Komm Zu Mir
What Buffy likes best is to tie her up. Manacles and chains and the taut line of her against a wall, or ropes and the headboard, complete immobility. She peels Faith's clothes off her body like she's some exotic fruit, dark-skinned and pale-fleshed, and teases the white skin underneath for hours. Licks her way up the inside of her thighs and across her collarbones until Faith is whimpering with need. Buffy tongues the soft place on the inside of Faith's elbows with only the barest hint of human-blunt teeth like her world depends on it.
The first time Faith cried, she was ashamed, but afterward Buffy kissed her dizzy and now she doesn't notice her own frustrated tears. There is never any sign of the first bite, sharp stabbing pain on her neck, wrist, thigh, the sudden scent of blood in the air making her veins sing with need. Buffy loves the tiny gasp of surprise Faith gives, loves the way red looks, streaked across her ribs, around her navel, cannot drink enough of her. When she finally lets Faith come, cool tongue on her clit, three fingers pushed inside her until she arches and screams, the bite marks are already healing.
At times, Faith tries to imagine a world in which she were not the second turned -- new key, same familiar melody line. Deep down she knows -- and Buffy knows, too, with her smug, sideways looks -- there would never have been the two of them here in delicious darkness had it all happened in reverse. Just the same fucking thing as always -- Buffy the perpetual good girl to Faith's evil, determined to be whatever Faith wasn't. So it figured she'd do this just as soon as Faith was learning about things like redemption and second chances and adjusting to the world without hating it.
It's like a distant fairy tale when Faith remembers it now, the way it happened, too neat and unreal to question. Her suddenly racing pulse as something slunk into her cell and startled exclamation at familiar blonde hair in the fluorescent lighting falling sideways from the hall. A headlong flight past the unnervingly still shapes of guards slumped over while she tried to imagine an emergency so dire the Council had wanted their naughty slayer freed. And then these facts which she tries not to recite to herself: half of what she knows about slaying she learned from Buffy, long months of no more than required prison exercise – all these things together which ensured that Buffy would have won anyway. Even if she hadn't been so strong now that Faith had felt fear crawling in her stomach even before the first flash of ridged forehead and yellow eyes which prodded a whispered obscenity to fall from her slack-parted lips. Even if Faith had truly tried to resist.
Buffy turned her in the back alley of an all-night convenience store, beside an overflowing dumpster and a lone streetlight buzzing into the three am air. It took Faith a moment to even begin to breathe again after she wrenched herself away, panting, from Buffy's sudden attack and first saw the glint of incisors. She was grinning ferally, and it was only an instant before Faith realized why she hadn't simply seduced her into darkness, surprised her with a caress turned deadly. She wanted this, wanted Faith belly-up, wanted them both to know who was the boss, the champion, the Sire. For the briefest of moments, Faith could see her redemption laid out before her, a staking, the Council's favor regained, the Chosen One at last, needed, wanted, but Buffy, chest unnaturally still, not panting after all, had laughed at the look on her face.
"They'd never believe you," she said, and what proof would Faith have, bodiless, with an unidentifiable pile of dust?
She has never really been able to grasp the concept of becoming good once again, of turning around on her one-way path of terrible things and this, she tries to tell herself, is why. A decision to go all the way, which had nothing at all to do with Buffy's mouth on her neck, Buffy's blood in her throat, Buffy's hungry eyes which wanted not Willow or Xander but her, Faith, her.
It took a long time to die on the greasy pavement of the alley, back against the concrete wall, Slayer healing warring with hungry Slayer-vampire straddling her, gulping her life away. It took a long time for the dim circle of starless sky above her to fade into darkness, her fingers grabbing at the asphalt, soul slipping free of her body, new Slayer somewhere being called.
Buffy was out hunting the night Faith first fucked Spike, the way she would have even before: directly, crawling between him and the television, onto his lap, pushing him inside her as he groaned, eyes wide in surprise, hard in an instant. She rides him the way she said she would once, in a dim memory from behind someone else's eyes of this man who is now her grandsire, and he fucks her, bites her, takes her, and lets her gouge her nails as deeply into his back as she wants, because those will heal soon enough, too. But they both know she is Buffy's toy, Buffy's game, obsession, Childe. He is a little afraid, she thinks, of what he has created, this bright-haired, cold-lipped girl whose eyes glint with as much evil as they once did with life, and what she in turn has made, a dusky shadow of herself. They are dark, beautiful, brutal, terrifying together and know it. In loud, dim clubs they dance together, wrapped in leather and silk, all dark eyeliner and rolling hips and too much energy, and he watches them, obscured by his duster and cigarette smoke, face unreadable.
He likes her dark hair, likes to tangle his fingers in it. Once, when he came, he called her Drusilla.
They have only one bed, but rarely do the three of them fuck at once. Most often, Faith watches as Buffy wraps her legs around Spike's waist, both so pale and delicate-limbed, because this is what Buffy likes. Dark eyes watching hazel watching blue. Sometimes Buffy looks on as Spike takes Faith from behind. Faith turns her head away, presses her face into the pillow, because it's better than seeing Buffy's blank eyes watching them, her stillness; she never touches herself.
Neither of them sleep much, bodies full of more energy than even Spike, who drowses through the still, restless hours of midday, can explain. One plus one is two, Faith thinks. The whole preternatural Slayer package exacerbated by the demon inside them each. They are both ravenous all the time, and they hunt with more fearless vigor and boldness than anyone else dares, skirting parking lots, the bright edges of well-lit civilization, simply because they can. The day they ate a Watcher, Faith fucked Buffy senseless beside his slumped body and crossbow.
The Council is running scared, which delights them both, for lesser or greater reasons. They are hunting them, carefully, from a distance, circling along with the new Slayer, a tiny, big-eyed girl from Mexico, impossibly young. Her, though, they are watching especially carefully, keeping her back, finally beginning to understand the power of a hellmouth, just as Faith is. Before, she had wondered what it was which drew vampires to Sunnydale, what they and the mayor and demons felt which she didn't. Thought maybe she had been somehow pulled to it as she fled headlong across the country from Kakistos and into the arms of Big Sister Slayer, but like everything else, whatever she sensed then was only a shadow of what she feels now.
It buzzes in her brain, crawls beneath her skin, tingles in her fingertips, her tongue, ceaselessly. It's like an extension of all the demon energy pent up inside her, furiously prodding her to dancekilleatfuckdestroy, faster, harder, more. She is always aware of where it is, from a dozen or a hundred miles away. It calls her home, its little girl lost, poor, pretty, wicked Faith; and then it laughs at her, knocks her down, gibbers in her ears until she wants to scream, and she LOVES it, wants to destroy the world to get at its pulsing energy, would kill for it, does.
They are not afraid of the Council, of anything. They have been creatures of the night long before this, and now the darkness courses through their veins like a heady and horrible elixir. When they fight side by side it is faster and sweeter and more perfect than anything Faith ever imagined, and she roars into the blood-drenched blackness with the joy of it.
Sometimes, near dawn, as they lie in bed not sleeping, Buffy strokes her hair, spooning her, whispersings lullabies in her ear like she's the little sister stolen away to hell. At times, she vanishes for days, and when she returns, she dances with Faith for hours, fucks both her and Spike into oblivion, cannot hide the desperation in her eyes. Buffy will ignore one or the other of them completely for a day, a week, without warning, and that is the worst, Faith thinks. She would far rather bleed for Buffy's ravenous lips for hours than endure being relegated to complete oblivion. When Spike has inexplicably fallen from her graces, Buffy steals Faith away, giggles with her for hours, dresses her up in things soft and young, things the mayor would have liked. Begs her to seduce some boy or girl just so Buffy can watch Faith's eyes flicker coyly, the falsely innocent curve of her lips, and then the sudden transformation, the rawness, the kill. The other times, though, when Buffy becomes entranced by Spike, Faith stalks the night alone, hides in her own secret haunts during the day, kills carnally, recklessly, pretends she could leave.
Buffy thinks most of Angel, and both Faith and Spike know this. It gnaws at her like nothing else that she can never again recreate the thing she alone could cause, once upon a time. Now that she wants Angelus with the same near-dreamy fervor with which she once pined for Angel, she will never be able to draw him to the surface. Her cold skin and smoky, feverbright eyes which make Spike touch the small of her back with such reverent lust will never make Angel happy to any degree. Faith worries that she will go to him and he will stake her. She worries more that he won't.
Angel is like a pall hanging over all three of them. She used to think she knew what it was to truly hate someone. Without mirrors, she sees her own bitterness reflected only in Spike's eyes.
When Buffy is gone, Faith gets Spike to tell her about turning Buffy, the demon (whose power he is both vague and hyperbolic about) he saved her from when the Scoobies abandoned her, the demon they couldn't prevent from taking Dawn as his bride. With her eyes closed as he talks, she imagines she was the one watching Buffy sob out the loss of her mother, her Watcher, her sister, her friends, heaven, in the empty Bronze. Pretends she listened to Buffy beg for it all to stop, slipped strong arms around her waist, her teeth into her neck. Faith can imagine perfectly Buffy’s body stiffening as she gasped, hiccupped, face still salty, the rapt, terrified look in her eyes as she opened her mouth to the offering of a bloody wrist, dying.
Faith has crystalline, color-splashed dreams which dance tantalizingly around the edges of her consciousness, refusing to be fully remembered. She cannot tell if there is a flash of acknowledgement in Buffy's eyes when they wake, whether they still tumble together from one subconscious to another or if her mind long ago began substituting its own Buffy into the vacuum left by the real one. Once, there was a wild-haired, dark-skinned girl, her face painted in white and black, and that time Buffy woke up cursing and unsettled, her brooding near-silence matching the inexplicable chill in Faith's spine.
Buffy still dreams the future, knows what the Council will do, tells them when to move or stay. She is getting restless here, with the havoc she can wreak in this little town, even as full of chaos as they've made it. She'll want to leave soon, and Spike pulls her onto his lap and talks to her about Paris and Venice, the wine and the blood and the twisting, ancient streets, old places, and Buffy tosses her hair back and smiles, looks at Faith and then away again.
"Slayers are only happy when they're dead," she’d said once, bitterly, to Buffy, when they were both very young and could still look at each other by sunlight. Pretty Buffy who even then believed in shiny happily ever afters, at least a little, who only now understands things Faith has held close to herself for so long. She thinks of this sometimes, in the utter blackness and silence. Lays the palm of her hand on the flat, cold skin just above Buffy's breasts, and can never decide if she was right.