Current Time, Original Universe
Buffy tossed and turned on her bed, a stress headache so well entrenched that no amount of Advil could relieve it. It was Spike's fault. It was always Spike's fault. She liked to think that many of the things that happened to her were his fault. He'd gotten a soul for her. Why would he have gone and done a stupid thing like that. It was hurting him. And what did he expect? Now that he had a soul, he could be her Angel? An Angel who could love her without risking becoming a monster. A happy Angel. She shuddered. It was too weird to think about.
He claimed to love her. Who was she to say he didn't? But it wasn't her fault! She certainly hadn't encouraged him in any way. Back when they had been having sex, she'd never been kind to him, quite the opposite actually. And now he was here again, more than here. He was actually present behind his eyes.
That presence. Although she had agonized with her conscience, Buffy had never really risked falling in love with Spike before he'd won his soul. He'd been a demon, conscienceless, bound from violence only through artificial means. His 'love' for her had been pathetic; an obsession worthy of a neutered vampire. What's more, he'd tried to rape her. That wasn't something a man in love did.
Could you love without a soul? Spike had always claimed that he did.
Now he had his soul, and he still loved her. It would be so much simpler if she loved him back. But then, what was love? She was fairly sure she had loved Angel. She'd loved him enough to have her heart broken when he became Angelus. Was that the only sure definition of love? That the people you loved could break your heart?
If that was the case, she'd loved a lot of people. She had loved her father who'd left her. And she had loved Angel, whom she had had to put down like a wild animal. And she felt she could have loved Faith, her sister Slayer who had betrayed her. She'd loved her mother who'd died. And she knew that she still loved Willow even after she had come scarily close to ending the world. Closer than anyone else, and who'd have thought that way back when?
They had all broken her heart at one time or another with when they died or betrayed her. She should start watching Xander especially closely. He was due to become evil any day now.
It was no wonder she'd had felt frozen when she woke up in that grave, because her heart had surely frozen in self defense. Some how Spike, even before he had regained his soul, had done more to thaw her heart than anyone else.
It had hurt. Life hurt more than Buffy sometimes thought she could stand.
Buffy thought perhaps she did love Spike a little then, for helping her feel again. Her heart thumped painfully, protesting the knowledge that he was one more person who would doubtlessly break her heart.
Yet somehow, the thought that she loved him, just a little, allowed her to slip into sleep.
Buffy woke to the hyper-reality of a Slayer Dream. She pulled a scratchy blanket off and looked around to see that she was in the top bunk of a bunk-bed that was against the wall in some sort of cell. The room was about ten feet by ten feet and the ceiling wasn't all that high above her head. She rolled out of the bed and landed in a defensive position, stake in one hand. So what if the stake had appeared out of nowhere. She already knew that this was a dream.
As she had suspected, Faith was in the lower bunk. She was still asleep, her mouth a worried frown as if whatever scenes that played themselves out behind her eyes were bad ones. Her face held that vulnerable expression that Buffy had occasionally seen before, the one that informed her, however much she did not want to know, that Faith was not the hopelessly hardened case she sometimes let on.
Suddenly Faith's eye's shot open, instantly aware. "Buffy? What are you doing here? Are you breaking me out? Or have you finally come to kill me?"
Before Buffy could answer, Faith's eyes widened in fear. "Who is that!" she asked, her voice a tight whisper.
Confused, Buffy tracked Faith's gaze to the far corner of the room, which was now shaded in darkness. Within that darkness a person lurked. She thought it was female. It had long dark hair that fell into it's face, hiding it completely except for the eyes, which peaked out with luminous intensity. They were strangely familiar eyes, bewildered and scared.
She heard a low moan from behind her. It was Faith, who had scooted to the corner of her bed, back pressed to the wall.
"Buffy, don't let that thing touch me!"
"It doesn't seem dangerous," Buffy said doubtfully. "Just scared."
But Faith was more scared than it was, and acting half crazed herself. The person in the corner moved, and Faith whimpered.
"Don't let that fucking thing near me, I don't want to become...." her voice trailed off. Buffy put her hand on her knee to reassure her and felt that she was actually shaking.
That was when she heard another sound coming from the outside of the cell. It was a familiar sound, the staccato clack of stiletto heels on a concrete floor. The perfect metronome sound spoke to Buffy of a person who was confident, powerful, and not a little dangerous; a person who made her own destiny.
The woman spoke in a voice that was familiar but Buffy did not recognise it. "How do you like my pet, Slayer?" The voice said.
Buffy turned.
She woke up.
Faith started awake from her dream and thought that she had simply entered into it a second time, because she was still in the same cell. Of course she was in the same cell. She had been in this cell, or another like it for the last 3 years. Sometimes she thought the main punishment of prison was the unrelenting sameness. Boredom was complete within prison walls, and it wasn't just from lack of activity. Faith sometimes thought she would go crazy if she didn't see something new. She was fairly sure that it hadn't happened yet, but she suspected it might happen soon.
Fuck, that dream had sucked. She'd rarely ever felt that scared in her life. She shuddered as she remembered that thing in the corner and the woman in the hallway. She hadn't got a good look at either but both of them had scared the shit out of her. Buffy though, dream Buffy at least, hadn't seemed at all scared of either of them. She wondered with the Clink shrink would have said about that. Heh, like she didn't already know. She'd never measure up to Buffy, not even in a stupid dream.
With nothing else to do, and wanting to shake the nervous energy that her strange dream had left, Faith started to work out as well as she could in her small cell. She was like that lady in the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, that touch chick. She'd been in jail too, hadn't she. Or was it a mental hospital? Whatever. She'd had nothing to do but get ready for the future. Faith didn't know what the future would bring either, but she was sure that she had better be ready for whatever came. She wasn't going to end up 6 feet under.
When she got out, the only thing she knew for sure was what she wasn't going to do. She wasn't going to go back to Sunnydale and beg Buffy Summers for a place in her little band of Snoopies. She wasn't going to be second string to nobody, never again. Not for the side of good and not for the side of evil either. Been there, done that, and the fries sucked.
Maybe she wouldn't even be a Slayer anymore. Buffy seemed to have that covered anyway. Oh, she'd slay because she enjoyed it, but it wouldn't be a 9pm to 5am job anymore. It would just be something she did to blow off steam. Like sex, but with fewer awkward morning afters.
Grinning to herself as she started on her 20th set of push-up repetitions, Faith reflected that she wouldn't mind either right now, sex or a slay. Or hell, breakfast.