and Dawn are down in the kitchen too, and the potentials have been sent back to bed. Dawn sits cross-legged on the floor beside Xander, holding his hand as Giles cleans and bandages the new wound on his thigh. Willow is doing the same for a cut on Faith’s arm that slashes across her tattoo. All those wicked fight-or-flight chemicals still cruise through Faith’s body, nowhere for them to go, and she trembles violently on the kitchen stool as Willow attends her. At Giles’ suggestion, Anya puts on water to boil, starts gathering tea supplies.

“He called out to Buffy,” Faith says, “just before he dropped. And when I walked in on him, he was listening, but there was no one else in the room.”

“The First,” Spike says. “So how does this happen? He already knows the First can appear as Buffy.”

“He was the one who warned me, just yesterday,” Giles says.

“Right. So how does he fall for it again?”

Willow’s hands stop moving for a moment, coming to rest on Faith’s shoulders. “It told him what he wanted to hear.”

“Come on, Red.”

“I’m serious. He talked to me earlier tonight about the knife wound, asked me to help him. He thinks there’s a piece of it still inside. He said it’s doing something to him.”

“The wraith knife,” pipes up a voice behind them. Andrew. He’s good at fading back, being invisible — till he opens his mouth. Faith reminds herself not to forget this. “You know, when Frodo gets stabbed by the knife of Mordor and the shards keep working their way —”

Faith turns, gives him her own version of the cold black stare, well honed in prison. “There are no shards. The x-rays were clean.”

“Could there be something else?” Dawn asks. “Poison, maybe? Or a spell?”

“I think we have to consider the possibility,” Giles says.

Faith digs her thumb into the bruise on her thigh, the one she made with her own fist. “Jesus. He’s been begging me for help since the first time he woke up in the hospital. And I —”

“Nobody knew,” Willow says. She gives a gentle squeeze to Faith’s shoulder. “You did the best you could — got him to the doctor, made sure he took an X-ray. None of us thought to consider —”

Andrew jumps in again: “If whatever it is reaches his heart, do you think he’ll become a Bringer?”

Faith is off the stool and halfway to him by the time Willow catches her uninjured arm, pulls her back. “You can leave before I hurt you,” she tells Andrew, “or after. I really don’t care.”

He disappears without another word.

She turns back to the others. “We have to decide what to do about Xander. We don’t know how long he’s going to be out, so we’d better figure out what we’re doing with him until we can learn what’s wrong and fix it.”

“Well,” Spike says, “like any well-equipped basement, this one has a set of chains.”

“No. Jesus.”

“It might be necessary, Faith,” Giles says. “At the very least he needs to be under guard, but our strongest warriors may be needed elsewhere.”

The door off the back porch opens and Buffy steps in, returned from patrol. “The whole house is lit up, what’s —” She takes in the scene in the kitchen, Xander sprawled on the floor, Willow and Giles finishing up their bandaging. “What happened?”

Willow fills her in, with a couple of additions by Giles and Spike.

“We need to get him somewhere safe before that stuff wears off,” Buffy says.

Faith bristles. “Working on it.” She silently curses herself for letting Buffy get to her. Ego doesn’t matter, she tells herself. Xander does.

“How violent was he?” Buffy asks. “Do we need to get him down to the basement?”

“Was a helluva fight,” Spike comments. “He knocked Faith here half cockeyed.”

“I don’t want him chained in the goddamn cellar like some kind of lunatic.” Faith casts a glance at Spike. “No offense.”

“But he is a lunatic,” Anya offers. “At least right now.” Faith gives her a double dose of the look that chased Andrew off, but Anya’s impervious. “I’m not saying it out of spite. It’s not like it reflects that well on me, having been engaged to him and all.”

Faith’s about ready to rise to her feet again when Giles says, “Anya—” in a tone of warning, and Anya presses her lips together.

A faint groan escapes Xander, which takes the discussion out of the realm of the purely theoretical. Faith is swiftly outvoted, and the men hastily get him down the wooden stairs and onto the bed Spike’s been using.

She follows, her heart twisting when she sees the shackles bolted to the cellar wall. “Just the one wrist,” she says. “All we have to do is keep him away from anything sharp.”

Spike and Giles exchange a glance, decide there’s no harm in doing it her way. She turns away when she hears the wrist band snap shut. Lot of memories attached to that sound, none of them good.

Willow’s troubled gaze meets hers. “Let’s get upstairs,” she suggests. “He’ll be okay.”

They leave Dawn to sit with him, keeping watch until he wakes. When they reach the kitchen, Anya’s made the tea, and Faith accepts a mug. She wishes it held something stronger.

Willow gestures to the bandage on her arm. “I’m afraid that’s going to leave a scar.”

She shrugs. “Won’t be my first.” By reflex, her hand travels to her belly, where she still carries the fading scar from that night she and Buffy fought. “So Willow, did you find anything yet on this knife?”

Willow doses up her tea, using that as a reason not to look at Faith. “I haven’t started on that.”

“Well, what the fuck were you waiting for?”

She meets her gaze. “There was something else Xander asked me to research. Earlier, before you came with the truck.”

“More important than this?”

“Only in an apocalyptic sense.” That silences Faith, and Willow goes on. “He came up with something that might be a way of fighting the First. It goes back before the beginning of time, and well, so does Dawn. Xander thought the First could be fought with the energy those monks placed in Dawn. That maybe there was some way of — I don’t know, activating it. I’ve been trying to look for some way of doing that without hurting her.”

“That’s a terrific idea,” Anya says brightly. “It’s always good to get your anti-apocalypse strategies from someone who’s crazier than a shithouse rat.”

“Anya,” Giles says, “if you can’t say anything useful, do shut up.”

“Fine. Suppress dissent. It’s the in thing these days.”

“I can’t do this,” Faith says. She stands. “If I spend five more minutes in this room listening to this shit, I’ll kill something.” She looks meaningfully at Anya.

Just then a shriek rises up from the cellar. “Oh god oh god oh god! Buffy! Spike! Giles!”

Faith shoves past all of them and runs downstairs. Dawn stands rigid by the base of the stairs, both hands pressed to her face.

Blood again. Xander has come to and torn off the bandages, and now he’s clawing at the knife cuts he made. Tackling him again, she keeps up a frantic litany in an almost unbroken stream. “Xander don’t don’t Xander we’re getting you help please….” She scrambles to catch hold of his unchained wrist, but he swings the other, clipping her in the temple with the shackle. Faith rolls off the bed, shooting stars across her vision. This is fucking getting old.

Buffy and Spike move past her to the bed.

“Help me, Buffy, get it out, get it out —” He doesn’t lash out at her, instead pawing once more at his leg. In tandem they tackle him, shackling the other wrist. “Tell them what you told me.”

“Xander, listen. That wasn’t me. It was the First. It wants you to hurt yourself.”

He yanks at the chains, then falls back, panting. “For god’s sake, Buffy,” he says. Faith can barely hear him over the renewed noise in her head. “Why are you doing this to me?”

Faith scrambles to her feet and flees the cellar.

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