And it all started with a jar of peanut butter.
It was the crunchy kind, Buffy's favorite. The stuff was chocked full of peanuts and, for Faith Lehane, death. When they'd had to take her to the emergency room because her throat had swollen almost completely closed, the entire crew had panicked and Giles' snide remark was how an apocalypse had not killed a Slayer, but a jar of sandwich spread almost had. She was returned safely to their fairly large Cleveland residence by mid-afternoon and Buffy called to order an immense 'family meeting'.
"Who mixed the JIF with the Skippy?" Buffy asked, and she was holding up the offending jars of the stuff while all the teenagers looked on. Buffy was the principal, and they'd all been called in for cutting classes, cheating on tests, accidentally incurring an allergic reaction on Miss Lehane. "You all know Faith's allergic. Who did it?"
Truth be told, it'd been Kennedy who committed the dire indiscretion, but she wasn't about to say anything. She and the brunette she'd become slight buddies with, Rosemary, exchanged glances and Rosemary spoke up quickly, "There was, like, none of the JIF left and I didn't wanna put the empty jar back in the fridge so I globbed it in with the Skippy. I—I'm really sorry, Faith."
Faith's surprising calm was rooted in the fact that she'd been halfway traumatized by the morning's events and she didn't feel like herself again just yet. She hadn't had a reaction since her first trip to Sunnydale when Joyce had fed her the oatmeal-peanut-butter cookies she had neglected to mention contained peanut butter. Of course, because her luck was as good as a Lehane's could get, then the reaction hadn't been as bad as it was earlier. And now, there she was, sitting on the couch still itching like a hundred mosquito bites and hardly able to talk. And man, was she ever irritated.
She would admit, she was startled that Buffy was putting up this kind of deal for her. It felt, almost, like she and the older Slayer were never on good terms, no matter what. There was no level of acceptance that was going to get Buffy to fully forgive Faith and, somehow, she knew that. She wasn't going to earn it, anyway. When you were as self-righteous as Buffy Summers was, there was no winning.
Faith waved a hand resolutely and Buffy sighed. For a moment Faith wondered if anyone else saw the agitation on the Chosen First's face. It wasn't painfully obvious, but it was clearly there. Maybe, she figured, she should talk to her—
Perish that thought immediately.
It ate away at Buffy more than any of them could understand. It was the prospect of being alone, a home she no longer had, and things she just couldn't deal with. She was too old to be able to whine about it, she recognized that, but some nights she couldn't sleep while she remembered. It haunted her worse than anything, though, because she'd never be able to visit her mother's grave again.
Sunnydale was half a war-zone, unrecognizable in every respect. Even the old welcome sign had been destroyed. Houses, trees, people, pets, life itself had gone down when they defeated The First.
"You and Angel, you're both damn good at that quiet broody dig." There was something unsure about Faith's voice that Buffy couldn't place. Eggshell walking, much?
"You're one to talk," Buffy responded, albeit with a touch of venom. Faith caught it, but she didn't have a touch of an urge to retaliate. A little bitter birdie in her ear tweeted out how a younger Faith would have smirked and returned the lash. "You've been playing a lot of the disappearing act lately. You okay?"
Now that she was no longer horrendously itchy and her tongue was not the size of a continent, Faith had to come to terms with the necessity to talk. So she offered a quiet nod and dropped herself onto the roomy loveseat in their old-lady-upholstered living room (leave it to the stuffy Brits to decorate badly and then make them live in it. Dusty, stained glass lamps, everywhere…) She wouldn't dignify it with a response, the gesture would suffice. Although, there was that irritation on B's face again.
She cut her off at the pass before Buffy's mouth could open. A question was not needed, "What about you, B? Ain't been your usual sunshiney self."
The Rogue Slayer was hunting relentlessly for a cigarette when Buffy spoke, and she'd finally found one salvaged in the crushed pack. It was the last one she had. Kennedy kept bumming them when she wasn't looking in some attempt to imitate her. It was cute, but Faith wasn't keen on the concept.
"I was just… thinking, you know? I miss Sunnydale a lot, and—"
"Place needed to go, anyways." Faith muttered, and finally managed to light her cigarette. Her Harley Davidson Zippo had been one of the things lost in the great destruction of Sunnydale. She mourned its passing with this pathetic BIC she couldn't stand.
The blonde Slayer curled up a bit tighter into thin, red blanket she'd wrapped herself in. Her clear, ice-green eyes slid toward the other for a moment, "What about all those people we couldn't save? What about everything we lost? That was my home, Faith."
An instinct told Faith to stop arguing, to crawl back inside herself, but something else said to keep going. She figured it might have been the boldness of the cigarette, "If we all kept worryin' about everyone we couldn't save, we'd never quit killing ourselves over it."
"It's easier for someone to say who's killed people before." Faith flinched. She'd been dealt that low blow twice, and both times it hurt like an ice pick through the heart. It was unfair, but nonetheless she let it go. Buffy was far more harsh than she was, Faith Lehane had been debarked. "You can't just let everything roll off your back."
She didn't want to have this conversation, honestly, not even in the least. She wanted to let everything go and quit fighting like Buffy insisted, and she figured it could be a thousand different things. It could be B's relentless need to coax a rise out of her so they'd butt heads, it could be the Chosen first's way of marking territory, but Faith knew she was just too damn tired.
"Sure I can. Watch me." She said coolly, and took the longest drag off the cigarette she'd ever felt. "Shit happened, B. Don't let it eat you. It's not like you said 'oh, let's vaporize this town'."
"You have no heart." Buffy murmured, and Faith's chocolate-colored gaze darted swiftly out the window to the night sky, unwilling to look as wounded as that statement had made her. It wasn't that she didn't have a heart; it was that Buffy was missing the warrior gene, the survival gene, the life goes on gene. This was Faith's way of saying 'drop the baggage'. Only that wasn't going to happen, because Buffy could oftentimes be worse than her. Well, not really, it had just seemed to be lately.
"You shouldn't beat yourself up over it." She was trying, but it was as failed and lame as a horse with a broken leg. In spite of the defeat written all over her face, Buffy said only one thing before heading upstairs.
"One of us has to. You sure don't, F."