A/N: unedited, first draft. Not short enough to be a drabble, but without any real plot. Just Giles, musing.
It will do something to you, living with someone like her. It changed him.
Of course, he imagined that it would have been so with anyone else. If Xander or Buffy or Willow, or even Wesley had opted to move in with him, it would have changed him in some way or another— and vice versa. He couldn't fathom any living arrangements with Xander lasting very long: even if the boy decided to grow up, they would drive each other crackers. With Willow or Wesley, he'd become completely work-oriented; books and charts and occult knowledge would end up replacing food, sex, good manners, and, in the long-run, a decent taste in alcohol. With Buffy . . . well, he wasn't quite sure that he was ready to think about how that might have turned out.
But with Faith. . . .
Initially, he'd thought it would be like living with an especially willful teenager— the form of Faith they had first encountered, when Buffy and her Scoobie pals were still in highschool. He assumed that she would blast loud music at odd hours, sleep an ungodly amount of time, and come home every morning unnecessarily bloodied up, perhaps with an entourage in tow. He envisioned his livingroom within a few weeks of her arrival, junk food and condom wrappers in odd places, clothes thrown about the sofa, weaponry and other such shop-lifted trophies left in dangerous places (like on the floor, where he would step on them). He would be reduced to a maid in his own home.
It wasn't long, however, before he realized that, like his other young charges, she too had grown up.
For example: she slept only a required amount of time and kept up training without nagging on his behalf. She made coffee— stark and black, with a lump or two of sugar— before she went out for the night and always left about a cup and a half for him. She did not bat an eyelash about keeping a cellphone on her at all times, taking it without question or stubborn reproach when he handed it to her. She made sure to tell him when she was veering off and going somewhere unusual on her rounds. If she shoplifted, she was sure to be discreet about it (and some of it was technically not shoplifting, only borrowing and returning with minor damage). She kept her personal things in her own room which was, itself, more or less tidy and uncluttered (not much use for knic-knacks, she said). And she never once brought anyone home with her.
And if that wasn't something to be awed about, he also discovered that there was a lot about Faith Lehane that he didn't know.
She could cook, for example. Now, because cooking was something that all self-sufficient bachelors musts learn sooner or later, Rupert made sure his pantry and fridge were kept stocked with the usual ingredients and such. And Faith, never one to be a stranger, had probably poked around in his kitchen a bit and found said cooking materials. It was near the end of the second week of her stay that he first opened the fridge and found (shockingly enough) one of his glass dishes, covered in plastic wrap and laden down with what he deemed to be a casserole. And after reasoning that it wasn't poisoned and that it was, at the moment, the only edible thing in the fridge, he was brave enough to scoop some of it onto a plate, heat it up, and try it.
For the longest time, he couldn't decided which was more flabbergasting: the fact that Faith had actually cooked or the fact that she had cooked something good.
Also, she liked to read.
Not voraciously, mind you. She was nowhere near as bookish as, say, Willow or Rupert himself. She could not be found at any given spare moment curled up with a good, solid novel in his comfiest armchair, completely and totally engrossed in the adventures of the page. In fact, she wasn't much one for novels at all; she had once told him that the only two books she'd ever read, front to back, without skipping any pages or chapters, were Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and William March's The Bad Seed— "Both when I was twelve and still had pigtails in my hair," she said.
She seemed to enjoy short stories, though. Sometimes, when he'd come back from research or "a stalk around the block", he would turn the key in the lock and hear the sound of paper fluttering on the otherside of the door; and when he would walk into the living room, he'd find a book on the coffee table that he didn't remember leaving there. Saffron and Brimstone by Elizabeth Hand or No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July, or even a collection of Ray Bradbury that he thought he'd lost. He'd even come across her peeking through The Collected Oscar Wilde one Sunday evening before a run.
And once— just once— he had come into the livingroom around noon, unable to sleep, and found her, passed out on his couch, long, tan limbs sprawling, his own slim copy of The Little Prince open on her stomach.
There were other such little things. The weeks wore on, and they grew closer. He found out that she liked silent films and old black-and-whites; sometimes, when they were both too exhausted for sleep, they would plop down in front of his unimpressive little tv and, with beers in hand (or brandy or scotch, or whatever they happened to feel like), watch whole seasons of The Three Stooges. She regularly practiced meditation and could entrance herself deeply enough to where, if he was quiet, he could sit down a mere seven feet from her without her noticing. When she was drunk, she could do near-perfect impersonations of old cartoon characters, Marvin the Martian and Jessica Rabbit being her favorites. She hummed to herself in the shower; once, curiosity had prompted him to linger near the door and listen long enough to distinguish amongst the rushing water something that sounded suspiciously like Chim Chim Cherie.
Not everything was this pleasant, though. She was still Faith, after all. She still went to wild concerts, still slept with random strangers, still partied like the world would end by dawn, still got into sticky situations and as many fights as she could fit into one night.
Of course, they were just living together. They were room mates, each with separate lives. She wasn't his charge and he wasn't her Watcher. She was an adult— a woman, not a girl. What she did to feel alive and did with her free time was none of his business.
He told himself this; over and over again, every night she went out, ever time she came back. Every time he looked at her, he reminded himself that she was her own person, living her own life, making her own choices.
It did no good. It still bothered him.
He couldn't help but worry when she told him she was going dancing at some underground club or going to some particularly raucous concert (with the tacit implication that, yes, she will be in the mosh pit and, yes, she probably will get into a fist fight, and yes, she will be dancing with everyone else's boyfriend). It bothered him when she came in for the night with scratches along her cheek, a fleshwound in her arm, or bruises on her neck.
And most of all, he absolutely dreaded it when she walked in from a long night and brought with her that smell. He would be cooking dinner or leafing through books in his study and she would come close to him, either to reach over him and get plates or to see what he had to show her; and he would feel her body next to him, pulsing with a new, enlivened heat, and he would breathe in and take the salty-sweet-meaty scent of sex into his lungs. It just about murdered his olfactory bulbs every time. That sad, angry, sweet smell, both slow and urgent, alluring and repulsive.
Of course, they never talked about her . . . conquests. The men she rented hotels with, the ones she left battered and aching for the memory of her. He understood that she was a young woman with a libido to rival a teenage boy's. He also understood that she had so many partners because she always thought less of men once she'd slept with them. And he knew that she knew that she had a rather unhealthy disrespect for men (— for people in general, but men especially—) but that it was nothing to discuss, especially not with him. He liked to think of himself as a father figure to all the Scoobies. . . but Faith never let anyone get that close.
Even still, it was he who was most familiar with her. Of all of them, he was the one who understood her most.
And maybe he was crazy, but she seemed to trust him to a certain extent.
It was in the little things. The little tidbits and secrets about her past that she let slip to him when she was more than slightly tipsy or feeling particularly morose. Also, in the way that, when the Scoobies were splitting up for a night of expansive patrolling, she would always subtly gravitate towards him, or at least make sure that, if she was required to have a search buddy, he was the one by her side. How, whenever she was injured, he was the only one she let clean her up, even if someone more qualified to do so was nearby. Or how, after an especially punishing night, she would sit with him in their small kitchen, each at opposites sides of the little round table; how they would bask in the yellow glow of the ceiling light, not saying anything, their silence filling up all the conversation space and taking a shape of its own.
This small flame of her growing trust in him was not something they verbally acknowledged. It was just another one of those things they didn't talk about.