Fanfiction: Sunnydale Calling
It was painfully bright in the OR, and cold. Sharp smells like death. Green blurs moved in and out of view, spitting words he couldn’t take in. Pain rushed through him, pathways thrown wide open. From a trickle to full-bore firehose. Like nothing he’d ever imagined.
Before he went under (in case he didn’t come through) he wanted to see one human face. It was all hidden here, beneath caps, masks, eye protection. He wanted to look in someone’s eyes.
He saw her then, standing back from the commotion. Blonde hair shining like (cliché, so sue me, I’m dying) a halo. Her eyes met his, held them. “Xander. They’re saying it’s not looking good. I need to tell you, in case —”
They were trying to turn his head, insert a breathing tube, but he fought them, caught her eye again.
“You’ve always been such a huge disappointment to me. But today was a revelation.”
“Xander.” Voices so loud. He flinched. “We need you to cooperate. Just relax for me.”
“Today,” said Buffy, “was really your worst fuck-up of all time.”
Whatever they’d shot him up with took him then. The OR lights dimmed then went dark.
Somehow Faith carried off the pretense that she was Xander’s wife through the entire admissions process, signing half a ream of papers and sitting through the interview with the clerk. She told everything she knew and made up the rest. If things went well, he could help her sort it out later. If not, well, it mattered as much as a freshly detailed truck in the face of the apocalypse.
Once released, she found a pay phone and called the house, asking for Willow.
She waited for the sound of the phone being passed hand to hand, adrenaline shakes hitting her so hard she thought her legs would go. She sat on the floor, her back against the wall under the bank of phones. “Willow, listen, it’s Faith.” She read the doubtful pause that followed. “I know, my voice is shot to shit, but it’s me. I need you at the hospital. Now. It’s Xander.”
“Oh God. What’s happened?”
“Those eyeless fucks. They attacked us, cut him bad. He’s in surgery right now.”
Faith heard her soft noise of dismay over the line. Yet when Willow found her voice again, it had assumed a strength Faith couldn’t find within herself. “What about you? Are you okay?”
The question — the concern she’d never expected from Willow — closed her throat for a few seconds. “Bruised, is all. I need you to bring some clothes. I’ll have to shitcan these. Grab whatever, just get here soon.”
“Have you called Buffy?”
“No, but she needs to be here, especially if she’s O positive. You call her. Just work it out so I have a few minutes with you. We have to talk. If you don’t find me down on the first floor, try the blood bank. Third floor, I think.”
“There in ten minutes.”
Faith reached up and behind her, fumbling the phone into its cradle. She leaned back against the wall to wait for the shakes to pass. Stared stupidly at the pale skin of her arm against the washed-out pattern on the hospital gown they’d given her to cover her bloody clothes. Faded color marking so much suffering, waves and waves of it. A pair of green-clad legs halted in front of her, and their owner squatted to speak with her. One of the ER guys, carrying a plastic drawstring bag bundled under his arm.
“Mrs. Harris. Why don’t we find you someplace more comfortable? You’ve got someone coming?”
She nodded.
“That’s good. We’ll make sure they know how to find you.” He helped her to her feet and brought her to the surgical waiting room. He got her a hot cup of tea, dumping a fair amount of sugar in it. “You’re still a little in shock; this will help.”
Faith sipped; the syrupy taste disgusted her, but she swallowed some more.
“You did all the right things,” the ER doctor told her. “His chance of making it is all due to you. And there’s a damn good trauma team in the OR with him.”
“Thanks,” she said numbly.
He pushed the plastic bag at her. “You already have his wallet” — true, they’d retrieved it for his insurance card and then turned it over to Faith — “but here’s the rest of his things. The clothes are pretty much destroyed. If you decide to dispose of them here — same goes for your own clothes — make sure you use the biohazard receptacles.”
He droned on a moment or two longer before returning to the ER, but the rest of it was lost on Faith. Bloodless sonofabitch. Dispose. Receptacle. They all had language here to keep the nasty facts of suffering and death at arm’s length. Her clothes and Xander’s, soaked and stiffened with his blood, were nothing but biohazard to them. Something potentially dangerous if they weren’t kept safely segregated from ordinary hospital trash. How could these people help him if they had such little fucking clue who he was, what his blood had bought?
Willow appeared in the waiting room doorway, and Faith rose to her feet, letting the hospital gown fall open.
Willow’s eyes widened. “Holy cats.” She enclosed Faith in her arms, asking again if she was okay. Faith stiffened at first in her embrace, unsure what to do, then she let herself relax into it, draw the strength the Willow offered.
She settled Faith back into her chair, freshened her tea from the pot on the coffee cart. It felt alien to be taken care of, especially by Willow, who’d always felt so threatened by her. Willow sat too, warming her hands on her own cup of tea. “Buffy’ll be here soon. What is it you need to tell me?”
Faith looked down at her cup, the dark amber liquid. “You and Xander. I know you two are really tight.”
“Sure.” Puzzlement still in her voice.
“In the truck. After. He was hazy, everything got kind of tangled. But he talked about you. About, you know, almost marrying. He wanted to tell you.” Fat tears spilled onto Faith’s cheeks, and she scrubbed at them with the back of her hand. “Fuck. He said, ‘Willow, I tried, I really did.’ I thought you should know.” That was all she could get out.
Tears shimmering in her own eyes, Willow touched Faith’s hand then drew hers back. “It’s important to you, doing the right thing.” She didn’t wait for an answer. “I’m glad you told me. But I don’t — I don’t get it. Anya was the one he was supposed to marry. He said it was me?”
“I thought —” Faith shook her head. “He didn’t say. Just that he almost had a wife. I asked who, trying to keep him saying anything, keep him conscious. That’s when he said, ‘Willow, I tried.’ I connected the two. Still. It was important to him. He wanted you to know.”
Willow’s breath hitched, tears making glistening tracks down her cheeks. “I can’t think what he meant. What if I never —” She censored that idea, but it curled into their minds like smoke, hazing over all other thought.
Faith drew herself up a few moments later, determined to bury her fears in some kind of action. “I want to get some slayer blood in him,” she told Willow. “Maybe it’ll — fuck knows what it’ll do. But it can’t hurt.”
Together they went upstairs to the blood bank, were installed in vacant donation chairs where they gaped at the television set, not talking, definitely not watching the dark red ribbon each had pulsing out of her arm. That was how Buffy found them a few minutes later.
“Willow. Mrs. Harris.”
Faith looked around at the technicians. None seemed to have heard. “Keep it down, B. I did whatever it took to get his ass into surgery. Take a peek inside his truck if you think that was a bad idea. Looks like a fucking slaughterhouse floor.”
Her words brought a fresh wave of tears from Willow, but anger rode along with them. “For God’s sake, you two. Don’t fight.”
“Faith, what happened?”
“What’s your blood type?”
“O positive.”
“Grab a chair and open a vein, B., and I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”
The technicians unhooked Faith and Willow, plying them with cookies and donuts, juice and buttons that read Be Nice to Me — I Gave Blood, then got Buffy set up. Once they all drifted off to return their attention to the soap opera playing on the far television, Faith sat by Buffy’s side, tearing into a packet of Oreos as she described the attack.
“We got all of them,” she finished. “Xander killed one, and the two of us together took care of the other three.”
“This all happened when — last night?”
“No, this morning sometime.”
“Because I’m wondering now where the hell you both were last night.”
Faith felt suddenly exhausted. “What does that matter now?”
“It matters because it’s not The Real World: Sunnydale we’re living here. We’re a camp of defenders. And I know the concept of discipline has never been high on your hit parade, but now it’s going to mean the difference between life and death. Where were you two?”
“My old place, the loft. You’ve been there.” That was the understatement of the decade. She and Buffy had tried to kill one another there; Buffy had nearly succeeded.
“Jesus H. Christ, Faith. You took Xander to your and the mayor’s old love nest?”
Faith shot to her feet. The room tilted and grew dim.
Willow reached out a hand to steady her. “Easy. You’re a quart low.”
Faith waited until Buffy’s face became clear in her vision. “You do not want to say that ever again.”
“If it belonged to Wilkins, it’s as good as the Hellmouth Bed & Breakfast. Were you trying to set Xander up, or are you that stupid?”
Stupid, Faith thought. Stupid, thoughtless, horny beyond clue. The both of them, but the fault was hers.
“Ease up, Buffy,” Willow said. “Can’t you see what’s in front of your face? She’s in love with him.”
The only thing worse to Faith than seeing the shock and surprise in Buffy’s expression was knowing that it was mirrored in her own.
She stayed at his side all that night because they let her. First she’d locked herself in a restroom for a cat bath and to change into the clothes Willow had brought. Not that Faith gave the slightest shit who saw her in clothes soaked with Xander’s blood (biohazard). Except Xander himself.
He was pretty much still checked out, though. They’d roused him in Recovery long enough to be sure he had come out of the anesthesia, then they hazed him right back up with pain meds and sent him to his room. A few times during the night he’d nearly surfaced, waking her with agitated, unintelligible mutterings, calming again as she took his hand and spoke soothingly. After his third bout with restlessness, she cracked open one of the Red Bulls she’d had Willow bring her, and kept talking.
Faith spoke about her life: the one she’d had early on, before she’d learned she was in the Slayer line. The powerlessness of knowing every day she was at the mercy of adults who did not give a shit, who ruled their lives — and hers — by whim. How all that seemed to change when she became a slayer, the way power seemed to hum and crackle in her body, and how difficult it was to tamp all that down to fit the expectations (whims) of Wesley and Giles or even Buffy. She talked about Angel and how he’d stopped her spiral out of control, and about her last few years in prison.
It was possible to tell him these things because he slept. She would say them again some day when he was conscious, because now she knew she would not be crushed by speaking them.
As light crept in through the cracks in the blinds, she kept on, though her voice was a wreck. “I’ve apologized — or tried to — to just about everyone I hurt. Hell, I even wrote a letter to Dawn, apologizing for teaching her to steal, and apparently that’s something that never even happened. I’ve never said, though, that I was sorry for what I did to you. You offered me something nobody ever had, Xander. I just didn’t know how to accept it or value it.” She stroked her thumb over the back of his hand, and leaned her head against the bed railing. Tears fell, but she was too fatigued to realize it. “You don’t know how many times I took all that back, sitting there in prison. How many times I let you stand by me when I told Giles the truth and none — none of the rest of it ever happened.”
She felt a faint pressure of his fingers around hers; almost too slight to notice. Faith looked up and met his gaze, hazy still, but it was Xander in there.
“Hey,” he said. His voice rasped too — they’d told her he might have some hoarseness from the breathing tube.
Faith picked an ice chip from the bucket the night nurse had kept refreshing, and fed it to him. “Hey yourself. How are you feeling?”
“Packed in cotton. All over, but mostly inside my head. Yay, drugs.”
“Yeah, well, be careful not to say that to anyone but me, Xander.”
“How long they leaving this in?”
“Leaving what?”
“The knife,” he said. “I can tell it’s there.” She could see the tug of the medication pulling at him.
“Xander, it’s out. You’re fine.”
“I feel it.” He let himself drift away from her, not quite asleep yet not really conscious.
Two quick taps sounded at the door, and Buffy pushed it open a few inches. “How’s he doing?”
“He was awake a few moments just now, but I think —”
His fingers tightened around hers. “Tell her no,” he slurred.
“Xander, it’s Buffy. She came yesterday too, while you were still —” Faith could see him fighting the undertow now.
“I don’t want her.” His breath grew ragged. “She said … she’s said enough.” Eyelids fluttered as he struggled to stay conscious. “Get her out.”
Faith smoothed his hair back from his damp forehead. “I’ll take care of it. You sleep.” She crossed to the half-opened door, where Buffy stood, frozen. “B., I’m sorry. He said —”
“I heard him.” Tears swam in her eyes.
“I don’t know what he’s —”
“No,” Buffy said, forcing steel into her tone. “I’m sure you don’t.” She turned on her heel and marched away.