XI.
Riley was not nervous. He told himself that a few times, without conviction. He was not at all nervous or worried, which was why he was walking around a construction site after hours with a penlight, looking for his chip.
He knew that he'd had the chip this morning, during his nearly disastrous conversation with Xander. His boss had been told about the incident at the dojo, and only Xander's cell phone diplomacy had been able to convince Riley to back off Robin and Faith.
It was easy to stay mad at Faith. What she had done to Riley, swapping places with Buffy then trying to use him, it had hurt. It had made his life harder, at the time. But then again, his life had been hard anyway, where Buffy was concerned.
Riley thought again about Sam, about the way she had been impressed with Buffy, and a little jealous, when they had finally met. Sam was the first woman Riley ever really loved without losing himself. His love for Buffy had been self-destructive, possessive, addictive. When it was over, he'd fallen hard into darkness, and only the discipline of the military, of the New Initiative had saved him.
It wasn't till Sam left him, in Panama, that he realized that he still didn't really have any discipline of his own. He'd let others impose it on him. When she left him, he'd crawled into the nearest bottle, still aching from his physical wounds and almost broken from the emotion ones.
He'd never been much of a drinker, and he'd been a bad drunk. Not mean- he just wasn't very good at it. He'd run out of money and sober up, then he'd have to stay sober long enough to get more money and more booze. One day he realized that he was working all week to drink all weekend, and he might as well do that in the States as in the jungle. It was in a hotel in Mexico, on the way to California, that he'd taken a wrong turn, or a right one, and wound up in an AA meeting.
AA had helped Riley realize that he had an addictive personality. Whether it was love, or liquor, or the sweet embrace of death and undeath, he liked to hand over control. If his love was bigger than him, all his actions were excused. If losing Sam broke him, it wasn't a flaw in him, it was the curse of true love gone wrong.
He'd stopped drinking, and taken some work here and there in a resort town in Mexico. He'd tried to get back into school, without success. Maybe it would come now, maybe not. Either way, his start at A New Dawn was a good one. He felt in control of his decisions, and of his life.
Of course, then he'd found out Xander was his boss. Worse, he'd thought that Buffy was Xander's wife. Trying to be noble and congratulatory to Xander during their meeting that morning, he'd instead been a complete ass, and only the mutual realization of Riley's colossal misunderstanding had saved things.
Riley searched the ground where he and Xander had sat talking that morning. He must have been fingering his one-year chip, a nervous habit he'd picked up over the last few weeks since meeting Faith again. And now it was gone. Gone like so much in his life.
"Okay, stop taking pity, and start taking control. Find the damn chip, get cleaned up and get over to Xander's before it's too late," he ordered himself. "Fourth step- moral inventory. Time to step up, Finn."
He heard his voice, so harsh and raw, in his ears as he muttered to himself, looking all over the site for the small bronze chip. He knew his voice would never recover: the damage had simply been too severe. He did wonder, though, if the voice in his head would ever change to match the voice in his throat. If it did, would that mean something profound?
"Got you!" he hissed happily, spotting his chip where it had fallen, not a yard from where he had been when Xander had laughingly explained about little Dawn, well not so little now Riley supposed. He'd spent much of today practicing, trying to figure out what to say to Buffy when he saw her again.
He heard something, someone on the street, coming towards the framed in home in which he stood. Dousing his light, he let his eyes adjust to the gloom, and started moving towards the street, his chip back in one pocket and his flashlight slipped into the other. He moved out, seeing a form approaching at the edge of his vision, and hearing a voice he remembered very well.