Disclaimer: I don't own Buffy, but I do own Sophie, baby Lily, and Echo the puppy :)
Unfortunately, Buffy's actions in defending her girlfriend served to make the next day incredibly awkward. Both slayers refused to speak to Riley. Echo would growl at the commando if he got too close to either one of them. Willow and Tara were talking to him, but every conversation they had was short and uncomfortable. Baby Lily shared her big sister's perceptive abilities, but was not yet old enough to process them properly, and the only way she knew of doing so was to cry at the top of her lungs whenever Riley was nearby. Willow invited Xander and Anya over so that Riley would have somebody to talk to, but as Xander now counted Faith as one of 'his girls', this didn't help much, as he wasn't too impressed with Riley at the moment either. All Anya wanted to talk about was the baby, and Riley could only stay genuinely interested for so long before it began to drive him insane. Sophie managed to avoid most of the awkwardness while she was at school, but contributed to it when she got home, by running away and hiding in her room.
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Despite all of this, when the time came for the slayers and soldier to head out on the hunt, Faith was perfectly happy to put any unpleasantness between herself and Riley behind her. To be perfectly honest, she completely understood why he thought of her the way he did. They would need to if they were going to work together, and the main reason that she had refused to speak to him was that Buffy had. Well, that and her own uncomfortable feelings about their history.
"It looks like the demons are hiding out in the cemetery" said Riley as they walked through town, inspecting his top of the line tracking equipment.
"How original" said Buffy, rolling her eyes. "We never could have worked that by ourselves. Thank goodness we had this wonderful technology." Riley said nothing, but was clearly annoyed.
"It doesn't matter how we found them, B" said Faith, "It just matters that we found them, and now we can get rid of them."
"Yeah" said Riley, agreeing with the Dark slayer for the first time. Maybe he had been too quick to judge her. According to some, he did have a tendency to do that. "Let's move out."
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When they reached the cemetery, it didn't take them long to find what they were looking for. The demons, kind of a cross between reptiles and insects in appearance, were currently in the process of driving a nest of vampires from a crypt.
""Spose we should thank 'em" Faith grinned, pulling an axe from the bag of weapons that they had brought with them. "We would have ended up having to do that ourselves eventually anyway. Whaddaya say B?" Buffy grinned right back at her girlfriend, taking hold of the Slayer scythe.
"I guess some thanks are in order." With that, the two slayers charged into the mob of demons, who almost immediately turned to face them. The vamps fled. There were very few vampires nowadays who still had the guts to take on the chosen two.
"Remember to watch out for their tails!" Riley called after them as he fiddled with his government-issue blaster. He was a little annoyed with the two for running in before they had formed any sort of plan, but he couldn't deny that they were doing good. Individually, Buffy and Faith were both great fighters, but when they fought together, it was magic. If they had worked that out back when Faith had first arrived in Sunnydale, quite a few of the Big Bads that appeared after that event may have been defeated a lot sooner. Riley on the other hand? Well, he had been trained from the beginning to be a team player, meaning that we worked best when we had someone's back to watch, and someone to watch his own back, so he wasn't so great fighting on his own. It was this fact that ultimately led to the tragic series of events about to take place...