Author's Note: from a prompt at comment_fic on livejournal : what if Buffy stopped Faith from killing the mayor's aide? The format is inspired by the twoendings fanfiction community on livejournal; one plot has two endings and you choose the one you like better.

Fic:

Buffy saw it in time; her hand was on Faith's in a flash, and before the mayor's aide could wince in fear, Faith was looking perplexed and fairly pissed at Buffy. Then she did a double take and saw that she was about to kill a human - a sniveling human who soon ran away threatening them with being devoured by city hall -- but a human nonetheless.

They looked at each other, reluctant gratitude meeting veiled worry. It was too close a call. But neither of them wanted to dwell on the what-ifs. On the hows and whys and whethers. It would have changed Faith - maybe changed them both.

But Buffy saw it in time. No harm, no foul. And they had bigger problems to deal with.

And they did. They worked together against the mayor. Against later enemies as well.

But that world where it happened - where Buffy didn't stop her in time - where Faith killed a man... they didn't think about it much. But that world would have been a lot different.

Ending 1:

Faith never killed anyone. Not anyone with something there to kill.

She never joined the mayor. She never did more than flirt with Angel. She never fought Buffy until she got shanked with her own knife.

She never spent a comatose year dreaming of climbing out of a pit full of fire and blood.

She never more than half-formed the question of why people looked at Buffy the way they would never look at her.

She smiled and slayed and did her best to act like she was one of them, never asking herself why she felt it was an act, why she was better at understanding how monsters think than humans.

When the First came to visit, it went for the weakest. Not Spike. Not Andrew. Not the scared young slayers-to-be.

It came to Faith. And it showed her the shadow inside her, the vine of hate and rage that she had choked on for so long. She had no way of fighting it.

When it was over, when they had lost the earth, and they sat huddled, waiting for the end, they didn't know who had betrayed them. Faith sat silently with them, not feeling any reason she should tell them.