Shrinks and Memories
Faith had had enough.
She was already doing her best to get all "rehabiliatated", and all this shrink wanted to talk about was the Mayor. She kept asking if he'd ever tried anything "inappropriate", or forced her to do anything she didn't want.
If it was a regular shrink, she could have just pawned them off with some sob story. But, no. The Council and B and the G-man were insistent; she would talk to a psychiatrist who was also a Watcher, or they wouldn't let her leave.
So here she was, trying to explain for the millionth time to this dumbass chick that, no, Wilkins had never tried anything with her. Yes, she'd helped him with his plan to kill everyone and become a huge, scary, slug-demon-thing of her own free will.
Then came the question she hated: Did she love Wilkins?
God, who came up with these questions? Nothing was going to get better, and she wasn't going to be magically cured if she moped about her childhood trauma. It just didn't work that way. You'd think, y'know, being out in the world, forced to face things that civilians denied even existed every day, they'd be a little more aware.
This was reality, not some Hallmark special. Talking about your feelings wouldn't make them go away. It wouldn't change the fact that she's killed humans. And no matter how hard they tried, no matter how often they told her, again and again, that the Mayor never really cared about her and was only using her, she didn't believe them.
She knew he cared. He was the only person who did. B and the Scoobs tried, Joyce tried, Giles tried, hell, even Angel tried. But in the end, it was never about her. It was about what she could do, how she could help, if she was a threat.
Wilkins had cared about those things too, sure. That's where it started, yeah. But the more time they'd spent around each other, the more they'd realized they were just two lonely people who had nothing but each other. And that probably did mean their relationship was just convenience, but she didn't give a shit. In every way that mattered, he was her dad. And in every way that mattered, she was his daughter. If she had been okay during the Ascension, she had no doubt he woulda pulled it off without a hitch, even with the Sunnydale grads fighting back.
Instead, she got stupid and overconfident, got her ass kicked into a coma, and left him with all that worry and anger and pain. It was the reason everything went wrong and he ended up dead instead of all-powerful.
He was all the family she had, and it had cost him everything. One hundred years of planning, down the drain because of her.
Maybe she wasn't meant to have family. Maybe she just trashed things, screwed everything up. That was definitely what her past would claim. And maybe that was the whole problem.
Maybe her best bet was to get tough. To fake like she was fine, get the hell out of this stupid containment facility, and then go out and do what she did best – kill monsters and Big Bads like there was no tomorrow. Forget love or family or any of that shit, it only made people weak. If blood and ash was all she had for the rest of her life until something got a hit in faster than her, it would have to be enough.
Then the shrink repeated the question, she glanced up guardedly, and forced herself to tell the truth.
Did she love Wilkins?
"Yeah. He was the only one I ever really loved."