Episode 6.3
Second Chance
by Karen

As they walked down the deserted street, Faith was shocked at the changes in the once bustling city. As they passed the hotel once more, her foot connected with something that skittered across the charred pavement. When she bent to pick up the bit of metal, she recognized Hope's vanity license plate.

Spike stopped, turning to look at her, crouched on the ground, holding the plate like it was a lifeline. "Faith?" he asked.

She jerked as the voice interrupted the silence. She looked up at him, "Y-you go on. I-I have to do something," she gulped.

He was about to snap at her, but the vulnerability in her face stopped him. "We shouldn't split up. We've got two hours."

"Are you sure?" she understood his silent offer to go with her, to offer any support he could.

He shrugged, "Lead on."

She stood, realizing just how shaky she was, and led him into the side alley of the hotel. Already knowing what she'd find, she couldn't explain the foreboding feeling. It was an effort to force herself forward. Each footfall sent waves of panic through her. Twice she almost turned and ran, but Spike was right behind her, and he left her no room to run. Besides, she had a reputation to live up to. She didn't know what Spike knew about her, but he must have heard something, how she was the rogue slayer. But something was making her nervous, made her want to throw up from the tension. She couldn't understand why, she knew what she was going to find. Dead bodies. And more dead bodies. Not like she hadn't seen a lot of those in her time.

But when she stepped into the back alley, she didn't find what she expected. There were bodies and limbs and blood. But a white moving-type truck was parked halfway down the alley. At least ten men could be seen, sifting through the demonic mess, and lifting bodies onto the truck. The gallows humor that kept the men from snapping floated to her on dead air.

Then everyone went silent as one man lifted a girl with red hair out of the pile of demonic guts and into his arms. Work stopped and everyone straightened as the man carried the body towards the truck.

A bracelet jingled down the girl's arm, and Faith remembered seeing it sparkle in the afternoon sun yest-eleven days ago, as Hope drove her away from the prison. Back when she was just going to help with another apocalypse, where there was little chance of dying, where her life was one big adventure.

Faith broke from her trance, horrified, "Hey!" she yelled, charging the man, "You can't just-" she cleared the truck trailer and saw two neat piles of coffins. She stopped short, staring, uncomprehending.

"Who are you?" one man demanded gruffly, coming forward, and the others turned to him, as if he was the foreman of the job. They all stared at her, the strange girl who had interrupted their work. Faith just stared at the dangling wrist, adorned with the sparkling charm bracelet.

"Who are you?" Spike returned, "What the bloody hell are you doing here?" She could feel him behind her, and for once, as she couldn't break out of her trance, she was happy for his presence.

"Follerin' orders," the man said, "Mr. Wells sent us as clean up crew after The Council found out about the mess here."

Faith couldn't take her eyes off the stack of coffins that had lids secured on them. She tried to count them, but the sheer number of them broke her. "How many?" she whispered.

"Twenty three, includin' this'un," he gestured to the red head in the other man's arms. He was just standing here, holding the girl close to him, ever so gently even though she couldn't feel anything anymore. He had stopped once Faith had yelled, and he stared at her as she stared at the bracelet, entranced by it.

"Hope. Her name was Hope," Faith said viciously, cutting her glance to the man, before staring again at the girl.

"Including Hope," his voice was condescending, but she didn't notice, staring at the bracelet. "But as you can see, we're not quite done yet."

Faith took a step towards the man holding Hope, though she didn't realize she had done it. She was wallowing in her guilt over the death of the youth. So young, she had so much to live for…Her life hadn't been screwed up like Faith's…

Spike looked at the crew, "Do any of you happen to have a phone?" the just stared at him, "I need to call the slayer, Buff-"

"You know Miss Summers?" one asked with a bit of awe in his voice.

"B? Yeah, we know her. Go way back," Faith said absently.

"Wait," the leader said, "Are you by any chance Faith?" she looked up at him, startled that he would know her name, before nodding, "We were told you would be here," he gestured around him, "Though we didn't expect to find you alive. A-Are the others?"

"We really need to-" the man holding Hope moved to put her in a pine coffin, and something fell at his feet. Faith's breath caught in her throat as she saw Hope's baby pink cell phone. She looked at the others with wide eyes, before crouching to pick it up.

"She has no use for it now," the man holding the body said softly, and Faith nodded, staring at the pink phone in her hands.

"Faith," Spike said, reaching for the phone.

She jerked it out of his reach, "No. I'll do it." She turned the phone on, staring at the bright, cheery welcome message and background screen. After a moment, she shook herself, and dialed Buffy's number.

"Hello?" the blonde's voice came through the phone; the stress and worry clear in her voice, "Hello!" her tone now held hostility.

"B," was all Faith could get out before the tears burned her cheeks. She didn't know why she was crying. She hadn't cried since before Angel convinced her to turn herself in. Thank god she had learned long ago to cry silently. Crying was a sign of emotion; emotion was weakness.

As her body shook silently, Spike took the phone from her. While she had been staring at the phone, the man had put Hope's body in a casket, but he hadn't closed the lid. The men had gone back to work. She tuned out Spike and the others as she knelt beside the plain wooden coffin. She stared at the girl's oval face. If she focused on her face, she could pretend she was just sleeping after a night of patrolling. But her peripheral vision caught the bloody cut that had taken the girl's life, cutting her from shoulder to hip. It wasn't the only mar on the perfect olive skin, cuts crisscrossed each arm, and a long gash would have left a nasty scar on her cheek. She was purple and black on all visible skin. To say she had taken a beating was an understatement. Some hair was stuck to her face. Through her tears, Faith saw a hand reach out and brush the red lock away from the pale white skin, shocked to find it was her own. She was shocked to find very little decomposition had taken place. It had been eleven days, but there was no smell or flies or maggots or other bugs in the dead air. The whole scene was silent, as if frozen in time, except men were sifting through bodies and talking to each other, trying to cover their own uneasiness.

Then everyone stopped dead, as the foreman headed over to one very pale guy, and then she felt their eyes upon her. She looked up, but they averted their gazes quickly.

Something came over her, and she watched, detached, as two hands she knew were her own flipped the clasp on Hope's charm bracelet, with the ballet slippers and the four-leaf clover and the horseshoe charms, and pulled it off the limp wrist. She pocketed the bracelet. Then she went over to see what they were staring at.

When she got close enough, she saw a girl with brown hair with highlights similar to her own. Then she recognized the black cotton tank top and hip hugger jeans and jean jacket, all darkened with dried blood, slashed to show pale skin underneath.

She stopped short, staring at the jagged cut across the forehead and cheek, the partially severed ear. She gasped inwardly at the jagged cut just above the hip hugger jeans that would have killed a normal person. She saw the left leg bent at an odd angle. She couldn't tell if it was broken, or if it had twisted when the body fell. The whole face was a dark bruised purple, and so was one shoulder. A cut had found that shoulder, ripping the sleeve seam almost completely from the rest of the jacket. It had slipped off the shoulder to show the tops of the girl's muscled biceps and triceps. A deep gash showed on the pale skin, trickles of dried blood were on the hand, showing that blood had flowed down the arm. The hair was matted, hinting at the blow to the back of the skull that had taken life from the body.

As she stared at her limp body, she couldn't remember receiving any of the wounds before her. The last thing she remembered was a biting at her neck, and then nothing. As she stared in horror, a roaring filled her ears, and darkness consumed her.

She found herself in a dingy room, with something soft beneath her. Angel was sitting on the edge of what she guessed would be a bed. When she saw the pink cell phone on the bedside table, she burst into tears, her eyes already scratchy from the tears she shed previously.

He took her into his arms, and she tried to find comfort there, but she couldn't. "She wasn't even my friend," she sobbed.

"It's okay to cry."

"Twenty three died because of us, because of you and this war you started. How do you do it?"

"Do what?" he asked softly.

"Live like this. I know it wasn't my fault, they came on their own free will, following their destiny, but I feel that I should have done something. I-I just hurt so bad. It's never hurt this much before. Anything."

"You feel guilty. Guilt is a funny thing. Sometimes you feel guilty about nothing, and sometimes you feel no remorse at all. Sometimes the guilt you feel is crippling. To feel guilt is to be human," he said.

"But how do you deal with it?"

"People go through it different ways, by trying to forget, by trying to remember. Some try to drink the feelings away; others drown themselves in sexual pleasure. It all depends on the person."

"What did you do?" she asked, pulling out of his embrace to look at him.

"What did I do?" he repeated, "I hid from the world, starved myself…you were there through the wacky trip through my life," he joked.

"You remember that? It's all hazy," she said, her attention diverted from her guilt and tears.

"Beating the crap out of my evil half? How could I forget?" he asked, joking with her.

His humor was lost on her, "So this is how B felt," she mused, "I-I went back," she confessed. "But then you probably knew that."

"Yeah."

"Twenty two girls showed up for Hope's call. Twenty-three lives ended. Forty six parents who lost their girls."

"I know."

"How?"

"Besides what Spike told me, once I got back, I called Buffy. Left out some pertinent information, like our deaths, but she told me about the cards slayers now carry. White if the parents didn't know, black if they did. I was willing to take on the burden of calling their parents, but she had already done half of the work."

"She's gonna know. Those guys are gonna tell her-"

"And we'll deal with it."

"If I hadn't helped, Hope wouldn't have made the call!" she cried suddenly, realizing her guilt was founded. It had been her fault that all the girls had shown up, her fault that they had met their death in that back alley.

"But you did. You did what you felt was right, and there's no way to fix that."

"But it wasn't the right thing. My help didn't stop anyone from dying. It only caused more deaths."

"Don't worry about that now." He tried to draw her thoughts away from her guilt, "Gunn and I found an abandoned grocery store. Figured the law would be on our side on this one. You should eat something."

"Could you get me a sandwich?" she asked, suddenly wanting him to leave. She couldn't deal with him telling her she did what was right. It had been wrong, and because of it, twenty-three girls were dead. She should have done more to protect Hope, she should have stayed alive longer to protect the girls that were coming. They had been teenagers, all of them. The slayer gig was big on teenagers. They had yet to become adults, or have lives of their own. They hadn't learned what love was, or gone to college, or started a family. She couldn't help but wonder momentarily how many of them had died virgins. They were just children. They had had their whole lives ahead of them, and still would, if it hadn't been for her.

She felt responsible, something she had never really paid attention to before. And that responsibility was killing her inside.

"Sure, just take it easy," he said, going into the other room. She wiped her eyes on the coarse sleeve of her jacket.

She heard through the open door Spike and Angel arguing. It sounded like they were arguing over her. Angel was saying something about how she needed quiet; she'd been through a lot. She didn't want her weaknesses broadcasted to the whole world, so she pushed herself up off the bed, and walked out into the other room to interrupt the fight. The three guys stopped and looked at her as she entered. "I'm fine," she stated, though no one had openly asked how she was, "I just need some food, is all." She pushed herself through them, and headed towards the bag of groceries on the counter. She pulled out a loaf of white bread, some cold cuts, and mustard. She slapped it all together, and made a big show of taking a big bite of the sandwich. She till had a reputation to live up to, after all.

But then it dawned on her. The person who she had been, the hard outer shell, not letting anyone in, that person had died. She was no longer that person, because she had changed. Dying had changed her. Jail had started her on the road to redemption, the road to change, but she hadn't been able to change completely. Her old reputation, her old life had haunted her, forcing her to live up to what she was before. But she didn't have that now. She didn't have to live up to those old standards if she didn't want to.

She felt like she had been lifted from a burden. She had been given a second chance by the Powers That Be, and she wanted to make the most of it. She wanted to make the most out of her second chance for the twenty-three girls whose deaths laid heavily on her conscious. Though she had never given school a chance, she wanted to give college a try. She wanted to live her life differently than she had been. She had been given a second chance, and she was going to take it.

"Faith?" Angel asked, as they all stared at her, with a bite of sandwich in her mouth. She had just stopped. The sandwich was still halfway to her mouth; she hadn't started chewing.

"Yeah?" she asked with a mouthful of sandwich, chewing.

"Are you okay?" Gunn asked.

"Five by five," she said after swallowing the bite. She took another smaller bite, smiling. Life was looking up. "So, what now?"

.END.