"So...The new Slayer?"
"There isn't one."
"..."
"Faith, the line runs through you now."
"I..."
"You are the Slayer."
"I know that..."
"Faith, not a slayer, the Slayer."
Once again her feeble grasp of the English language evaded her. Ok, she had got used to the fact that she was a slayer. She didn't have many options available to her to do anything but get used to it, but she had always been the backup one. The spare. Buffy had been the big cheese Slayer whom the fate of the Earth, edging on apocalypse, depended on.
Now it was her.
She was the Slayer
The Slayer.
You had to understand the power of that little three-letter word.
"Ok, honey, wrap it up."
"...I have to go."
She put the receiver back on the handle.
Faith was escorted back to her wing in a dazed silence. The usual sounds of G wing (Cussing, murmuring gossip in small huddles. More often than not, both aimed at her) were muffled to her like she was surrounded by a big damper as she made her way up the metal staircase to her cell.
This had been the one of the very few calls that she had got in her 18 months locked up. Not surprisingly. Faith wouldn't phone herself either if she were a Scooby. The only phone calls had been from Angel who had endeavoured to keep a line of communication open between them. She hadn't received it as enthusiastically as he'd hoped. She was perfectly civil but it seemed that her mind was always somewhere else. She sounded distracted; bored. And so the phone calls had grown shorter and the time between them had stretched and stretched. After about 6 months the outside world had all but forgotten about her.
That's how she wanted it.
Sitting in her cell, she was all too aware of the loneliness around her. This wing of the prison had a policy of putting anyone trained in fighting in separate cells. They had introduced this policy a few weeks after Faith's arrival. It had taken two inmates in the hospital wing before they had got the message. Faith wanted to be alone.
She didn't like being alone. 'Wanting' was really the wrong phrase to use. She felt that it was more a case of necessity for her to be by herself. It was the easiest way for everyone. But she didn't like to be alone. The emptiness of the cell yawned around her.
She would say that it enveloped her but it wouldn't be right. It wasn't in any kind of contact with her. It was a distant feeling.
She almost laughed at herself. What kind of poetic shit was she coming up with these days? It came from being sitting on her own all day, every day. When you don't have any company but your own mind, you find you start to embellish things. So what the hell? She was a poet. What? It wasn't like anyone was going to find out.
She thought about poets. They were loners usually, complaining that the world doesn't understand them. Well the mould fits so far. 'Would I make a good poet?' She attempted to recite some kind of poem that she had learnt in junior high. It was about daffodils and clouds. It came out stilted as she tried to summon it from the thick tar that consisted of the back of her brain. Everything in it was obscured and it took a considerable amount of effort to prise out.
She frowned. The lines didn't sound right coming out of her mouth. Perhaps she wasn't cut out for that kind of poetry.
"There was a young woman from Ealing
Who had a peculiar feeling.
She leant on her back
And opened her crack
And pissed all over the ceiling."
She let a small smile slip onto her face. That was more like her. But she knew that she was just trying to skirt the subject in her
mind. The one who kept on marching up into the front of her brain, throwing the dandelions and young women from Ealing onto their ass and screaming at her in the face.
"How the hell can you be the Slayer?"
Here she was locked up in a maximum-security prison with a life sentence and she was supposed to fight the vampires, demons and things that go bump in the night, along with averting the odd apocalypse on the side. That was not going to happen. The world, at this moment in time, was in serious shit.
And what did the Watchers Council intend to do about that? Did they intend on getting her out of prison? Why can't they just call another Slayer?
Could they? Without the previous Slayer being...
Dead.