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The ball goes flying. Faith swears she can hear it whistle as it sails up and away. She watches it go with a hand up against her brow, a makeshift visor against the glare of the late afternoon sun. It sails across the park, over the high fencing at the edge of the grounds, and she loses sight of it. Faith strains her ears, but whatever sound it makes when it lands, she doesn’t hear it.
“Jeez,” she says, slipping a bit of laughter into the edges of the word. “That’s a real club in the balls.”
A glance at Buffy, over her shoulder.
Not a smile. A roll of the eyes. Nothing.
Buffy’s not even looking, arms crossed over her torso, the dinky little bright pink club hanging limply from her grip. She’s staring off at something in the distance, pink glossed bottom lip jutting out, brows drawn low.
First, Faith wilts.
Should have taken her bowling, she thinks, miserably.
It’s just that she’s never been bowling. She knows the general goal - put a ball down a lane and knock over some pins. But there’s the scoring and she doesn’t know how much a pin is worth. She’d end up fucking something up, breaking something expensive, looking like an idiot, embarassing Buffy and herself.
Mini-golf had felt safer. Kinda cheesy, sure, but at least she’d done it once before. So she’d been ten years old and it had been as one of many birthday guests for the most well-off kid in her class, but it counted. It was simple, goofy - a couple balls and some clubs and a bunch of hokey obstacles. Who could fuck that up?
Her, apparently.
Somehow.
It had taken the better part of a week to work up the courage to ask Buffy to go out with her.
Not out-out, but— just the two of them, none of her entourage. No vamps, no watchers, no quippy, demanding friends with endless in-jokes Faith has no point of reference for. Buffy and Faith and a few long, golden hours before the sun goes down and patrol begins.
She’d sweated it out for a few days, been interrupted by a snarling vamp once, chickened out all on her own a different time, and finally blurted it out at the end of a long night, lingering on the edge of Buffy’s lawn, rolling a stake between her slick palms.
Buffy had agreed quick enough to make Faith feel stupid for worrying. Hadn’t even hesitated when Faith refused to tell her where they were going.
A surprise seemed like such a good idea at the time. A way to make it fun and special, to give Faith an out if she couldn’t manage to scrape together the sixteen bucks for the cost of tickets.
But Buffy’s bright, easy enthusiasm had faded the minute Faith marched them up to the admissions booth and bought their way in.
She thinks it’s fucking stupid, Faith grinds her teeth together.
It is fucking stupid. Thinking she could impress a girl like Buffy with a shabby, cornball place like this. She’s seen Buffy’s house, with its bathroom bigger than the room Faith had slept in growing up. Buffy was probably used to Disneyland and those nice restaurants with the cloth napkins, not shitty run down mini-golf parks and stale concession stand popcorn.
There was a reason Buffy and her friends spent their nights in hip live music joints and not swinging clubs surrounded by colorful windmills and fiberglass alligators.
“Look, do you just wanna go?” Faith asks miserably.
Buffy blinks, glancing over, eyes all cloudy like she’s only now remembering Faith is even there with her. “Huh?”
“C’mon, let’s get outta here,” Faith says, hearing the words run together, loose in her mouth.
“We’re leaving?” Buffy asks, rushing after Faith as she stomps back towards the entrance.
The anger hits like something tipping over, spilling heat in her belly that splashes up to the back of her neck.
“You coulda just said you didn’t wanna come,” Faith snaps.
“I did want to come,” Buffy argues.
“Then you shoulda said you hate mini-golf.”
“I don’t—”
“C’mon, B.”
“Alright, fine,” Buffy huffs, reaching out a hand and grabbing Faith at the elbow. She tugs them gently to a stop.
Faith allows it, flicks some hair in front of her face to fight the burning in her cheeks, but can’t quite bring herself to pull away from Buffy’s grip on her.
“So, I kind of hate mini-golf,” Buffy admits.
“I gathered,” Faith says. “If this was you trying to hide it, you did a lousy job.”
“Yeah, I’m— I’m sorry,” Buffy says. “This was nice of you. The problem is all me.”
“Well, at least you admit it,” Faith grumbles, trying to conjure up a smile. Buffy squeezes her arm, weakly. “But seriously, how does this even happen to someone? It’s putt-putt for godssakes. Who hurt you?”
It’s a joke, when she says it, but Faith knows enough about Buffy by now to know there’s a chance at a serious answer.
In fact, it would kind of make sense, if Buffy is telling the truth. It would explain why she was happy to come out, and suddenly shut Faith out when they got here.
Once the possibility occurs to her, Faith bites her lip. She’s expecting to hear Angel trip out past Buffy’s lips, all breathless regret and tortured longing.
She’s not ready for Buffy to take a deep breath and say, “My mom’s boyfriend. Ted.”
The sentence slams into Faith like a freight train. Buffy isn’t looking at her, is glancing back towards the course again.
“I didn’t know your mom was seeing anyone,” is all Faith can manage to say. Stupid.
“She’s not,” Buffy says, haltingly. “Right now. They broke up. I— I killed him.”
All the air leaves Faith’s lungs at once. She reaches up without thinking, covers Buffy’s fingers, still clasped along her arm, with her own hand. “B.”
“I mean I thought I did,” Buffy rambles on, glancing back at Faith and then away again. “But he came back and— I mean, you know what it’s like around here. Something was hinky. He wasn’t really who he said he was and—”
“Let’s take a walk,” Faith says, squeezing Buffy’s hand again. She loosens Buffy’s grip, falls into step close beside her, guides her out of the park with a hand at her hip. Buffy surprises her by leaning in, letting Faith walk them out past the parking lot. There’s a drainage ditch behind the park, the feeble stream it houses dwindled to a sickly trickle in the dry California weather.
They walk through the concrete trench for long silent minutes, past graffiti and old trash. Faith’s trying to figure out how to bring it up again tactfully when Buffy puts her out of her misery and starts up on her own.
It’s a story that’s sickeningly familiar. Mom meets a great guy, he’s everything she’s looking for. They move fast and he puts himself right at the center of Buffy’s life, buddying up with her friends, monopolizing her mom’s time, asserting himself as a father figure to Buffy, whether she likes it or not. Then the orders, the threats, the secret second face he keeps carefully hidden from everyone else. Then the violence.
Buffy’s breath hitches as she talks about it. Getting hit in her room, how strong he was. Faith’s fists clench so hard at her sides listening to it that the bones in her hands ache from it. She talks about fighting back, knocking him down the stairs. How he didn’t get up. Joyce’s horrified face, the frantic 911 call, the flash of police lights.
“I really thought I killed him,” Buffy says. “I mean— he was dead. The cops released me to my mom the same night. I don’t know what she told them exactly, but going home with her was horrible. The worst part was she didn’t even yell at me. She told me she loved me. But I knew when she looked at me she was seeing a murderer.”
“Some people don’t deserve to live,” Faith bites out, shocking them both with her vehemence.
Buffy looks over at her, wide-eyed, and shakes her head slowly. “He wasn’t some vampire or some monster. Well, I mean — not that I knew, then. It was wrong to go after him like I did.”
“It was wrong for him to try to smack you around,” Faith insists. “Guys like that don’t know when to quit. Maybe it was just you at first, but eventually your mom would set him off and he’d go after her too. And she doesn’t have slayer healing.”
Buffy’s quiet for a while. When she picks the story back up, she finally gets to the Hellmouth of it all.
“A robot?”
“Yeah, I know. Programmed to be a better version of the guy who built him. A perfect husband.”
“A perfect husband who beats on kids and kills his wives?”
“The 50s were something else,” Buffy jokes weakly.
Faith shakes her head.
“Anyway, it’s— the first time he really scared me was here. Well, there,” Buffy flaps a hand in the general direction of the park behind them. “He got me away from the rest of them and— he grabbed my arm really tight. Said he would hit me. And then when everyone else showed up he was back to acting like normal, like everything was fine. He called me out in front of them for cheating — at mini-golf, as if anyone’s score actually matters — and I just felt so alone and crazy and embarrassed, it…”
“Makes you feel helpless,” Faith supplies, throat tight.
“Yeah,” Buffy agrees, soft. They walk for some time in silence, but Buffy’s closer now - the backs of their knuckles brush from time to time. It takes everything in Faith not to tilt her hand palm out, to grab on, to hold onto Buffy and not let go. After a while, Buffy clears her throat, asks tentatively, “You know what that’s like?”
Faith barks out a laugh. It’s startling, she hardly sounds like herself. She flinches at the sound, feels her cheeks going warm, tries ducking her head to hide it. “Which part? The people hurting you and pretending they didn’t? The creep boyfriend who gets away with whatever he wants to? Or the mind control computer chips in the down-home cookin’?”
Buffy’s hand doesn’t just brush hers this time. It lingers, the bony ridges of her knuckles trapping Faith’s hand against the side of her own thigh until she flips it palm out like she’s wanted to. Buffy doesn’t pull away when Faith slowly unfurls her fingers, threads them into Buffy’s.
“All of it,” Buffy says, warmth pouring out of her palm pressed tight into Faith’s. She squeezes her fingers a few times, rhythmic, slow, like the beating of a heart. “Any of it.”
“Well, I don’t think any of the guys my mom ever shacked up with knew how to cook anything fancier than a microwave burrito,” Faith feels Buffy’s gaze on the side of her face, but she can’t bring herself to glance over and make eye contact. Not while she talks about this. “Not that she’d need any brainwashing to let them do whatever they wanted to me. Not like any of ‘em were that much worse than she was.”
“Oh,” Buffy says, a rush of air.
“Yeah,” Faith shrugs, swallows past the lump in her throat. “Thing is, I never really had the guts to stand up to ‘em like you did. I mean, I’d lip off, catch the back of someone’s hand for my troubles, but I never got any licks in myself. Sometimes I think about what it could have been like, if I’d been all slayerized back then. If I could go back, have one of ‘em try to put their hands on me now, see how much they’d like it when I turned the tables…”
“Make them regret it?”
Faith had been expecting judgment, or maybe pity, out of Buffy’s voice. But she sounds thoughtful. Maybe even like she gets it. “Yeah.”
Silence springs back up between them, but this time it’s harder to take. Faith feels itchy, restless, can barely think past the blood rushing through her ears.
Shouldn’t have said any of that, she thinks. Buffy’s not gonna look at her the same anymore. She’s gonna see some after school special, some unstable white trash victim from Southie, playing super-powered badass.
Their situations aren’t all as similar as it first seemed to Faith. Afterall, it took Joyce being drugged to choose a man over Buffy. And in the end, even when it seemed like Buffy had done the unthinkable, Joyce had stuck with her. Loved her still.
Finally, it’s too much to take. Faith quickens her step, tries to yank her hand out of Buffy’s grip, but she holds fast. Faith lurches, stumbles hard at Buffy’s unexpected resistance, damn near yanks her arm out of its socket.
She glances back at Buffy who gazes innocently off at the amateurish graffiti haphazardly decorating the concrete slopes around them. “Do you think it’s gonna last?”
“What?” Faith asks, bewildered.
Buffy lifts their hands up together, gestures toward some graffiti on their right. Two names and a lopsided heart pierced through with a crooked arrow. The paint lines are thick and sloppy, with drips rolling down from where whoever held the can leaned in way too close. “The love between Chewy and Monica.”
It’s an out. Faith seizes onto it like a drowning sailor to a lifeboat.
“Well, if they can’t make it work, what hope is there for the rest of us?”
Buffy laughs even though it’s not that funny and Faith feels something in her chest unclench. She lets herself step closer, so their shoulders can brush. Buffy still hasn’t let go of her.
“Faith…” Buffy starts up again.
She tenses.
It’s gonna be an ‘I’m sorry.’ Or a ‘you didn’t deserve that.’
Something useless and well-intentioned that will just make her feel small and pathetic all over again. Probably, Buffy’s thinking the same thing Faith was earlier — about how they’re different. About how it’s important to draw that line between them, so Faith doesn’t start getting any ideas about them being too much alike.
But instead Buffy just says, “I’m glad we came out here, today.”
“Oh,” Faith rolls her thick tongue around in her mouth a moment, thrown. “Uh, me too.”
“Sorry I ruined mini-golf,” Buffy says, glancing over at Faith with a sweet, bashful smile that makes Faith’s heart stutter in her chest.
“‘S’fine.” Faith rolls her shoulders. “It was dumb anyway.”
“No, listen,” Buffy argues. “It was nice. Really nice. Okay?”
God, she’s tugged them to a stop, looking right into Faith’s eyes like she really means it.
“Okay,” Faith says, weakly, just to get them moving again. Buffy nods, satisfied, and tugs them forward.
“I think we’re coming up on Maple here in another half mile or so,” Buffy hums thoughtfully. “Wanna grab a coffee and kill some time at the Espresso Pump until sundown? My treat.”
“Sure.”
Buffy beams and tugs them forward, faster now with a goal in mind.
Faith follows, helplessly, already dreading how empty her hand will feel when Buffy lets go of it when they get where they’re going.