Disclaimer: I own nothing. Please don't sue me.
Author's Note: I wrote this forever ago, but I could never really figure out where I was going with it. I like it too much to let it languish though. So it is what it is, which is a drabble.
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The Cost of Craving Dark Instead of Light
Summary: Faith knew there would be consequences for the things that she did, but until Buffy said the word "Heaven," she never really considered the specifics. Drabble.
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Faith never gave much thought to Heaven and Hell. Which was strange considering that she lived in a world that was neatly divided into light versus dark. Saints versus sinners. Buffy versus Faith.
As a kid, sometimes she went to church on Christmas. Sometimes not. It all depended on how drunk her mom was. Faith didn't like church. There were so many rules, and she never knew what they were. So she was always just wrong. It was supposed to be a safe place, free from judging, free from everything ugly in the world. But it wasn't really.
And then in prison, there were of course the religious people. The ones who thought that finding God at the eleventh hour would make everything else okay. Faith didn't see it that way. Once you started murdering people in cold blood, you didn't have the right to expect some magic hand to come down and wipe you clean. That whole we never stop paying for our mistakes, morality according to Angel thing, it always made a lot more sense to her than anything those bible thumpers said about His infinite capacity for forgiveness.
So, yeah, some things were just the way they were. Faith was the Bad Slayer. On some level, no matter what she did, she would always be the dark to Buffy's light. It didn't matter how many unknown quantities they added to the Slayer mix. It didn't matter what evil acts these new girls perpetrated; they would never touch Faith's legacy. Because they would never be The. They would be compared to hundreds of others and never to Buffy. Faith was compared only to Buffy.
It shouldn't have surprised her that Buffy went to Heaven. Of course Buffy went to Heaven. Because she was perfect, and she never killed innocent people, not even by mistake. And when she chose a father figure, she chose well. She probably kept the promiscuous sex to a minimum too.
In all her time in this world, Faith had only ever heard about Hell dimensions. But then she asked Buffy about dying, and she got her introduction to the existence of Heavenly dimensions. It had not really occurred to her that those would exist. That was probably part of her problem; she never thought about the ultimate consequence.
After all, even when it turned out it was real, Hell was just for demons. They came from there, and they probably went back when they died, if they went anywhere. There was not really any reason to connect that to humans. You didn't even really have to see it as a punishment exactly; it was just where they belonged.
And it wasn't as if they ever came across supernaturally good beings. Except themselves. Slayers were supposed to be supernaturally good. But they were still just human, subject to all the same human weaknesses. Faith had learned firsthand that there was nothing inherently good about a Slayer. They were as corruptible as anyone. Maybe more so.
But if there were many, many Hells, then it followed that there were many, many Heavens. And one day, Buffy would end up in one for all of eternity. And Faith wouldn't.
Since waking up from that coma, Faith had always considered life to be the punishment and death to be the release. Angel wouldn't kill her that day she tortured Wesley (Torturing the Watcher, add that to the list of things Buffy would never do.) because she still needed to atone. She didn't die from the Orpheus because "our time is never up; we pay for everything." It wasn't like she spent hours contemplating the meaning of life, not even with all her spare time in prison, but she always kinda thought death would be the end. And now Buffy was telling her unequivocally that it wasn't.
Faith sat with that for a while, just let it wash over her. Really, truly, her time would never be up. Everything had a price, and she had not even begun to start paying.