Cleveland
Breaking out of prison was the easy part. Faith had only ever stayed in the facility by choice, and now, she was choosing to leave. Escaping the watchful eye of the Feds, however, was not so easy.
After escaping, Faith went to a bus station. She made sure to give her real name to the station master, and made sure he remembered she had bought a ticket for a bus on its way to Nevada. Then she went to a different, much seedier bus station, and slipped on a bus to Colorado. In Colorado, she managed to hustle enough guys to pay for a trip to Ohio. She used cabs, trains, and buses, but never planes.
She eventually arrived in Cleveland, after days of arduous and careful travel. It sucked to have to be so cautious. She’d have to be careful all the time now, too: careful not to let the cops see her, careful not to let her wild dark side catch up with her, and careful not to think too hard about what she was doing in Cleveland, rather than safely locked up in a prison facility outside of LA.
She had given it more thought than just that day she’d learned Buffy had died. She had tried to justify staying in prison to herself, but ultimately, she couldn’t. Buffy was dead. Faith was the only Slayer alive now, and to her, it seemed more an act of cowardice to stay in prison than anything else.
But Faith seriously doubted she was redeemed, or even close to it. She wondered if she was even capable of slaying a vampire. If she did, would she go back to that dark place she’d been in during her Sunnydale years? Would she kill again?
She found her answer a few days after arriving in Cleveland. She was just coming back from an interview with a very handsy man who was looking for a clerk for his gas station in the sketchiest part of town. She already wanted to bash his head into the counter, and it sucked, but it was the best prospect for a job she had, and she couldn’t live off of pool-hustling money forever.
While walking back to her motel (unfortunately also in the bad part of town) she spotted a young woman being harassed by a hulking man with thick muscles and blond hair. She tried not to pay attention at first. She thought about stopping him, and then remembered the feeling of blood spilling across her hands. Her heart started to race. No, this was a human thing. She was a Slayer. It wasn’t her business.
Then, she caught the woman’s voice, crying out, “What happened to your face?” and she snapped to attention. It could mean anything, the reasonable, cowardly part of her brain screamed. Maybe he was just deformed. But she was already switching into Slaying mode, grabbing the stake she had kept with her at all times since she’d broken out of jail.
He should have heard her coming. As Faith approached, she thought that he should hear her by now. He should turn around. Her hands trembled as she held the stake. What if she was wrong? What if he was human?
Finally, when it seemed like she was only a few inches away, he whirled, exposing his unmistakably vampiric face to her. A breath of relief, then Faith dodged his blow and they fought. The woman ran. The fight lasted less than twenty seconds, before Faith was the only one left in the alley, its other denizen reduced to dust on the wind.
She went home to her motel that night, relieved that at least she was still good for something. She wasn’t sure if she would be able to kill anything other than vampires (the memory of her panic over demon blood coating her hands was still fresh in her mind) but hey, the title was Vampire Slayer, not demon slayer. This was all she really had to do.
The next day, she got a call that she’d gotten the job at the gas station. It certainly wasn’t because of her outstanding resume or sparkling wit; she’d never really had a job before, and she had barely been able to talk to the gas station manager without clenching her teeth. So either he was really hurtin’ for employees, or he was hurtin’ for something else. Faith didn’t care. She had a job. She could slay vampires. She could do this. She could be a good Slayer, or at the very least, a half-decent one.
…
The weeks she spent in Cleveland were not especially pleasant ones, but they weren’t unpleasant, either. Mostly, Faith spent her days either at work, or wandering the streets trying to figure out if that weird feeling she got was because vampires were around, or because she was lost and had been walking for at least twenty minutes now, and oh shit that was a cop car, wasn’t it?
At night, Faith would patrol, just like in Sunnydale. She tried not to think about how when she used to patrol, it would be with a certain blonde. She tried not to think about how sometimes, she would do a maneuver while fighting a vamp and realize halfway through who, exactly, had taught her that move.
She didn’t tell anyone she was the Slayer. Some vampires figured it out, but they all died too quickly to spread the word. Mostly, she was afraid that if they did find out, and start spreading the word, that it would somehow get back to Sunnydale. It was a stupid fear. Sunnydale was hundreds of miles away. But word traveled on Hellmouths, and Faith didn’t want any reminder of her old self--or Buffy--to track her down in Cleveland.
All of that lasted a few months, which was more than Faith had expected. She hadn’t been keeping up with her training at all. Anytime she tried, she was reminded of sparring in a high school library with a pretty blonde girl, and her hands would start shaking. The only training she got was on the job.
There was a vampire. A woman, tall and slim, with long black hair that was tied back in a braid. Unlike most of the vampires Faith fought, she wasn’t new. Faith didn’t know how old she was, but she knew this vampire had experience. And the first time they fought, she used a move that reminded Faith so strongly of Buffy that she was stunned for a moment. The vampire shoved her against a tree, grinning. She was wearing her vamp face, but still somehow managed a sultry expression.
“I thought the Slayer was in Sunnydale” she breathed through a mouthful of fangs.
“You thought wrong.” Faith replied, before driving her knee into the vampire’s stomach. It loosened the vamp woman’s grip enough that Faith managed to shove her off, but the vampire quickly regained her balance and started sprinting away. Faith ran after her, but unfortunately she still hadn’t mastered the streets of Cleveland, and lost the vampire woman quickly. Well, so much for anonymity.
She thought about the woman’s words. ‘The Slayer’. Not a Slayer, not like when Buffy had been alive. But then again, Buffy was never a Slayer. Buffy had been alive to see two other Slayers fight alongside her, and she had still always managed to be the Slayer.
Faith felt a familiar pang of envy at the thought, a painful reminder that she would never be as good as Buffy was. She had contented herself for a while in being good enough, or decent, but the truth was she wanted more. She always had. If she were content to be good enough, her feelings for Buffy wouldn’t be half as complicated, because she had known since the moment she met the girl that Buffy was everything she wanted to be. Buffy had everything Faith had always wanted to have. And that was always the problem. The one person who had ever truly cared about Faith, who had fought for her, given her chance after chance, was the very one that Faith resented the most.
Had it been this hard for Buffy to be good? For her, it seemed to come easily. Making the right decision, doing the right thing, caring about people, was all as natural as breathing for someone as perfect as Buffy. But for people like Faith, it was hard. It was an effort, and every day she dragged herself out of her crappy bed in her crappy apartment, trying to resolve to be better. Rarely did she succeed. But she hadn’t killed or maimed anyone (human) since she’d arrived in Cleveland, so that was a start.
She tracked down the vampire the next day, in a nest in some abandoned warehouse. It was nice to know that every city seemed to have those. Normally, she would just wait until daylight and torch the place with the vamps inside, but she didn’t want to get caught and sent back to prison with ‘arson’ added to her rap sheet, so she went in and staked each of the vampires in their sleep.
She felt like a coward for doing it like that, but it was better to avoid a fight. That way, she could still patrol tonight. She staked the female vampire last, and watched the bitch dissolve into dust, thinking about how maybe one day, the favor would be repaid, and Faith would wake up with a knife in her gut. She already dreamed about it almost every night. The last thing she needed was for that particular dream to come true.
Patrol that night was uneventful, which irritated Faith because the whole reason she had killed those vampires during the day was so she could patrol at night. She returned to her tiny, miserable apartment well after midnight, irritated and feeling like she needed to fight something. Anything.
Instead, she drove her fist into a wall, the plaster crumpling easily under her fist. It felt good, to finally hit something with all her might, even if she might have felt her fist go through brick, too. She stood there for a moment, chest heaving, tears of anger stinging her eyes. All she could think was that she couldn’t do this anymore. She had been fighting so hard to be good, and what was it getting her? She was no better off than in Sunnydale. In fact, she was kind of worse off, because she didn’t have…
Faith quickly pulled her fist out of the wall. Her knuckles were bleeding, but they would be healed by morning. She went into the bathroom and rinsed the plaster dust off her hand.
Maybe she needed another change. Surely, there were other Hellmouths in the world. Maybe one in a town where she didn’t have to live in a shitty apartment and work at a shitty gas station with a shitty manager that wanted nothing from her except to fuck her senseless.
Hmm. Or maybe... maybe that’s what she needed. Faith hadn’t had a good, meaningless fuck session since prison. She hadn’t dared enter any bars in Cleveland, not since the first night she had arrived. She’d been wanting to take the edge off, so she’d walked into the closest bar she’d found. It reminded her so forcefully of a night in LA, dancing as chaos and brawls and blood raged around her, that she had been too scared to go back. Another instance of her own cowardice.
She fixed that the next night, when she walked into a sketchy little bar near her apartment, found the least-creepy looking guy in there, and took him back home. The sex was quick and mediocre at best, but at least it distracted her from her thoughts for a moment. It didn’t scratch the itch that had been building, that sense of urgency and unrest. She tossed and turned in bed, barely able to sleep with the stranger next to her. Eventually, though, she must have found some rest, because she had a dream about the dark-haired vampire who had fled two nights earlier.
“Faith Lehane?” the vampire asked, looking more human than monster as she walked through a ray of sunlight. Faith had not told the vampire her name.
“Who’s askin’?”
The vampire woman smiled. She didn’t seem very vampiric at all in this dream.
“I’m sorry you had to kill me, Faith.” she said gently. It was not something Faith ever expected anyone to say to her, and it was certainly not something Faith commonly heard in her dreams.
“Who are you?” she demanded.
“My name was Fiona.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“My name was Fiona, and I have come to give you a warning.”
“Why you?” Faith demanded. She hated Slayer dreams. They were always filled with violence, or riddles, or something in between. Why couldn’t prophetic dreams just be clear?
Fiona lifted one of her shoulders. She was beautiful, Faith noticed, now that she wasn’t trying to kill her. It was weird to see something so monstrous appear suddenly so ethereal.
“I don’t know. Perhaps I represent something to you.” Fiona mused. Faith ground her teeth. If she wanted to know what things represented to her, she would have read one of Jules’s stupid psychology textbooks.
“Whatever. Forget I asked. Just tell me what you came to warn me about, so this stupid dream can be over.”
Fiona smiled then, like she was amused by what Faith said. But her smile faded quickly and she looked at Faith with a suddenly urgent expression.
“A great darkness approaches Sunnydale.”
“Sunnydale’s not my Hellmouth.” Faith replied automatically. “I’m sure B’s friends can take care of it.”
Fiona looked at her, frowning slightly. “Could I have ‘taken care’ of myself as a vampire?” she asked. Faith sighed, fighting the urge to punch Fiona. Why the fuck did these dreams have to be so goddamn cryptic?
“So what are you saying? That Buffy’s friends are the threat?”
The vampire only gave Faith a soft, almost sympathetic look before saying, “Life and death are not to be messed with, Faith Lehane. You should know that by now.”
Faith looked down. Her hands were coated in blood. She looked up again, and saw the lifeless bodies of Allan Finch and Lester Worth. Her stomach twisted. There was a familiar knife at her feet, covered in blood. She bent down to pick up the knife, and as her fingers brushed the warm metal, sticky with blood, a hand wrapped around her wrist. It was so quick that she didn’t register it, and she gasped, jumping back just in time to see Allan Finch’s dead, soulless eyes staring back at her. She woke with a start.