Chapter Text
Buffy
She left the phone on speaker when she called up Faith, crossing her arms and hanging her head. Somehow, she knew that this would be a pain in the ass before Faith even answered the phone. On the third ring.
"Yo."
"Third ring?"
"Yeah I was listening to music, B, is that okay with you?"
Buffy rolled her jaw, eyes like bright green cartoon acid as she scowled at the phone. On the other end, of course, Faith could feel the stare. Despite all the healing, all the scar tissue over the old wounds, part of them never actually escaped the hallways of Sunnydale High, of Buffy prickling with jealousy when Faith tried to talk to Scott Hope.
Of the way she'd look back at the blonde to drink out of her bitter cup, to sip her jealousy like wine and float back to her and act like nothing had happened. That same prickling jealousy came, then, stabbing out from underneath Buffy's skin like it was trying to get out. Static.
But this time she wasn't jealous of Faith (maybe she never was, but she'd kick you in the face if you implied it), but jealous of the music. You'd rather listen to music than me? I could make you feel me, instead, make you bruise and moan and sing ME a song.
"Are you almost done with the shipment at the museum?"
"Yea, gonna head back home here in a bit."
"Do you think you could stop by the Magic Box first? We're having a Scoobie Meeting."
"Uhhh— you sure that's a good idea, B?"
"When have I ever had a bad idea?"
The question was hard enough to hit your head on if you walked into the conversation too quickly. Her sharks that she called friends were slowly congregating around the phone. Nosy. I hate them. Giles was pretending to survey the nearby wall for dust. Xander was reading a book (that was upside down) just a few feet away.
Probably my fault for calling Faith on speaker phone, in all fairness.
"Xander and Red told you that was a terrible idea too, right?" A comic book page sloooowly flipped on the other end of the line.
"Maybeeeee, but we need your help with something."
"Well, maybeeeeee you should listen to them. They're trying to look out for you, B."
Xander gesticulated as if to say "Thank you! At least the murderer has some sense!"
"I can look out for myself. Be here in half an hour?"
"Half an hour? I'm 25 minutes away-"
"Kaythanksbye."
"Man, fuck me sidewa-" the line cut off as Buffy hung the phone up.
Charlie Says
It didn't take long for Charlie to adapt to the supernatural reality of Sunnydale. Mystical ideas tended to through him like light through an empty room, finding nothing to light, not even floating dust. It was the same way with God.
He was the most devout man in every Sunday worship, but Father MacManus never looked at him twice. Maybe he somehow knew that the zealous fervor would find no purchase in the soil of Charlie's mind, that the second he left the House of God, the House of God left him too.
At first he thought the man in the alley was a regular run of the mill vagrant, high on some California shit that made it want to eat one of his boys. Find your own snacks, he thought before decking it with a nearby steel pipe. The fucker didn't go down, so Charlie shot him a few times. Then a few more. Eventually it fell .
The Vampire sat there gurgling blood in the alleyway it had jumped him in. Bullet wounds that were slowly healing in it's ribcage. Charlie would occasionally finger the holes open, callused hand exploring it, feeling the flesh pulse and try to restore around it.
"Got a nasty fuckin' face, you do. Shhh, s'okay. Some of my boys do, too. Doedn't change a thing. Doedn't change a thing."
He reached into his jacket pocket, pursing his lips when he found a small little glass bottle of Holy Water that he carried for good luck, straight from the Mac Man, god bless 'im. His lips were dry, his tongue cracked from the withering of habitual methamphetamine use.
Charlie took a swig of the holy water, gurgled it a little like mouth wash, feeling the color seep back into his mouth before leaning down to the male vampire.
It was a demon, soulless evil. Not like him. I got plenty of soul, dearest, plenty plenty plenty. He smiled with some distant cousin of love, leaned down, and kissed him on the lips. Red smoke sizzled up through the screams of the beast, and Charlie gargled that too.
His mouth was a little less dry.
Faith
"Man, fuck me sideways," she bitched, but was cut off by the dial tone. The work was actually finished. She'd lied about having to do more of it out of the suspicion that Buffy would pull some shit like this and she wanted to protect what little peace she had.
Fuck, fuck fuck.
She made her way to the Magic Box after wrapping up everything at the museum. Everything was in it's proper place. For someone who had such a messy life, she always deliberately ordered a work space, it was a compulsive habit that had been developed while working at Charlie's. There was only chaos there, so she had to crystallize it, maybe then she wouldn't melt into him.
The bell neutralized the chatter that had been filling the room prior, all eyes on her. 'Yeah, I'm hot, so what?', she thought, knowing that wasn't why the room was dead on her arrival.
"Yo," she tilted her head up to cut the wave of judgement from Wil and Xander and that fucking empathy from Tara. Fuck em'. "What's the sitch?"
She took her place near B, resisting the urge to mess with the collar choker around her neck, feeling like a warm hand around her throat each time she spoke, like a thumb tracing her Adam's apple and threatening to crush it while she writhed.
Something in the Slayer connection hummed as she pulled out the chair next to her Keeper. Good girl, it seemed to say, everything's got a proper place. Even you.
"Glory is the sitch in question," Buffy said, hand tracing against Faith's outer thigh, destabilizing her, making her less real.
"The Bitch in question, maybe. You all know more about her than me though, so why am I here?"
She tried not to be such a defensive prick, she really did.
"Not the only one, apparently. Maybe we just wanted to involve you," Willow said. Faith met the look head on, a laugh on her lips that couldn't quite animate itself.
"Really?" Faith scoffed with a raised eyebrow, trying not to wince as the rubbing on her outer thigh paused with a warning in its stillness. "Don't hold it against me if I don't buy that, Red."
"N-no, she's telling the truth," Tara cut in, speaking up for the first time in some time. Maybe now the time was right. Faith's eyes turned to her, not friendly, but certainly not hostile. Out of the twin blacks of her eyes she looked at Tara, an animal judging if the new figure was a threat or not. Cautious.
Tara continued, "It was our idea to involve you. B-buffy believes in you, and so we believe in you."
Xander made a noise, tilting his head back and forth. Yeah, that's what I'm sayin'. I sure as shit don't believe in me. The belief was a dangerous thing. It was one thing to repent before God, but God never spoke back. Never told you the right thing to do. Just listened to your apologies, let you break himself on the rocks at his feet. The whole appeal is that you believed in HIM, not that he believed in YOU.
This was worse.
"We know what you d-did, but we also know what you're doing. Buffy tells us all the time how you're helping out around the Museum, at the house, with patrols. And I think that maybe you helping others is helping you, that maybe that's how you heal." Bullshit. "And I think that maybe you don't think you deserve a s-second chance, and maybe you don't. I don't know. But you never betrayed me. You never hurt me. So I'd at least like to give you a first chance."
Willow looked at Faith with a paused glint in her eye, then back at Tara. Faith could tell that she had been talked into agreeing to this whole thing by Tara at some point. Shouldn't have listened to her, Red. You had the right idea about me.
"S-sorry. I know that was a lot, I guess it was just on my mind."
"No, no, it's uhm. Yeah." I need a fucking cig. And a drink. Maybe even a fight. Wonder if Willie's is open right now. "Thanks."
Red right through her, seeing all the terrible things that would happen if that first chance Tara offered her was squandered, Faith's body just a 3D window into catastrophe. I'll give as good as I get, can guarantee you that, she thought, but her heart didn't seem to join in the clamor.
"We'll be there for you," Buffy chirped "like death and taxes." Her voice had a barb that made Faith tremble, or maybe that was the thumb that slowly started circling again.
"Yes, very well said, Tara," Giles started. "and we were hoping that perhaps you could help us devise a way to fight Glory. We were looking into weapons that could possibly harm her— as I'm sure Buffy has already told you, Glory is a hell-goddess that was banished from her dimension."
A moment of silence passed, and with every millimeter that Faith's eyebrow raised, Giles' own fell. He looked over at the new suspect.
"Uhm, I was getting to it! Just been busy. And all. And I'm pretty sure I mentioned it to her at some point, and if I didn't, it just never came up."
"Never came up, B? She swung you around by your ankles to toss you through a window, then suplexed me. I didn't even know you could be suplexed without the suplexee being in on it. Would have been nice to know she was a— what was she again?"
"Hell God," Willow chirped, "and apparently a Hell of a wrestler." Tara murmured a smiling approval that seemed to feed Willow like sun on a leaf.
"There wouldn't happen to be a screen recording, would there?" Xander asked.
Giles put a line break in the dialogue with a heavily English accented clearing of the throat. He had one hand on the table that he was sitting on, looking down at the two Slayers, eyes darting down to Buffy's hand on Faith's thigh like a schoolmaster's ruler.
"Anyways."
"…", he let the silence fester, unblinking stare like a book lobbed at your head. They might not be in a library any more, but he still commanded the preternatural capability of dehumidfying a room of all noise with a glance.
"We identified the knife that Richard Wilkins gifted you as being of demonic origin. We were wondering if perhaps you could shine a light on it, perhaps he told you anything-anything at all about its make, its origin, because all that we know of it is that it is wholly unlike any other weapon known to man or demon."
Faith blinked.
"Uh, shit, G-man, I wish I knew what to say. He never told me about it. I never asked about the things he gave me, y'know? Would be rude, I guess."
"It would be… rude?" Buffy asked, and Faith didn't need to look over to see the raised eyebrow. She could hear the brow ruffling against itself.
"Yeah, rude. Someone gets you a gift you don't fuckin' grill them on it, you say thank you, and you mean it."
"R-right, of course. Now, there is one more thing I needed to ask about. When you and Buffy had the, erhm, confrontation on the roof, did you feel anything strange about the knife? Did it give you any mystical impressions?"
"Are you asking me how it felt to get stabbed with a knife shaped like a Doc's autograph?"
"In a manner of speaking."
"Had better," she lied, "but the knife wasn't the one spilling their guts."
Xander hid a laugh with a cough.
"Of course. Apologies."
"S' fine, we're Five by Five, I don't mind talking about it or anything. Was just a shank between good friends."
She put on an easy smile, feeling Buffy's expression combust into shame, into nostalgia, into need. Buffy's hand had returned to her own lap after Giles saw what they were doing, but Faith saw movement in the corner of her eye from where her hand was twitching, whether to stab or to stroke or both, Faith didn't know. Faith didn't particularly care, either.
Giles articulated air for a moment before Tara of all people saved him.
"R-right! Well, about that… I think maybe you could help us scry the origins of the blade. When you and Buffy… uhm, well after that, both of your auras were permanently tied to the blade. It's a part of you two, now, like a lightning rod between you. Whatever the case, we can use that connection to explore the blade, if you're willing…"
What the fuck?
"First problem with that is that the blade is at the house, second is that I'd rather not explore that thing any more than I already have," Faith lied (again).
"Lucky for you, I have solutions to those problems," Buffy grinned, "Firstly, the knife is already here." Buffy pulled the shine out of her purse and plopped it on the table, the dark slayer's cheeks going red when she saw the Harlot Red lipstick still on the flat of it. "Secondly, you're going to do the spell."
"And what if I don't want to, B?"
Buffy raised an eyebrow, not backing down.
"Then say so."
Willow and Xander looked back and forth between the two as the silence got thick enough for the razor to cut. Faith did it with a scarred, scratched up voice, breaking the eye contact.
"How do we do the spell?"