Chapter 1: The Warrior's Life
After all the trouble she'd been through to get herself inside, she never thought it was going to be that easy to get out. But out she was, and with good reason. It almost brought tears to her eyes but that was the fact of life. You live it, in pain and sadness and anger, and then you die. Sometimes slowly, sometimes abruptly, but die you will.
Buffy had died. For a worthy cause, she was told. To save the world she was told. To stop a goddess from enslaving humanity she was told.
Cut the bull, B. You died cos you were tired of living to fight, of fighting to live. You died cos you gave up.
She understood what that was like. She gave up once, a long time ago, but never took the much more permanent route of death. No, she took the harder, more painful road of turning evil. She started walking the wrong side of the tracks and it took a hard effort to pull her back into the light. And in her line of work, that was all it was.
Light and dark. Black and white. Evil and good. Clear lines separated the two, with just enough space for the shades of gray to lie in comfort. Right now she treaded the gray, striving for the light, but too comfortable and attached to the dark to make the journey easy. But she was told it was going to be difficult. The price of giving up was picking up the pieces afterwards. Like a 10,000 piece puzzle smashed onto the floor, putting your life back together was going to need a lot of patience and determination.
She had sat through prison for a year. Not that long by some standards, but in her business, a year was practically a lifetime.
Her name was Faith. She was the Vampire Slayer. Her line of work was putting herself into the path of danger against the supernatural forces of evil so that normal people could go to sleep safe at night.
She had smashed the puzzle, and was slowly putting it back together, one piece at a time.
Long story short, the Council came and gave her a choice. Come back into the fold as an obedient Council Slayer – complete with Watcher and all – or they'd pay the guards to look away while she slowly got strangled to death in the toilet. The choice was obvious, really. Give the Council the finger and go down fighting.
But something made her stop and think. Maybe it was a feeling of guilt. A debt she owed to B, maybe. Or the Angel. Or to someone else. It hardly mattered. Her road to redemption wasn't really getting walked with her in prison and getting killed in the can was not something she really looked forward to.
Not that the alternative was pleasing, either. But the Council guys they sent told her that the vote to keep her alive was won by a very slim margin. So she figured she could behave for a little while. Be the nice girl for once and listen to orders. Hell, after a year in prison, following rules and orders almost came in second nature.
So she'd play with Council. Go back out into the world, fight the good fight. Probably get killed fighting, some random night by some random demon or vampire. It was better than getting a shiv in the back from a pissed-off inmate. She didn't have to go back to Sunnydale, not yet. She had the option of getting a Watcher, which she declined. They left her an unlimited line of credit and a warning that if she so much as let a toe stray across that line again, they would end her time as Slayer.
So she was going to play nice. Who knows? Maybe she'd come to like it.
It had been 2 years. Other than the one time Wesley had called her and asked for help with Angelus – she nearly gave up that time, nearly died trying to save Angel - she hadn't talked to anyone important besides her contact at the Council, Jonathan. She talked to Angel once in a while, exchanged a few pleasantries, always promising to drop by, but never keeping it. She had definitely not talked to anyone from Sunnydale.
Oh yeah. She got word that the other Slayer had come back to life. See?Knewyoucouldn'tgiveupthefightforlong,B.Itain'tlikeyou.
She lived her life alone, days asleep and getting stoned by prime-time television, nights in the endless adrenaline of the fight. She'd traveled much of America and to other parts of the world. Traveled enough to know that the Hellmouth wasn't the only place where bad things happened. Heck, compared to the backwoods of Malaysia and Indonesia, the stuff that demons do in the 'Dale seemed pretty damn tame.
Demons there knew the town belonged to the Slayer. That meant, however, that the demons across the wide world ran rampant, knowing there wasn't much that was able to stop them. So Faith took on the hard fight of letting the word spread. There were two Slayers now, and the world wasn't as safe for the nightlife as it once was.
That was the way the life of the Slayer was supposed to be. Travel the world, fight evil, and maybe stop apocalypses once or twice. Die a violent, bloody death; go to the place with the harps and clouds and angels. B changed all that, much like she changed a lot of other things. B was good at that.
But there were two Slayers now, and the line would continue through her. She needed to fight the fight like it was meant to be fought. Let B have her life in Sunnydale, with her friends and family. She deserved that much. This was the only life Faith knew. The only life she deserved.
The warrior's life.