Xander knocked on the door to Faith's apartment and as he waited, glanced down at his watch. It was quarter to five in the morning and the sun had just barely began to peer above the horizon when he parked his truck in front of her apartment building. Faith finally opened the door and for his usual five am greeting, Xander had a duffle bag thrown roughly into his chest. He had grown accustomed to it so he was prepared and caught the duffle. A small grunt escaped him at the impact, which was a vast improvement from the first time she did it and he went flying onto his ass. She hadn't even enjoyed a laugh that time since she had already gone back into her place to grab some more things.
Xander had been able to find the small patterns in their complicated lives. One pattern was the one that always was followed when Buffy and Faith fought. Another pattern he had learned to love was dealing with Faith the next morning for their road trip. He would always come and pick her up and then drive to the location of her next assignment. They weren't a couple or anything, obviously, but since her first assignment, which Giles told him to drive her to, he had been permanently assumed to be her driver.
With a sigh, knowing the attitude he was about to have to deal with for more than a few hours, he took the duffle bag down to his truck. He tossed it into the back seat next to his duffle bag. He turned to sit straight but then he turned back to look into the backseat again. Their two bags were different makes but it shocked him how similar they looked. He shook his head, concluding that he definitely needed to get more sleep.
He finished about half of his coffee before she appeared from the apartment building. The sun was only beginning to shine, but as usual, Faith wore a large pair of sunglasses. She wore a tight, ribbed, white tank top with a black backpack and her leather jacket slung on her arm. She wore a pair of jeans with boots that weren't yet tied and the laces dragged along the ground as she walked towards the truck. Despite how tired he knew she was, for as long as he'd known her, the only thing that remained was that walk of hers. That walk that started in her hips and seemed to confidently reverberate through her arms and her legs.
Seeing her, Xander started up the truck. She climbed into the passenger seat and tossed her bag and her jacket in between the two of them. Xander lifted a cup of coffee towards her with five pills of Advil resting on the lid. She took it from him lowered her glasses to examine the pills. He wasn't sure what to think about the fact that she still didn't trust him enough to take simple aspirin pills from him without careful inspection.
"So what's the number today?" Xander asked playfully.
"An eight," she answered with a groan. The common question that Xander always asked was, on a scale of one to ten, how bad is your hangover. After the question had been asked so many times it had been shortened.
"That bad, huh?"
"Yeah, I had some extra beer… I was expecting some company." Xander nodded slightly as he drove down the road. "So why didn't you show?" He shrugged and answered,
"I don't know. You didn't seem… you didn't tell me to come over."
"Whatever," she answered, leaning back into the seat of the truck. She swallowed down the five pills and answered, "Well, it's your fault that I have a hangover then." He glanced over at her skeptically, unable to see how that was his fault. She shrugged and added, "I wasn't about to just leave all of that beer."
"And why not?" he asked.
"'Cause I might die. And then it would be wasted…"
"You're ridiculous."
"It's your fault," she answered, more then a hint of anger in her tone. Xander sighed, frustrated and not afraid to vent it. The only part of Faith that he'd found to be predictable was that she was, without a doubt, confusing.
They drove in silence for over an hour. Xander watched the road in front of him as the Sun continued to become more of a dominant force in the sky. He stole glances to his passenger who was sitting pensively in the seat next to him. More so than usual, he concluded, seeing her distant gaze that appeared to not be thinking about her usual necessities – slaying, sex, and liquor.
"This one's kind of close to home, huh?"
"Yeah," she mumbled.
"It might be cool though… you know, seeing a new Slayer from Boston."
"Yeah," she agreed sardonically, "maybe she'll turn out as good as I did."
Xander had grown accustomed to Faith's indifferent, and often irritable, attitude on the way to a lot of her assignments, but this one seemed to really be getting to her. That wouldn't have been a problem, since he was Mr. Understanding when it came to stuff like this, but she spent more energy trying to act like nothing was wrong then she did trying to deal with it.
So here's how it went after their fourteen hour drive – which really only felt like an hour or two – to Boston.
Xander parked the truck in the parking lot of a decent looking motel and when he went to get two rooms for three nights, Faith unloaded their bags from the vehicle. Xander returned with the keys and gave Faith hers, and the two agreed to meet back at the truck in an hour so they could go get some dinner. They both met back at the truck at the same time, went and got some delicious food from a local diner, went on a productive patrol, and then returned to their separate rooms ready to recuperate and start the next day.
Okay, so that's definitely not how it went… First of all, the drive felt like it took a year and a half with the number of arguments they managed to have. Second was that, while Xander was parking the truck in the lot, he hit the fence, making a nice dent in the fender. After he was able to park the overly large vehicle, which he cursed for ten minutes straight and Faith commented on the fact that, even if you have the size it doesn't mean you know how to handle it, he went into the office and returned with a key to a single room. Faith reamed him for assuming he was getting some and sent him straight back to the office to get another, separate room.
Xander did go back and got another room, cursing her under his breath for being such a pain in the ass. In an hour, Xander was back out at his truck waiting to get dinner, but it was another forty-five minutes before Faith showed up. They went to a diner and were served this greasy stuff that they assumed was supposed to be their food. Faith left Xander with the bill – as usual – and they walked around trying to find something for Faith to kill, preferably an undead something, but at this point, with the attitude she was coping, Xander was about ready to let her torture anything, as long as it would improve her mood.
They found nothing for Faith to take her energy out on so when they got back to the motel, Xander had originally been correct, there was no need for a second room.
Faith led the way into her room and switched the light on as Xander closed the door behind him. Before he even turned around, Faith was pulling at his jacket. He quickly discarded his jacket and shirt before grabbing her thighs in his hands and picking her off of the ground and pushing her against the wall. He kissed her as fiercely as she kissed him, trying to deny to himself that Faith might've been able to convince him to think that none of this meant anything.
It certainly wasn't the first time this had happened. It actually had become something of a pattern… Faith claimed it as a bad habit, while Xander tried to defend that she felt something for him. She assured him that it was because she was getting too lazy to go out and find someone new every time, so she would just go back to him because it was easy. Both of them were fairly certain that her claim held no validity, but there was always that shred of doubt that liked to slice its home in Xander's mind.
The pattern had begun on a night that Xander ran into Faith in a bar after a long day. They went back to her place and Xander was reminded why Faith still was the host of absolutely all of his fantasies. Xander was convinced that it would be another couple of years before she'd even think about sleeping with him again, but to his surprise and delight, she was back later that same week with her convincing argument about her laziness.
They weren't in a relationship of any sort, at least not one lacking extreme dysfunction, but they hadn't gone more than two weeks without spending a night together. No one had a clue about them… it wasn't that either of them consciously thought of hiding it, but they were so busy denying it to themselves that it carried on to everyone else.
Faith laid in bed trying to deny the fact that his heavy, warm body leaning on her was the best feeling in the world to her. She glanced down – okay, more like a steady stare – at him, sleeping with his head resting on her chest and his arm slung around her waist. She had only been able to sleep for about fifteen minutes. This was usually when she woke him up and told him to leave. Depending on his mood, he decided to listen or not.
She zoned out as she stared at him and her mind fell into a daydream, strangely enough about her last boyfriend she had when she was still living in Boston.
She sat up on a dresser against the wall in his room. She finished off a beer that they'd stolen from a gas station earlier that night just for kicks. They were both bored… She was drinking her beer and trying on all of his various hats that were resting on top of the dresser with her. She would turn to the mirror on the wall behind her to see how they looked, exchanging sexy looks with goofy grins, and then turning to him for some sort of approval. He was too consumed in a playboy magazine he was flipping through to notice his girl looking at him – and desperately trying to win his attention.
Faith finally settled on a dark grey cap and slid off of the dresser. He was sitting with his legs hanging off the side of the bed as he read the magazine more intently than he'd ever read anything in his life. Faith crawled onto the bed and kneeled behind his back and started rubbing his shoulders.
"What'cha reading?" she asked curiously. She glanced over his shoulder to see a two page spread of this hot, skinny, blonde. The girl in the picture was the polar opposite of her. She was the bright and bubbly blonde, whereas Faith was the voluptuous, sultry type.
"Isn't she hot?" he asked.
"Yeah," she answered, now officially feeling like shit about herself. She rubbed her boyfriend's shoulders as she kissed his neck and ear but his attention never shifted from the blonde he was now transfixed on.
"I mean, just look at her…" he said, still amazed at the piece of paper in front of him rather than the gorgeous girl next to him, starving for his attention. "I could fuck her so bad…" His complete obliviousness was partially due to the joint they had smoked less than an hour before, but Faith was clear enough to feel the twisting pain inside of her.
She finally swung her leg around in front of him and sat on his lap facing him. The only thing between the two of them was the magazine he was still staring at. She ground her hips down into him and kissed his forehead. He moaned encouragingly, and she almost accepted it until he added,
"Oh my God, this is so hot. Oh, I never thought I could get some and stare at something like this… this is wicked! Faith, keep going, okay?"
Faith shook her head, forcing her focus back onto the room she was really in, rather than her old boyfriend's bedroom. She didn't realize it, but she had inhaled a breath of air sharply as she shook her head, and Xander was immediately awake. He saw the look in her eyes and sat up quickly to be at her level. As he sat up, so did she; stiffening herself away from him and pulling the sheet up around her. He didn't understand what was wrong with her but he clearly saw insecurity dripping off of her.
"What's wrong?"
"Why did I keep going?" she asked in a mumble. "Why did I do it?" she asked again, this time searching Xander's face for the answer she needed.
"Baby, what are you talking about?" he asked, with more concern than anyone had ever heard in his voice. And it was because he literally had never felt so scared in his entire life. Seeing someone who hadn't just never allowed an insecure note to leave her mouth in his company, but in anyone's company, sound the way she sounded, and look the way she looked, it terrified him.
He grabbed her arms in his hands, trying desperately to soothe her. She sat there silently, but clearly troubled. He found himself even shaking her a little because her silence was almost more terrifying.
"Why did I do it?" she asked, more to herself than anyone else.
"Do what, baby?" he asked again. He wasn't sure whether she was talking about her, you know, killing spree lifestyle for a while, or maybe about things he had no idea about. He didn't venture to ever assume anything with her, so he waited for her to fill in the blanks.
In a snap, she seemed to finally grasp control over herself again, and she shook her head, forcing herself to return back to her indifferent, closed self.
"I'm not your baby," she corrected sharply as she pushed his hands off of her.
"Faith…"
"Yo," she answered, "Why don't you go back to sleep… I'll be back later."
"But-" he began, sitting up to stop her. He stopped when she glanced back over at him. There was something about the way her eyes fell on his that cautioned him and kept him from continuing.
