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He always knows when she's been drinking too much, because that's when she smiles at him. There are never any bottles around--she's far too smart for that--and her breath never smells like alcohol. She never sways, or slurs, or even seems drunk, but he knows. He can see it in red lips curving upwards at the ends; empty eyes.
Any other time she'll smile any everything but him. The dirty walls, the tv that is mostly fuzz, or the open window that gives a perfect view into nothingness. Another wall, this one red with graffiti. Sometimes, almost offhand, she'll comment that it looks like blood. So much like blood that it makes her smile.
She told him a story about it, once. Blood, running steady and thick, forming letters on something flat and motionless.
"He was my first," she'd said, smiling wryly. "First piece of violence, I mean. I was fifteen, and we were living together in this shitty little apartment--lot like this place, actually." Looking around with a gaze so blank that it makes him flinch. "In the middle of the night I just...held him down. It just occurred to me in the middle of the night to cut him up, into little tiny pieces; make him littler than me..." Her voice faded off, and he prayed that she wouldn't continue, but when she did it was with a smile. "I tied him down with his shirt. He was really weak. And then I straddled him, waiting for him to wake up, because I couldn't do it until he was awake. I gagged him," she said emotionlessly, still staring out the window. "But he screamed when I cut into him: F A I T H. It took a long time to do it, and he bled a lot."
He had cleared his throat. "And after that?" he'd asked, in a voice that barely quivered.
She had shrugged, bored by then with the view. "Dunno. I took off in the middle of the night; left him tied to the bed."
After that, they'd stayed where they were, silent for awhile. He'd been looking at his hands, steepled in his lap; every fingernail, once pared and manicured to blunt perfection, now dirty and broken.
He'd gotten the distinct feeling that she was watching him, curiously, for a reaction. A year ago--less, even--it would have gained her one, but now he merely shrugged. For someone once so marvelously naïve and weak, he had grown accustomed to violence quickly. He'd grown accustomed to cleaning blood from beneath her fingernails while she looked at him with a strangely curious and empty gaze.
She lets him take care of her, which is marvelous all on its own. There was a time when she bucked skittishly if he even laid a hand on her shoulder. Now she sits patiently while he removes her boots, wipes the blood from her face, tends to the bruised fingers that she has almost every night. When he lays a reverent kiss upon her knuckles he smiles.
She's even more wild than she once was--out every single night, fighting and fucking and god knows what else--but she always comes home and crawls into the pullout couch that they share as a bed, murmuring as she twists and writhes between the sheets, fully clothed. In sleep she is a hurricane that destroys everything around her; he has woken up with bruises that he didn't have the night before. He's accustomed to bruises now; scars that are twisted and jagged on his chest. Some of them are random slashes, but many of them hold the same shape: F, loud proud and clear on the white flesh of his body.
She did it for the first time the night after she told him about the boy, the one in the hotel room. He had willingly let himself be tied down; yielded to her knife even as it made him wince. He had cried, and she had merely stared at him, expressionless. "Expecting that," she said gently, before she leaned down to lick up the blood.
It was like that with them--everything spur of the moment. Even the sex, which he hadn't really been as surprised by as he'd told himself he was, came and went as her mood dictated. One minute she was wild, panting with life, and the next she was staring dully at the corner of their apartment, where he'd at least tried to perk it up with a tiny, circular table and some yellow flowers.
She has taken to watching him, her eyes huge and wet and unreadable. Impossibly old, impossibly young. She only wears her makeup when she goes hunting anymore, so mostly her face is far too pale, naturally dark skin wiped out by a life lived at nighttime. She still wears the same things--tight, tight leather pants; shirts in dark, rich colors that bring out her hair and skin; and black, lots of black, always--but she will often settle for a pair of jeans and one of his button-down shirts when they're at home. Its only when they're alone that he sees what she calls her 'Sunnydale face'--harsh, angry, with a sexy smirk or a roll of the eyes--melt into the face that she wears now. Dark, empty eyes. Pursed lips, like she is always contemplating something. Hair curling wildly, falling in her face.
Over time, he has seen his own 'Sunnydale face' adapt itself into the face he has now--the smirk of over-arrogant youth fade into fathomless eyes and a stern face that will always be too gentle. Instead of his choking suits and ties, he wears, more often than not, black pants and a colorless button-down. His goal, as always, is to hide. Hers has always been to gain the attention of the things in the dark.
His Slayer, she is still...a Slayer. Not by official terms--the terms of the Council--but merely because she has nothing else to do, no other way to vent the horrible rages that overcome her. He knows that she is not merely killing vampires--the blood left over on her clothes after many of her hunts is too thick, and too fresh, to be that of vampires--but he never says anything of it. She keeps expecting him to; he can tell that from the always mildly curious expression in her eyes, as though she'd like to know what he's thinking, but it doesn't much matter. Doesn't matter what he thinks of her.
She doesn't need him, but he needs her, and that is just the way it is.
That's what he tells himself, anyway. Its so much easier to care for someone who couldn't give a damn about you. That way, there is no respect for them to lose, no way for them to stop loving you, because they've never loved you at all.
But this explanation doesn't account for the nights he wakes up to find her crying, curled up on the side of the bed. On these nights he feigns sleep as she clutches his hand, drops it, stalks restlessly around the apartment fingering the knife in her hand. Pointing its cold, sharp edge at his throat, making it dig into his flesh so he feels it but can't move, then pulls it away, hugging it to her chest and letting loose another wild torrent of tears. On these nights he knows that she is contemplating killing him, and that if he moves, she most certainly will.
But so far it hasn't happened. Each time that her episodes of sleepwalking, or insomnia, or whatever they are, have struck her, she has always returned the knife to its place underneath the cushion of the only chair. And she's always gone back to bed afterward; curled her body around him and arranged his arms around her until she was comfortable. In the daytime he sits and records all of this in his leather-bound books, sitting in the very chair in which the knife is hidden.
The books, and her booze, are their only real luxury. He just feels the need to record it, all of it. There has been no record of a 'rogue Slayer' before her, and even if these books never make it to the Council, he will make sure that they get to Giles.
And he knows. He knows that the term is not really 'rogue Slayer' so much as 'insane Slayer,' because the rage and the pain and the dark, empty look in her eyes are more reminiscent of a vampire than a vampire Slayer, and he has been told over and over again that a vampire is merely a soulless animal. The murders, the sex, the scars on her body that he doesn't ask about...so far all signs point to abuse, but he tries not ask her questions anymore, squelching his natural curiosity in the face of someone who could see killing him as a viable option to avoid such questioning.
He doesn't really talk to her about anything, anyway. Not about her past, not about his past, not about the nights when she comes home soaked in gray ash, drying into the bloodstains on her shirt. She volunteers information, sometimes; mostly about her time in Sunnydale or the time directly before that, when she was living on stolen food. She never talks the people who were her friends in Sunnydale, and the one time he mentioned Buffy, offhand, she had flinched, then remained silent for the remainder of the day. That was the one and only time he ever saw pain in her eyes, excluding her crying fits in the middle of the night. He had actually found himself feeling...jealous, that someone else could elicit some real feeling from the girl. Some hint of what happened behind the emptiness.
He had taken her out of Sunnydale the day after the first murder, the one in Sunnydale. Deputy Mayor Allan Finch, someone insignificant who had gotten in the crossfire and brought out Faith's instincts. Buffy had assumed that it was Faith's first kill, that she could still be 'saved.'
He was long beyond that little illusion--now--seeing the darkness in her eyes when she told him about it. She had relished the details of that one, giving him some dim rough draft of the look she gave him now--curious, non-judgmental; but then it had held a spark of mischief that she had lost somewhere. She had come to him, she said, because she knew B. was "already at Giles', tellin' her version of it--the one where I get screwed." She'd gazed at him with a look that he'd never seen before--'I know you're going to take care of it'--and he had gotten them out of there as soon as possible.
Which was well enough. Because the next night a group of vampires had attacked the blond Slayer, claiming to work for the Mayor. She'd just barely escaped with her life, went to Faith?s hotel room only to find her missing, and put two and two together.
He has never been able to get out of her whether she had really sent the vampires after her, but all she ever did was grin at the walls, so he has stopped asking.
They moved to LA because of its darkness. It was somewhere they could get caught up in, disappear into, and when they drove there she embraced it silently, with only a nod to show any interest in their location. He liked it because he believed that they wouldn?t be found here. She liked it because it fostered her darkness.
Now that he had stopped feeling guilty for it, it didn?t matter much. He hadn't gotten her out of Sunnydale to redeem her, anyway; he had gotten her out to save her from the Council, and he had succeeded. So far they haven't run into anyone that has been a threat to him, but he knows it is only a matter of time.
He also knows that, no matter what, he will give up his life for her. She is his Slayer, and he will die for her, if need be. When he told her that, she laughed. "And will you suffer for me?" she asked, mock-sweetly.
As soon as he nodded, he was screaming. She had the knife out again, and after she stuffed a rag in his mouth she had begun. "F A I T H. Say it with me, baby. F A I T H. You're mine."
No, you're mine, he always thought. My Slayer. And she laughed as though she could read his mind.
Lately she has been getting worse, which he hadn't thought possible. Her sessions of 'insomnia' are getting more frequent, she speaks less and less, and now she never even looks at him. For the past five nights the blood on her clothes has been human, and the newspapers are starting to report on the first page mutilations that used to be third page news.
She is no longer the bitchy, funny, "five by five" girl she was in Sunnydale, but nor is she the introspective woman with the crazed eyes that he has been sleeping with for the past six months. Her drinking is becoming sloppier, and he knows that she has begun mixing it with other things--pills and powders have found their way into couch cushions and crushed under shoes. The track marks in her arms don't heal quickly enough for her to hide, but she doesn't try to, anyway. Slowly but surely she is disintegrating piece by piece. Soon enough, all that will be left of her is the five letters across his chest.
Unless she gets rid of him first.
But that thought doesn't occur to him nearly as often as the other, so when he opens the apartment door to laughter, it is no surprise. She is half-sitting, half-lying on the bed with two men, and while they grab their clothes as soon as he walks in the door, she seems not in the least surprised to see him.
He barely hears the door shut behind him in his fury. Instead he focuses on the woman stretching, catlike, across the pullout. She purrs at him, face firmly in a seductive grin. Sunnydale face. "Hello, lover."
He doesn't reply. Instead, he puts the bags of groceries into the kitchen and returns to the living room to see Faith swallow two, four, six pills. "What are you doing?" he spits out.
She gives him a look, as the pills travel down her throat. "What's it look like?" she asks, flippant. He's unfamiliar with this attitude of hers, the 'Sunnydale face' that he hasn't seen in over a year. He feels almost as if he has walked into the wrong apartment.
"Stop it," he says, a hard edge of steel in his voice. But underneath it he is begging, and she knows that, so she merely stands up and begins pulling on her clothes, grinning directly at him.
"Stop what, Wes?" And he flinches again. Because she hasn't called him that since they've left Sunnydale. It's been Price, ever since they hit LA. Just as she is now Elizabeth, long version of Buffy.
Trying to brace himself, he throws that back at her. "Faith," he says firmly, watching her eyes to see if it registers. It doesn't. "You have to stop this, Faith. You're destroying yourself."
And that look is almost gone, 'Elizabeth' is almost back. The name that she picked for herself, that seems to fit with the quiet, empty-eyed person that she has become. Faith is the woman who cuts up his chest, F A I T H bleeding down in red letters. And Faith is the one who bites it back, grins around the blankness. "Isn't that your job, Wes? Aren't you the one who destroyed me? You did bring me here, didn't you?" She sees that cut him, but not too much. The cadence of her words is right, but they are not her words. They are Buffy's words about Faith.
He shakes his head. "You asked me to, Faith." Because she did, she asked him with those big brown eyes and the fact that she has never before depended on anyone. With the fact that she needed him. She shrugs, and he sees her begin to waver from whatever she's been taking. That's never happened before. Her words are slurred. "Doesn't matter. Its not me you want anyway, its 'Elizabeth.' Sure, she sits in corners and stares, but she doesn't kill people, right?"
She doesn't let him answer. Instead she half-rushes, half-stumbles into the bathroom and locks the door, leaving him in a room full of silence.
And he wants to debate that, really he does. Because as much as he...feels for--he can't quite bring himself to call it love--the pale imitation of the old Faith, 'Elizabeth,' the old Faith is the one he belongs to. The one who makes him bleed. The one that he can say that he loves.
But there's no time to think about this, because she's in the bathroom still, and with all the pills in her, and the alcohol. Maybe enough to kill even a Slayer.
He barely picks the lock in time, and he's surprised that he even managed to do it. He never has before, but now the doorknob is entirely off the door. Out of his way. He stops to give himself a mental pat on the back before rushing in.
She is lying, half-dressed, against the small bathtub. Her face is still and pale, and he finds himself wanting to flush it with life again. Make it all better, make her skin perfectly tanned brown and her lips dark red again, so that it smears his face when she kisses him.
Flashback. He's remembering the first time that they entered the apartment, him carrying their bags as Faith strides ahead of him, hands on hips as she surveys her new home. "Nice," she said with a catlike grin, running a finger over the layer of dust on the tv. "Its just like home. Of course," she shrugged, "if you'd ever seen my home you?d know that isn't a compliment."
He'd smiled back, glad to see, for the first time since they left Sunnydale, something other than terror in her eyes. Something like happiness.
She leaned over to kiss him on the cheek, and a shadow fell across her face, blending with her blood-red lips...
As quickly as possible, he takes her in his arms. She is limp and feverish and her breathing is uneven, but at least she's still breathing. He feels the first itching of panic bite at him, but calms himself as he whispers into her hair. "Its alright, Faith. I'm going to make it alright."
And he hopes that he can. She's still passed out, so she doesn't protest when he forcibly drags her over to the toilet, arranging her on her knees before it. He's never done this before; this amount of intimacy and invasion is unfamiliar territory. He's cleaned blood from every inch of her body, but actually having to force this on her...
Quickly he recalls the last time that she cut him, the smile on her face echoing the glint on the steel of the blade. Real intimacy.
He can do it. He steels himself, quickly, then opens her mouth widely and forces two fingers down her throat until he can activate her gag reflex. She vomits, half into the toilet and half onto him, but he doesn't care. Its brought her back into awareness and she spits.
"The fuck?" Her voice is hazy and confused, but she's speaking, and he holds her closer as she becomes more coherent. "Wes--God, Wesley..." She starts crying into his shoulder, hitting him gently with her fists. "Why didn't you just let me die, Wes? Why didn't--"
"Shh," he soothes her, voice quiet and melodic in the echo of the bathroom. "Its alright, Faith. My Slayer. I'm here. Now we can talk about it."
When he says her name, a whole new flood of tears break out. He can tell that she is hating him for making her do this; for making her vulnerable in front of him. He hates it himself, when he has himself so accustomed to a blank slate, both on Faith's face and in his own mirror...
But he's awoken her now, the real Faith that was hidden behind everything else, and she is the one that he has been risking his life for. She is the one who cuts into him with a kitchen knife, and she is the one who sobs on the side of the bed as he sleeps.
She hates him now, but it will pass.
