Chapter 3
If Faith had perhaps thought that Willow’s confession was going to involve a spell going awry, as she remembered they had done back in the day, and a jovial tale of personality swapping with say a demon from the underworld or you know, Cordelia, it would at least explain her very un-slayer like reaction to the redhead’s whispered confession.
Choking on the coffee she’d only just taken a sip of, Faith began coughing and sputtering out strangled words which sounded like “fuck me” but Willow wasn’t properly listening, worried that the slayer was about to choke to death in front of her.
“Are you okay?” She asked the dark haired woman, green eyes crinkled with concern.
Faith threw the Wicca a stern look of her own, closely followed by an incredulous raised eyebrow once her breathing returned to normal and her coughing fit had subsided. She couldn’t quite believe how this conversation was playing out. Willow a murderer? How the hell did that happen? This had to be some sort of elaborate joke to teach the rogue slayer a lesson. What fucking lesson that could be, the slayer had no idea, but still, Red killing a guy? Not gonna happen.
Faith lent back in her chair, running a callused hand through silky dark locks, brushing hair out of her face that had fallen during her coughing jag. Her dark eyes kept drifting to the concerned green opposite her, trying to determine the Wicca’s end game. But the closer she looked, the more she recognised the expression in the emerald depths before her. It was the same haunted, dark look that greeted her in the mirror every morning when she lingered too long thinking about her past, and the people she’d hurt, and the one she had killed.
Goddamnit Willow was telling the truth.
The silence that blanketed the table once Faith had processed all that she was seeing and hearing felt thick with the amount of unanswered questions she now had for the redhead. Though really there was only one question to ask. And as with most things she’s done in her life, Faith just ploughed right ahead and asked it without much thought as to whether Willow wanted to answer her.
“Why’d you do it?”
The slayer had a lingering hope that the Wicca would tell her it had been an accident, or a spell that had backfired, or she mistook a human for a vampire, because hell, that can happen. But that hope vanished as quickly as a vampire turns to dust when Willow’s hollow voice broke the heavy silence between them. Her once vibrant verdant eyes growing distant, darker somehow. Faith swallowed around the lump that had suddenly formed in her throat, taking in a deep steadying breath as Willow upped the ante on their game of show and tell.
“You want to know why I killed him? Because he deserved it. The snivelling little bastard deserved getting his ass flayed. That’s why. Pretty simple really. It had been like the best day ever, till he came along. We were happy again. We were in love again. She came back to me and everything was how it should be. We spent the night and the next day in bed together, just like in the beginning. Like when it’s all new and you don’t want it to stop. The feeling and the touching. Especially the touching.”
Willow let out a shallow breath, a small whimper mixed in with it. Her eyes felt heavy with tears again, like they always do when she remembers that day. But as much as it hurt to remember, it hurt more to try and forget.
“We were so happy, damn it. We’d just gotten dressed, it was late afternoon. And it was sunny, really warm. I remember that the most, the warmth. Remember being all warm and feeling fuzzy inside because she was back. Then it was all dark and cold. As she fell, the world went cold on me. Like a switch flipped to off inside me and the cold seeped in. There was a noise. Really loud. And blood, lots of blood, and she fell and there was nothing I could do. Nothing they’d let me do to bring her back. He came and he took my Tara away.”
The tears fell fast down Willow’s cheeks, she didn’t even notice them. Faith watched the Wicca in silence, that unfamiliar lump in her throat back again, only harder to ignore and swallow around this time. The pain coming off the woman in front of her was a tangible thing. The slayer was sure she could feel it grab onto some part of her that lay hidden. The part where her compassion and her empathy lay dormant inside, because no-one ever tried to bring them out of her and before now she even doubted they existed herself. That she could feel this much for someone else’s sorrow was alien to her. That it was Willow she felt it for was somehow less so.
Faith swallowed hard, trying to dislodge the ball of steel that suddenly wedged itself in her throat. Just as she was trying to force back tears she felt sting her own eyes like tiny sharp needles she saw the waitress making another swoop with her coffee, and the slayer warned her away with a dangerous look in her dark eyes. The waitress narrowed her eyes at the pair but ignored their table all the same, her mistrust of the young women ratcheting up a notch.
The brunette couldn’t quite believe what she was doing when she reached for Willow’s hands that were clasped tightly together on the table top. Yet she watched herself begin to pry them apart and cover them with her own much larger, callused hands. The gesture felt so strange coming from the slayer but both women recognised the importance of it. The line Faith was trying to cross in order to reach the dark place Willow had gone to in her memory. Reach it and bring her back. She knew a lot about darkness, had been living in its shadow for most of her life. She still couldn’t quite believe innocent geeky Red had found her way to the darkness too, but by the way the redhead was crying, Faith didn’t doubt that she had. And she suspected that like her, the darkness in Willow was always just below the surface, waiting to come out.
“Willow, it’s over now. It’s over, okay?” Faith didn’t know what else to say. There were a lot of questions she had, ones she was sure she’d never be able to ask, but for now she needed Willow in the here and now with her. Not least because she was starting to lose her slayer edge over the stuff buried within her, and didn’t want this to turn into Dawson’s hour.
"Willow, come on. It’s okay, ‘kay?”
Something broke through to the redhead’s thoughts. Maybe it was Faith’s deep rough voice urging her back. Maybe it was the feel of warm hands clasped over her icy cold ones, gently rubbing the knuckles. Maybe it was the fat waitress shouting an order to the chef. Didn’t matter how exactly, but Willow started to regain her composure a little.
“Sorry,” she mumbled to Faith, extricating herself from the hands holding her own, missing their touch immediately but refusing to pause on why. She reached for a paper napkin from the dispenser on the table, wiping the tears from her cheeks.
“You don’t have to apologise.” Faith also missed the hands before her, but quickly banished the reason why from her mind and like she always did, lit up a cigarette to deflect the tension.
“Yeh well, I don’t usually lose it like that. Not in public anyway. Oh, except maybe for that one time Principal Snyder made me take part in the school play. On that occasion there might even have been snot bubbles.”
The redhead smiled weakly at the woman opposite her, hoping she could see she was trying her best to get back to normal-happy Willow. Faith only smirked in return, being an old hand at using humour to mask what was really going on inside.
Willow raked her hands through her hair, sighing with the movement suddenly feeling very tired. She wasn’t sure how she got into the state she was in with Faith of all people the one to offer her comfort, but she was kind of glad she had gone there. It was difficult to grieve back at Command Central, with all the activity going on there lately. Not to mention her growing feelings for Kennedy and the unmistakable feelings coming from the younger woman in return, making it a little confusing to think about Tara and all that had happened. In her unknowing, sledgehammer way, Faith had allowed Willow to gain some much needed relief from her trapped grief, and perhaps help her with some closure she’d been desperately missing for so long.
And you’ve heard the beginning so you might as well hear the rest thought the redhead, ready at last to complete her story.
“Faith?”
The brunette looked up from the menu she’d not really been reading, to find a set of green eyes on her that were a little brighter than before.
“Yeh?”
“There’s more you should know."