Author's Notes: I haven't written anything canon compliant in ages and I finished this at 1 AM. Is it marginally OOC? Fuck if I know. Fight me.
Disclaimer: I do not own any characters featured in this story.
Little Stories
The morning Buffy died, Faith was reading.
Like, actually reading. For fun.
Nothing out of the ordinary happened lately, nothing more than usual. There were moments, mostly in the last month, that were odd but anything outside of waking up, eating, time in the rec yard, and sleep was crazy to think about to begin with. Like, sure, it was weird when she started to take up reading after the winter, when shit got really monotonous, but she wasn't some academic type because she liked Great Expectations or Of Mice and Men. Mostly, they were just the books she was assigned before officially dropping out of school and she wanted to know what the big deal was, but there was also a strange comfort in the worn spines and yellowed pages of the paperbacks. The smell of them was strong and stale and there were notes in the margins older than her.
There were looping lines and spirals running down the page like dark rainwater circling a drain as Pip met Miss Havisham. There was a phone number and the name Frank with a little heart next to it, jarringly under the paragraph where Lennie breaks the neck of Curley's wife.
Little stories somehow living their own little lives. Somehow ending up in a prison book cart, finding Faith in the quiet of her cell.
Still, books in prisons weren't odd. Faith picking up a book was maybe kind of unexpected but not odd, given the circumstances.
The real odd parts started in the middle of the goddamn day, during a workout not all that long ago. In the middle of crunches, there was a funny drop of something into her gut like stones plopping in a shallow pond and suddenly she was heaving and vomiting in plain view of every other prisoner in the yard. She remembered it not because of the shit she got from the other inmates since, but because it was a familiar drop - the kind that always managed to remind her there were things she still hadn't seen, even when she was sure she saw it all.
It was the nausea churning in her gut when she saw what Kakistos did to her Watcher - the exact same unraveling panic and shuddering finality - and then it was gone.
What came next were the wake up calls - not that they changed a whole hell of a lot in the last year. Buzzers and intercoms and shouting loud as the bark of starved dogs. Even the violence of it droned for a whole year. Then she threw up in front of everyone and something shifted.
It was the seconds before consciousness that changed the most, that slogged. Waking up was rising from shallow water, her chest heavy with it and heavier by the day. She started to think she was sick with something that would take her slow and even the guards started to agree. She only knew this from the extra yard of space they gave her.
Everything was screwed up, outside and inside.
Something was wrong with her, even as a slayer.
There was never a real moment when Faith forgot she was a slayer, but time melded the secret identity to her skin. She was and she wasn't. She was stronger than any woman here but they didn't ask questions anymore; those in the know kept their distance and that was enough. No vampires here, no demons or tv show dads who made themselves immortal and turned into giant snakes.
If anything, this might've been the closest to normal she could remember.
Faith didn't even dream a lot anymore which meant no prophetic slayer dreams and she was grateful for it - for being so tired and so understimulated that her brain simply shut down at night, switched off like it was nothing. There was a peace there when it came to deep, dreamless sleep. The kind of day-to-day life where morning was just morning, not the prelude to the end times.
Of course, that didn't mean she never dreamed at all. At least two forgettable ones a couple months in but nothing else - until the other night.
She crashed, so fucking exhausted from holding in her anger after some chick fresh off the bus decided to make a name for herself. Her new found passivity took such a toll, her head pulsed from the tension in her jaw from clenching it for so long.
Her body hit the cot and the next thing she knew, she was right side up again and walking through a desert, maybe for miles upon miles or maybe it was just a normal sized sandbox. There was a swing set not so far away in the center with one swing still open and the other occupied, the outline of a person facing a neighborhood Faith might've seen once or twice in her life. Not one she ever lived in - it was scrubbed clean and flowers grew there, things she only saw from the outside.
Faith approached like she walked for hours just to be right here, her heeled boots showing the damage, and she didn't need to see who was in the other swing because she saw the tied up blonde ponytail and the small frame.
Sitting, she gripped the metal chain link and it felt like nothing at all. They both stared straight ahead because they never really met face to face here these days, wherever here was. A newish apartment, a familiar bedroom, it didn't matter. When Faith stared ahead, everything was wrong and invisible fingers reached into her chest to pluck a single note of discord.
A happy, bright Sunnydale neighborhood was in the distance but the idea of it was flat like a polished surface. Like if she stood up and walked forward, she'd slam face first into a very realistic mural. Or it would shatter. A tiny, bitter part of her still liked the idea of that.
"Sometimes, I wonder how you knew."
Faith didn't turn at the sound of the voice but rested her head on the chain. Why was she so tired? "Not to rain on your pity party but I don't think I ever did."
The glare of blonde hair flashed out of the corner of Faith's eye as the blurry figure's head dipped down in concession. "Right."
A leaf fell from a tree and it took Faith a beat of silence to realize it tore and fell like wet paper to the sand. Next was a piece of sky, flaking and falling. Faith didn't stand to leave or call attention to it. She sat there and they both watched as the corner of a roof dripped down, followed by a puff of cloud.
"I think there was a book on this," the voice went on, far away as every word became a disjointed mess. A voice like little hands reaching for something - a piece of the falling sky, or maybe a mother. "Did they give you the book?"
Faith thought of her Watcher, her first Watcher and the memory of bile in her throat. "Not much of a reader."
"Me neither." There was a joke there in her tone, a forced levity like keeping a feather in the air with only your breath. "Doesn't matter. It's all the same story."
Faith wasn't sure if she meant but couldn't help but agree - even if it wasn't out loud. They weren't there yet. They would never be there, in the middle, eye to eye.
A passing thought of seven numbers without an area code. That number was useless these days. No going back.
The scenery melted sluggishly away in front of her, all of it except for the sun - a half there drippy egg yolk behind a thin veil of clouds. Faith wasn't sure it was rising or setting as she swayed her seat back and forth with the rocking of her feet.
Faith thought to say she was sorry but the words couldn't claw their way out from her throat. Not the time. Not the place. Their worlds always moved at different speeds and Faith's didn't move at all anymore - or it did so slowly, it appeared to everyone else like she was running in place. Black ink spirals that went nowhere.
That silence could've stretched for years or millenia or a second before the figure's voice cracked, always and forever in a different world. Another plane of existence, larger than anything. "I hate that you knew."
Faith didn't speak, or she did but couldn't remember the words. She only just noticed she was in her blue-gray prison uniform. Different worlds.
Either way, someone was standing up and it wasn't her. Tied back blonde hair became loose and flat down the figure's back, her face turned just enough to see the curve of a nose and at least one green eye. Her lips barely moved but the words took a moment to reach Faith.
"Seven hundred and twenty eight down."
She was turning more toward Faith but her face was gone in a blink as Faith was shaken back to consciousness by a deep, gruff voice. "Rise and shine, Lehane!"
Gone like it never happened. Gone like Faith wanted it to be.
Most of the dream went forgotten by midday, leaving only blonde hair, a swing set, and the sun.
The next night, there was nothing but that deep, dreamless sleep and Faith was more than grateful for it, but the weight on her chest when waking was heavier than it ever was.
The day came and went. Her subconscious was calm and empty and possibly the least troubling it'd been in a month. She woke up the next morning clear and light at 4:30, ate breakfast, went back to her cell for some reading - The Outsiders, which had its moments so far - and it was only a half hour in when it happened.
A fuzziness in her head.
The book fell from her grasp and something started to fill her up. A darkness. A black nothing everywhere, touching every part of her, and taking her insides with it. The kind of nothing like deep space before time started and after it would end. The kind without any air.
It happened so quickly, so breathlessly like tar filling her lungs - that same scalding heaviness - but it was all...nothing.
There was nothing.
So much, she was swallowing it down when she gaped.
So much, she sank and drowned in it.
Faith screamed, long and loud, letting all of her air out in one go. She was sitting cross-legged but now her legs were against her chest and she was huddled on the flat, thin mattress.
The only way to breathe out was this horrific keening sound. Not crying. Just a shrill, empty scream to get all the nothing out of her. Out of her stomach and lungs and bones. Anything to get rid of it.
Someone shook her by the forearms, a guard inches from her face, calling her name. She was breathing heavy, staring dumbly ahead like it was all she could do and it was all she did for god knows how long. She wasn't sure she moved for hours and when she did, the feeling of nothingness became her shadow.
When Faith woke up the next morning with no memory of a dream, because there was no dream, it was the first time it bothered her. She woke bound to a bed and unbound by everything else. Floating. Untethered from something and tired.
It went on like that for days, at least - the untethered feeling. The empty nothing there but not. She didn't read because she really wasn't a reader. She thought to write something down, a little note in a paperback novel for someone else to find, but she didn't like writing. Her handwriting was absolute shit, a scrawl worse than chicken scratch as her mother's boyfriend put it once.
She worked out more, mostly. She upped her reps in nearly everything and took a few extra seconds to breathe and not repeatedly ram a fellow inmates' skull into a barbell. There was a horrible edge that returned to her, to every piece of her, and whatever she cultivated since being locked up was now waging small war with whatever returned.
It was almost a week since she screamed herself unconscious when the same guard that tried to shake some sense into her unlocked her cell. "You have a visitor."
There was only one person who visited her. One person who gave a damn.
When she arrived at the visitor area and sat down in the cool metal chair, she examined the strangeness in Angel's face and wondered if he somehow heard her screaming all the way from his new digs. It was a stupid thought but there was still something wrong with him. He was always pale but this was something extra, a sallowness to his face. The sunken, drawn quality to his eyes. The extra crease of pain in his brow. The downward curve of his broad shoulders, like the weight of everything he ever did just now became too much to bear.
She took a second as he picked up the phone on the other side of the glass first and met her gaze. Dark eyes now pitch black. Hollow beads in their sockets.
It was there, in that second of silence that it came together in her head.
Faith knew why Angel was here, today specifically. Not after the heaviness and the dream and the screaming nothingness, but now, as something empty in her met with something empty in Angel. Now, because it was the same look she wore for days.
As Faith reached for the receiver, she thought about the sun and green eyes. She never said - not properly, not completely - that she was sorry.
She let him talk because she was sure he needed to say it as much as Faith needed to hear it. Suddenly, it didn't matter if it was all the same story. It was more than ever, a book with grim yellow pages and words in a hundred different languages filling the margins. A little story living a thousand little lives across a thousand different worlds and none of them mattered.
"It's about Buffy."
The world would turn without a slayer for the first time in god knows how long and Faith was alone - alone in her head, alone with her memories, alone with power she had no use for here.
When he was gone, she went back to her book, trying desperately to re-enter its pages in a way she could never crawl back to her sparse good days in the California sun.
She threw The Outsiders out of her cell as hard as she could once she reached the end.
Faith consumed the stories faster and faster, an addict looking for her fix, to bury the violence her bones begged for with as many pages as she could. She didn't care for them and all she could think to do was take in as many as she could and allow her memories to wear them like a mask.
A week passed and when Faith found Buffy in her dreams again, she was as flat as the melted image of Sunnydale. Not a person anymore. A ghost of a memory. Something that only made her fill up with that terrible void again. It was only then that she realized the familiarity of it and how it was always there, for years and years, longer than any person her age should feel it.
She hated herself a little bit more than usual for hoping it wasn't the last time she would find Buffy there, in her head, ready to give her hell because no one else did quite as well.
Little, lost Faith Lehane, with a list of the dead so long, there was no space left to make anything new and precious and alive. What else could she possibly do but focus on dreams and someone else's stories as this place ate everything she ever was until there was nothing left of her?
Maybe one day, all she'd remember was a stack of books that would reach from here to the moon and the very first person who ever gave a damn about her. She would maybe be okay if that was it.
The morning Buffy died, Faith was reading.
Everyday after that, too.
'Cause what else could she do when the only memory she wanted to keep - the one where the right slayer got to live - never fucking happened?