“I haven’t killed anyone,” Lois lied. “Why would you think I had?”
All she could hope was the darkness concealed the flush of her cheeks and the trembling of her hands. Was this going to follow her for her entire life, this fear of discovery?
Faith took a long drag of her cigarette. “The way you were talking back there, like being a Slayer was a bad thing, it’s a little odd. Most people love the idea of getting super powers.”
“I’d already heard about what had happened in Arkansas,” Lois said.
“What…a little girl killed the guy who was molesting her?” Faith shook her head. “What do you think the alternative was? That….waste of space would have kept on doing it for year after year after year.”
There was a tenseness in her voice that suggested she’d had some personal experience with that sort of abuse.
“Maybe I’ve had a few run ins with vampires.” Lois said.
“I’ve seen the file Willow worked up on you,” Faith said. “You take crazy chances all the time.”
“You people have been investigating me?” Lois couldn’t keep the sense of outrage out of her voice, even though part of her knew it was hypocritical.
“What did you think? We were going to walk into an ambush without at least googling the people we were meeting?” Faith smirked. “We’re young. We aren’t stupid.”
“So what did you find out?” Lois asked, her mind racing. Just how much information about her was out there, floating around on the information superhighway? It was an unpleasant thought, being the focus of the same sort of an investigation she usually did on other people.
Faith shrugged. “The usual sort of stuff. Hospital records, credit card purchases, a full list of articles you’ve written…”
“You can get hospital records?” Lois asked. Jimmy had had some trouble accessing those from online.
“Willow’s got a magical touch with a computer.” Faith smirked.
Willow was their witch, apparently, probably the redhead who was working on Clark inside the bus.
“I’d suppose so. So you looked everything over and came to the conclusion that I was a killer.” Lois tried to make her voice sound skeptical.
Faith shook her head. “You started talking about those girls…the little girl in the trailer…the crazy chick. I could hear it in your voice.”
“What’s that?”
“Self-loathing.” Faith said.
“Maybe I was just having a bad day.” Lois said, desperately scrambling for some sort of an excuse. “Maybe I’m a bigot.”
“You wouldn’t be hanging around powers boy in there if you were some sort of magic hater.” Faith chuckled. “And you strike me as the kind who really ought to love what these bodies can do.”
“I’m not sure I get you.”
If Faith was suggesting something sexual, Lois was going to punch her. Because really…wasn’t it enough that she was accusing her of murder without suggesting she was a slut too?
“Better sight and hearing isn’t a good thing for a snoop? How about being able to jump up to a third story fire escape and get pictures?”
“I’m not some sort of sleazy paparazzi.” Lois said, stung. “I’m a reputable journalist.”
“Who has been arrested three times for breaking and entering, and twice for getting into a fight with a city councilman?”
“Those were totally justified!” Lois said. “They were using substandard materials…they’d have gotten someone killed sooner or later.”
“And now you’ll be able to get the bad guy a little easier. He’ll have a harder time catching you, and if he does, you’ll be able to defend yourself.”
“I was already able to defend myself!” Lois said quickly. Too well, as it had turned out.
“There it is!” Faith said. “The look in your eyes.”
“There is no look in my eyes.” Lois said. “You’re just projecting your own guilt.”
Faith stared at her for a long moment without speaking.
“Even if I had hurt somebody, it wouldn’t necessarily follow that I’d killed them.” Lois said finally.
The one lesson she and Lucy had learned as children was this: admit to a lesser crime, and sometimes people won’t look any further.
“You hurt a couple of thugs bad enough to put them in the hospital a couple of years ago, back when you were just a regular girl.”
“Woman.” Lois muttered. These people were entirely too thorough. It was unfair using magic.
Of course, if Lois was the one using it, she’d…
Best not to think about it.
“So a woman weighing maybe a hundred twenty, hundred ten takes on two thugs and puts them both in the hospital. A woman with no Slayer speed, no Slayer strength, just skill and determination.”
“I’ve got a brown belt in Judo,” Lois said proudly. “I worked hard for it.”
Technically she hadn’t taken her examinations yet, but her instructor had assured her she was ready.
“Take that same woman and put her in the Congo on the day Willow does her mojo.” Faith’s voice dropped, became quieter. “Stuck in a place that sounds like hell.”
Lois closed her eyes, and for a moment she could almost smell the jungle, feel the heat on her back as she lit the gasoline, obliterating all evidence of what she’d done.
She was never going to be clean, and if it was written on her face to where any ex-con could see what she’d done…she wasn’t sure what she was going to do.
Faith was still droning on. “Give that girl ten times the strength and speed and she doesn’t know it. It’s a disaster in the making.”
“What difference does it make whether I did it or not?” Lois said tiredly. “It’s not likely that I would admit to it if it had happened.”
“So don’t,” Faith said.
Lois opened her eyes, and saw that Faith was looking down.
She glanced downward and saw that her hand was clenched into a fist.
“Don’t admit to anything.” Faith sighed. “Hell, it’s not as if I’m the expert on what it feels like to kill people. I’ve only done it twice, and the first time was an accident.”
“The second wasn’t?”
Dropping the cigarette, Faith stubbed it out with her toe. “I was a pretty messed up kid. My mom was a drunk. My dad was in prison…but mom told me he was dead.”
Slipping her hands into her pockets and leaning against the bus, Faith said, “Mom was never a real mother to me, but you know how stupid kids are…they always want people to love them, no matter how hard they get beat down.”
Lois knew exactly how it felt. Her mother had never beaten her; she’d just withheld love and been critical. Nothing had ever been good enough. The harder her mother had pushed, the harder Lois had tried to do anything to make her mother love her.
“You keep hoping for that one time it’ll be good.”
“You too?” Faith asked.
“My mother never beat me, but she drank.”
“It’s funny how drunks can find each other across a crowded room.” Faith sighed. “Abusive people can do the same thing, only they have a weird sort of sense for vulnerable people.”
Lois nodded. Over time, she’d gotten a feel for alcoholics. She couldn’t see them all of the time, but she often had guy feelings.
“You must have been pretty lonely,” Lois said.
She’d been lonely throughout her childhood, first when her parents were fighting, when she’d have to try to protect Lucy by telling her stories while trying to block out the sounds of yelling. Then as she’d watched her mother spiral downwards into drunkenness while her father slowly drifted away into his work and his mistresses of the week.
Faith nodded and stared at the ground. “So when this British woman came and told me I was special, that I had a destiny…I was pretty easy meat.”
“Your watcher.”
There was something about an organization that found young girls and indoctrinated them into fighting for their lives that didn’t sit right with Lois.
“Diana was good to me,” Faith said. “She was a professor at Harvard. I remember that her house always smelled nice, and she always had these little finger sandwiches for me.”
“Something happened to her?”
“She was tortured in front of me…killed by this bastard…She was the closest thing to a mother I’d ever had.” Faith looked up. “I’d have died for her.”
“So when you came to Sunnydale…”
“I was pretty much all alone. Buffy had her friends, her inner circle, and then there was me.”
A young girl, alone and vulnerable. A man must have shown up. They always did.
Faith chuckled bitterly. “I guess you hear it all the time…girl needs a daddy. A guy shows up and pretends to be nice.”
“He took advantage of you?”
“If it was just sex he’d wanted, he could have had it, and I’d have been done with him. No…he offered me something much harder to resist.”
“A family.”
“A screwed up, dysfunctional family where daddy wanted to turn into a giant snake and eat people, but yeah…”
Faith was silent for an interminable time, and Lois said, “How did you deal with it?”
“I pretended it wasn’t a big deal, tried to hide it.” Faith said. “Then I started getting angry and taking it out on everybody around me.”
“So it gets better?”
All she had was the same platitudes that everybody else had. Give it time, things get better…they hadn’t worked when Lois had lost her grandmother, and they weren’t going to work now.
“No. It doesn’t.” Faith looked up at Lois soberly. “Not on its own anyway. It gets worse before it gets better.”
Not the same platitudes, then.
“It gets worse?”
“I lost it.” Faith said. “Tried to get a vamp to eat me, anything to keep from realizing what a piece of…garbage I was.”
“You couldn’t just not think about it?” Lois asked.
It was what she had been doing, trying to keep so busy that she didn’t have time to remember.
“It never goes away. It just hammers and hammers at you until you let it in…or until it slips in on its own.”
“So what do you do?” Lois had been having too many flashes…times when those images kept overwhelming her.
“Prison was actually good for me.” Faith said. “I got rid of the men, the booze, simplified my life. They actually had a counselor there.”
“I don’t think I could go to a shrink…” Lois said, and then realized what she’d said. Her face flushed hot again.
Faith’s lips curled upward into a grin. “It’s not too bad. They don’t really make you lie on a couch or talk about your mother….well; mine did, because a lot of my problems sorta started there, but not all of them.”
“What it all comes down to is, are you going to let your guilt make you stupid, or are you going to let it make you smarter?”
“What?” Lois asked, her head still spinning from her inadvertent admission.
“Guilt is pain…and pain is nature’s little way of telling us ‘don’t do that.’” Faith sighed. “If you learn your lesson, then guilt made you smarter. The next time that situation comes up, you won’t do the same thing.”
“And if it makes you stupid?”
“Then you spend so much time thinking about how bad you are that you don’t change. That makes you a dumbass.”
Lois heard the sounds of footsteps coming around the side of the bus.
Buffy stepped carefully around a spot of oil on the ground, being careful not to dirty her Manolo Blahnik shoes.
“What are you guys talking about?” she asked.
“Girl stuff,” Faith said.
“I’m not a girl?” Buffy’s voice was a little testy.
Faith shrugged. “You’re the boss.”
“Your boyfriend is awake.” Buffy said.
************
The young red headed woman met them at the door of the bus.
“He’s still a little confused, but he’s awake.”
“Can I see him?” Lois asked, ready to push the woman aside.
“He’s not ok.” The young woman shook her head. “His aura is so bright; it makes it really hard to work. I can’t see what I’m doing well enough to fix him. Plus, still sort of drained after doing that whole earth mother thing with the scythe.”
“So what do we know?” Buffy spoke from behind Lois, and her voice was curt.
“There’s some kind of compulsion on him. All they have to do is call for him, and he’ll come.”
Lois closed her eyes for a moment. She should have protected him.
At least this guilt was going to make her smarter. She was going to do better. She was going to save him.
And then she’d save herself.
