Angel had taught her a lot about deals with the devil. Everything you do has a balance: you take something; you give something. The universe always takes back.
She ended up outliving him. She’d thought he would live forever, and not because of the vampire thing. Because he was Angel, and he was just . . . fuck, she didn’t know. A force, or a . . . a something bigger and more powerful than anything the Powers That Be should have been able to throw at him. Something that should be remembered.
Faith did remember. She remembered his kind eyes and that body that wouldn’t quit, and how hurt he could look if she said the wrong thing about B. She remembered every word he’d ever said to her, not just the pearls of wisdom, but the corny Angel jokes, too.
She wished, sometimes, that she didn’t. If she could have forgotten things, she wouldn’t have the memory of combing the remnants of a war zone in downtown LA to find nothing but ashes and a really nice sword.
She kept the sword, and she left the city. She left everyone.
But she kept remembering.
Fucking scythe. There’s always a fine print to all that magic bullshit, and the price exacted for her – dammit, it wasn’t even her fault! It’s was B’s idea, and fucking Willow had done the actual dirty work – was a one-way ticket all the way down the line. No stops for Faith. Just on and on until all she had of the things that mattered were memories.
She hadn’t seen Buffy in a couple hundred years, but she was sure B was still alive. Willow, too.
Once Faith had figured it out, though, that she was never gonna die, she’d never wanted to see either of them ever again. Like she needed more reminders of this undeath sentence.
She missed B sometimes. More, she missed Angel. She wouldn’t have thought that, back before the battle, but life is full of surprises.
Especially hers, what with all the time.
She stayed on Earth until the last boats were leaving, and then she moved constantly. No planet felt right; she felt constantly restless, conspicuous. She was glad when the war started, because it gave her a familiar place and something to do. There were always bad guys to fight, even if most of the vampires had dried up with the Earth; the Alliance was as good an enemy as any. Passed the time, at least, and good god, sometimes she just missed the righteous violence of the kill. She remembered what Angel had taught her, that humans were different, that taking a life had consequences, so there were times, now, years after the Browncoats fell, that she found herself awake in the middle of the night, her conscience too noisy to facilitate sleep.
So when the Reavers came, she was on the first ship out to the very edge.
She’d been culling the Reaver population for a couple years when the Pax video got out. She didn’t see it; she never used the Cortex, and she pretty much kept to herself. Spartan, or whatever.
She remembered that, too.
Faith’s first inkling that things had changed came a few weeks after the video was leaked; Alliance ships started coming out to the edge, making attempts to clean up the mess. A lot of bloodshed in those first weeks. Some civilian boats came out, too; bounty hunters and sightseers in a place they damn well shouldn’t have been, and a few freedom fighters wanting to take part in the good fight. Faith helped them out when they were in trouble right in front of her, and then she ignored them. Tourists. It’d all blow over soon.
She’d followed a Reaver raider down to Athens when she got the next surprise of her eternal life. The Reavers hadn’t gotten a chance to make merry with the townsfolk before Faith started taking them out—she had a gun, but honestly, she preferred the old-fashioned, hands-on approach. She was so absorbed in the task at hand that she missed the vigilante until a Reaver trying to get the drop on her dropped himself, felled by a precision-thrown axe. Faith looked up and saw a girl, thin as a winter wind and wild-eyed, take on two Reapers at once with the lethal grace of a Slayer. Faith was stunned; there hadn’t been Slayers in years. No one but her and B.
An elbow to the back of the head pulled Faith from her reverie, and she threw herself back into the fray. In moments, the ground was littered with dead Reavers; two sets of hands made light work.
“Who the hell are you?” Faith demanded. The girl was dripping with sweat and borrowed blood; a small scythe was clutched in her right hand.
“River.”
“Are you—”
“I’m not like you.”
“Could have fooled me,” Faith said. “You do this kind of thing often?”
The girl let her right arm fall, so that the scythe swung by her thigh like a small handbag.
“Lately, I do.”
Faith studied the girl for a long moment. She was so tiny, baby bird tiny, and she looked a little like Dawnie, except for those spooked eyes.
“You remind me of someone I used to know,” Faith said. As the words hit the air, they shocked her; she hadn’t really meant to say that.
“I know,” the girl said. She took some delicate steps over the pile of bodies, until she and Faith were breaths apart. “I was looking for you. We’re supposed to meet.”
Faith was, after the recent influx of strange events, not really surprised by this. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Then the girl stood up on her tiptoes and pressed her baby smooth lips to Faith’s. Faith didn’t resist, although she couldn’t remember the last time someone else had initiated sexual contact. It wasn’t that she was hard up; she was just used to being on top.
The girl was warm and tasted ever so slightly of apples. She was human, and she’d die.
But that was okay. Faith would remember her.
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femslash_minis Round 38, for ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fluffybkitty, who wanted playing Frisbee, dusk, and a confession, with no angst or character bashing.
