Quickened
by P.H. Wise
A Buffy crossover fanfic
Interlude: Faith
Disclaimer: I don’t own Buffy. I don’t own Angel. I don’t own Highlander. Please don’t sue me. I’m only a poor starving writer. I have no money.
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The city of Stockton, population 261,300. Some eighty-three miles east of San Francisco and situated on the San Joaquin River, Stockton was the kind of city you could almost be fooled into liking. It had started in 1849 as a Gold Rush town, but now it was more of an urban sprawl that desperately wanted to be a good, clean, suburban place to raise your kids. Stockton. Home of the Northern California Women’s Facility, a medium custody level two and three prison. It’s maximum allowable capacity? 800. The number of convicts actually present? 832. But that’s the way it goes, sometimes. The inmates knew all about that.
This particular corrections facility had the distinction of being the place where the Vampire Slayer named Faith was to carry out her sentence. It was early autumn, 2002, and the grass around the prison, not yet rejuvenated by the rains, lay brown and dead beneath the moonlit night.
At midnight, lying in her cell within the prison, Faith dreamed a dream.
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It was night, and she stood in the cemetery, facing Buffy’s grave. The wind whispered in the grass and the leaves of the trees. All was peaceful. The gibbous moon gave enough illumination that Faith could just make out the inscription on the headstone.
BUFFY ANNE SUMMERS
1981-2001
BELOVED SISTER
DEVOTED FRIEND
SHE SAVED THE WORLD
A LOT
Angel had told her that Buffy was dead. He’d stopped by for a visit before heading off for his long retreat in the Tibetan monastery. That had been almost three months ago. But it had never really sunk in until now. Here she was, standing at the grave of Buffy Anne Summers.
It felt wrong. Buffy was dead. Faith was alive and paying for her crimes. ‘If anyone deserved to die,’ thought Faith, ‘It was me. Not her...’ It was probably survivor’s guilt.
Probably. But that didn’t make it go away.
As she stood there, lost in thought, a small group approached the grave through the woods. Startled out of her ruminations, Faith looked up. Xander. Anya. Tara. All holding candles. And Willow. Willow was the only one without a candle. She held a small urn that, to Faith’s eyes, pulsed with the promise of death.
She shuddered.
Buffy stepped out of the shadows and moved to stand at Faith’s side. “Faith.”
“Hey B,” said Faith, giving Buffy a once over. The blonde girl was clearly dead and at least a couple of months decomposed. Her face was a ghastly sight, with milky, leaking eyes and rotten flesh and decaying hair. “You’ve looked better.”
Buffy nodded, but said nothing.
With the necessary preparations now complete, Willow was ready to cast her spell. A few moments passed, and then, she began.
“Osiris, keeper of the gate, master of all fate, hear us.”
The redheaded Witch dipped her finger into the urn and marked her forehead and both cheeks with blood.
“Before time, and after. Before knowing and nothing.”
She poured the contents of the Urn onto the soft earth of Buffy’s grave.
“Accept our offering. Know our prayer.”
“It begins,” said Buffy.
“Yeah, I got that. I’m more worried about the million dollar question: WHAT begins?”
Buffy turned to look at Faith. “Everything.”
Faith raised an eyebrow, nonplused. “Cryptic much?”
Buffy looked directly into Faith’s eyes. “Lightning flashes, sparks shower, and the feather falls from its place on the scales.”
Faith looked away. “Shoulda figured you wouldn’t be much help.” She smiled ruefully. “That’s what I get for tryin’ to hold a conversation with a walking corpse.”
Willow knelt before the grave, arms outstretched, panting for breath. The others watched, clearly concerned. But they couldn’t stop now. The spell had to be carried to completion. If this failed, nothing would bring Buffy back.
“Osiris,” Willow yelled, “Let her cross over!”
The Witch began to choke. Deep, ugly gashes appeared on her arms, and ... things... began crawling underneath her skin, traveling up her arms, moving up her neck.
Tara stared in wide-eyed horror, her candle nearly forgotten. “Oh my God, oh my God...” she said, again and again, willing everything to be all right even as she knew that it most definitely wasn’t.
Willow fell forward, gagging, and barely catching herself with her hands on the grass, stopping just short of falling onto the Urn. She clutched the grass desperately as a snake came slithering out of her mouth.
Xander’s jaw dropped open.
“It’s a test,” Tara insisted anxiously. “It’s a test. Willow...”
“Gettin’ kinda messy, B,” Faith said, striding towards the Scoobies. “Red doesn’t look so good.”
“No,” said Buffy.
“OK,” said Faith, “Getting a little creeped out with the Twilight Zone crap. What’s going on?”
“Ma’at weeps. The balance is broken. The Apocalypse comes.”
Faith’s eyes lit up with at least a partial understanding. She didn’t know what the hell Ma’at was, and she didn’t care about the balance, but Apocalypse? That was something she could deal with. If what the Scoobies were doing was going to cause an Apocalypse, then she’d just have to stop them. She reached out, trying to interrupt the spell casting.
Faith’s hand passed through Willow’s body as if it were no more substantial than smoke. “What the hell?” she asked.
Buffy regarded her Sister-Slayer sadly. “The avalanche has already begun. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.”
Anya, Xander and Tara continued to stare. Willow had managed to push herself back up into a kneeling position, and she was breathing as if she had run a marathon. “Osiris!” she yelled, “Release her!”
The red light surged down into the grave at her feet, and for a moment, all that any of them could hear was the distant noise of motorcycles.
And then all hell broke loose.
Lightning surged up around them in a furious wave. Headstones shattered, and sparks erupted from the earth in great fountains. The Scoobies dove for cover.
“Is this supposed to happen?” Xander asked, his voice filled with panic.
“I don’t know!” Tara cried, flinging herself down protectively across the Willow’s prone form. “Willow!” she sobbed, pulling the unconscious redhead into a protective embrace, nearly frantic in her need to make sure that her lover was all right.
In the distance, the revving of motorcycle engines grew louder.
Buffy’s flesh visibly knit itself back together before Faith’s eyes, the work of three months of decay undone in a few seconds.
“I don’t understand,” said Faith.
Buffy’s sad smile sent Faith’s heart into her throat. Metaphorically speaking. “You will.”
And then a tremendous blast of the lightning struck the dark Slayer directly in the chest.
Faith woke up screaming in her jail cell, liquid agony coursing through her veins. The air crackled with static, and bolts of lightning ripped through the enclosed space of her cell. She lifted into the air, screaming her voice raw as the power of Osiris flooded into her body through the link that she shared with her Sister-Slayer.
Alarms began to sound, and the other prisoners in the cellblock began to scream as the lightning blasted hole after hole in the walls of Faith’s cell. Bars turned to slag, and concrete walls over a foot thick were reduced to so much powder in an instant.
When the lightshow faded, Faith fell into the twisted remains of her bed with a crash.
The guards hovered nervously at the shattered entrance to her cell, none of them wanting to be the first to approach. Even before this, they had been afraid of her. Faith had made no secret of how strong she was. Hiding wasn’t her style. The guards knew very well that if she ever decided that she wanted to leave, there would be little that they could do to stop her. Even without the freak electrical storms, most of them wanted nothing to do with her.
It was Eddie who finally pushed his way through the small crowd of guards and rushed to Faith’s side: Eddie, her only friend among the guards.
He put one hand on her forehead, checked her pulse with the other, and frowned. “Come on,” he said, “Let’s get her to the infirmary.”
No one moved.
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Over a year later, Faith sat in the prison’s common room with a crowd of inmates, watching America’s Most Wanted. Bored looking guards were posted at the doors. Not even the questionable thrill of guarding a woman who could snap a guard like a toothpick if she so chose could overcome the sheer boredom of a day like today. Faith hadn’t done much to keep her unnatural strength a secret here. Secret identity girl had never been her style. It wasn’t just the guards that were afraid of her, either. The other inmates knew full well that Faith was someone you did not want to make an enemy of. She did as she pleased, and if someone didn’t like it, they kept their mouth shut. No small number of the others at the prison wondered why, if she could leave at any time, she didn’t do so.
The rain of fire in Los Angeles and the subsequent week long and counting total solar eclipse had created quite a stir at first, but at this point, the excitement had died down somewhat – at least within the prison compound. Fire rained down. The sun was blotted out. And yet the endless monotony of prison life simply... continued. Popular opinion outside the prison, well, that was another matter entirely.
For the depths of winter, it was actually pretty balmy. Or maybe it was just that it was always hot in California’s Central Valley: A lazy summer day, sans summer. And then there was that nasty Central Valley smell that got into EVERYTHING, and God help you if you took a shower with that water.
Even after a year, Faith didn’t know what the hell had happened that night. Ever since that day, she’d been able to sense Buffy’s presence, and strangely enough, Willow’s as well. She’d asked Angel when he’d finally come for a visit after his long Tibetan holiday, and the vampire had offered to do some research on the subject, but nothing had turned up.
Faith was one of the few Caucasian women in the prison – most were African American or Latina. As a general rule, non-Caucasian female offenders received harsher sentences and were convicted more often, usually for no better reason than the fact that they weren’t white. It wasn’t right, but hey, that’s the way it was. Most of the women in the prison were in on drug related charges. But most of those weren’t kept in security level three. Most of them slept in the guarded dormitories. Faith, though, was definitely cellblock material.
On the television, John Walsh was making an announcement. “Thanks to your tips,” the Brown’s Chicken Killers had finally been brought to justice. There were a few scattered cheers at that – some of the women here had called in tips in the hopes of having their sentences reduced. He went over the case, then, but Faith wasn’t listening.
Feeling uncommonly nostalgic, she found her thoughts tracing back into the distant past. She wondered how many of her old friends were in places just like this.
Kenny might have landed in prison on drug charges, she supposed, but she doubted it for anything more serious than that.
Ronnie? Nah. Ronnie had always been way too much of a slacker. A real loser, though she hadn’t seen that at the time. He liked to talk big, but in the end, he’d never had anything to show for it. Still, even if Ronnie had been a disappointment in the sack, at least she’d gotten a few good laughs in at his expense. Especially when he went off on his “any form of work is like prostitution” rant. Capitalistic bastards strangling the lifeblood out of society by encouraging greed, and no one produces great works of art like the Sistine Chapel anymore.
Faith smiled wryly.
How about Sarah, then? ... Nah. Sarah had always been way too smart for her own good, and the likelihood that she would have done anything that would land her in jail was slim to none. Of all the friends that Faith had had before picking up and running to Sunnydale, Sarah had always been the one that the rest of them had been sure would succeed.
That brought back memories.
Boston. Heh.
She shook off the cobwebs of nostalgia, returning fully to the present. Supposedly, she was getting a roommate today. Her cell really wasn’t big enough for two, but with the prison running low on space, they’d already put the bunk bed in the place of her regular bed. It had been costly to repair the damage that had been done to the room by the freak electrical storm, but it wasn’t like they had much choice in the matter. There just wasn’t enough room for them not to.
Idly, she wondered what sort of person she’d end up stuck with.
As it happened, she never found out.
“Hey Faith,” Eddie called as he stepped into the room. “Your lawyer’s here to see you.”
Faith blinked, looking up at the friendly guard. “My lawyer?” she asked.
At Eddie’s confirming nod, the Dark Slayer shrugged faintly, stood up, and went out to meet the world.
END
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Author’s notes:
This is the third in a series of interludes dealing with the time between the first and second story arcs of Quickened. Three down, two to go.
Before any of you ask, no, Faith is not an Immortal.
