Fanfiction: Three Fights

Faith wove her way through the pairs of potentials, trying to squelch the tension rising within her. “Push with this hand, pull with the other,” she told one girl, whose hands were locked around another’s forearm. “You want to keep her from moving her wrist, slashing you.” She moved on. This kind of training made her restless — more wound up, not less. The potentials were getting a workout, but Faith couldn’t burn off her own energy. She had to pace along the ranks, sometimes pause to demonstrate a new technique, but she couldn’t go full speed, couldn’t use her full strength without hurting someone.

“Jeez, Amanda,” a voice piped up. “Ease up a little, it’s not a real fight.”

Faith whirled, seeking out the tallest of the potentials, then making her way to her and her partner. “Let her go,” she ordered Amanda, then: “You. What’s your name?”

“Rona.”

“Well, let me break something to you, Rona. This isn’t a fuckin’ tea dance. You’re here to learn how to fight.” The other pairs broke apart, and Faith began to move through them, addressing them all. “You pull your punches here because you don’t want to leave a bruise on your partner, then guess what? What you’ve learned is how to pull your punches. And when the Big Bad comes to have your ass for brunch, you’ll be shit out of luck, because what you haven’t learned —” she seized the wrist of one of the girls, hard and swift, and had her dummy knife on the ground at her feet in a second — “is how to fight. Amanda — good work. Lead the others through the drills again. I’m through.”

Taking the back porch steps in one stride, Faith slammed into the kitchen and thundered down the stairs. She took a moment to wrap her hands, then laid into the heavy bag. Nothing held back: grunts, punches, howls, kicks. All the jittery adrenaline of these last few days of too little sleep, too much fear and anger and grief. The punching bag became the manifestation of the First, the physical target she’d been denied that night at the hospital. In her mind it was Dev’s form she pummeled and cursed. Wilkins she still had no heart to punch, and Marquita — all Faith had for her were waves and waves of fresh grief. When at last Faith staggered back from the bag, her hair and body were wet from sweat, her face from mingled sweat and tears.

It was then that she caught sight of Dawn sitting at the top of the wooden stairs, arms hugged tight around herself.

Faith lifted the hem of her tee shirt to mop her face.

“Wow,” Dawn said, barely audible. “I’ve never seen Buffy do that.”

She smiled to soften her words. “I think the world will agree that I’m not Buffy.” Her knees trembled; she dropped onto a pile of exercise mats and leaned back against the wall, gulping in air. “I needed that. I’ve been speeding on exhaustion, feeding my own sleeplessness. Maybe this’ll help.”

“Thanks.” Dawn’s long fingers twisted and pulled at one another. “For helping Xander. I wasn’t supposed to know all this, but Spike and Buffy were talking, and, well, I heard everything.”

“Harriet the Spy,” Faith said, memories making the smile linger. It had been their special joke back then. Dawn’s favorite kid’s book had launched her on an ill-advised career of snooping around, spying, and listening in on B. and her friends, which she’d confessed to Faith. “So you never hung up the notebook, huh?”

She smiled too, ducked her head. “Guess not. But — Faith — It was so scary just hearing. How close he came.”

“I know. I was scared too.”

“You?”

“Shit, Dawn, I’m scared more often than not. It can keep you alive. Especially these days.” Faith half drained the water bottle she’d brought downstairs with her. Dawn still sat on the top step, watching her with huge eyes. “What?”

“Oh. Nothing.” Then abruptly: “Do you know what ‘existential’ means?”

“Give me more than that. What’s the context?”

“Existential horseshit.”

Faith laughed. “It means thinking about yourself too much.”

“Is thinking about yourself bad?”

“Nah. I just spent three whole years thinking about myself. Of course, that balanced out a couple of decades’ worth of never thinking about myself at all. It’s all relative. Who’d you hear that from — Xander, I bet.”

Dawn nodded.

“I think what he means is thinking about yourself until you make yourself crazy.” She chugged more of the water. “What I was doing, on the other hand, was thinking about myself till I made myself sane.”

Dawn picked at the toe of her tennis shoe. Faith had to bite back a warning — she’d been slapped across the room more than once for widening a hole in her canvas sneakers. Dawn’s voice dropped again so she had to strain to hear. “Is it scary being crazy?”

“It makes all this — having to train an army in your backyard, always waiting for the First to show up again — look like chickenshit. When I was a little kid, my mom and her boyfriends might smack me around if I did something they didn’t like, but they didn’t really set any limits, you know? No don’t do that, you’ll get hurt. If I wanted to play in the street, great, as long as I left them alone to do what they wanted. But if some neighbor pulled me out of the street and marched me back home and gave them hell, that would get me a smacking. When you’re a kid and you don’t know anything, if nobody tells you what’s not safe, how do you know what is safe? So that’s what it felt like for me when — when things were at their worst.” Faith couldn’t believe all this talk was coming out of her. That night she’d spent explaining herself to a sleeping Xander — it seemed to have opened some flood gate. She tilted her head back against the wall, eyes closed, remembering. “It was like racing — but with no brakes. I was flying, flying down this hill — picture one of those long, steep ones in San Francisco, that’s what it felt like — and the speed was such a rush, like nothing I’d ever felt. But terrifying too, because I had no control, no way of slowing down, and by that time anyone who tried to step in and help just got hurt. Your sister, your mom, Angel, Xander —” She opened her eyes then and looked at Dawn. “The one thing I’m grateful for is how they all protected you. It’s hard enough living with the shit I’ve done, but if I’d hurt you the way I did them —”

“Faith, stop.” The strength in Dawn’s voice brought her up short. “I think once you start worrying about how you’d live with stuff you didn’t do — well, maybe that’s where existential horseshit comes in.”

Faith laughed. “You pick things up fast.” She remembered then — stuff you didn’t do — and sucked in her breath. “Except — Xander told me something on the way back to Sunnydale. It’s still screwing with my head.”

“Oh, yeah,” Dawn said lightly. “About how Dawn’s not really real.”

Faith shook her head. “That’s not what he said. And if you were any realer I’d have a couple of busted ribs from that hug you gave me when I came back. Which —” she turned her attention to her hands, picking at the tape. “It was a real kick. Having one person who was happy to see me. It’s just strange thinking the stuff I remember doing with you —” Harriet the Spy, the shoplifting spree, sneaking her into an R-rated movie, playing Old Maid — how could all that be gone, when it was so vivid?

“I know. It was weird for all of us. We’ve just had time to deal, and it’s all new for you.”

“So how did you deal?” Get this, Faith asking a sixteen-year-old for advice. Or a three-year-old, if you looked at how long she’d actually been here. Or hell, one of the eternals, what she supposedly actually was.

Dawn shrugged. “It still felt real. We had — have — feelings about all of it, memories we can’t cross off as untrue. Some of the things they’d made us think happened actually changed our lives. None of us could go back. I mean, try pretending that Bill Clinton was never president, we were just screwed with to think he was, and all along it had been — whoever that old guy was. It’s too big. We finally decided to go on, same as always. Except, ha ha, not always. It’s easy to forget about it, though, until something like this, where you just found out.”

“It’s wild to think that these monks Xander told me about made you so real to me. I’d never met you, was in the slam by the time you came here, right? Why bother with me?”

“I think they knew you’d be important. And here you are.”

“Here I am. Though maybe ‘here’ should be upstairs in the kitchen.” She sniffed at her shirt. “Or maybe in the shower, then in the kitchen.” She rose and climbed the stairs, while Dawn sat motionless at the top, standing only when Faith had almost reached her.

“I missed you these four years,” Dawn said. She drew Faith into a cautious hug, careful not to overbalance the two of them on the wooden steps. “This is real,” she whispered, and she held her there for a long moment.

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