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Buffy has two worlds. The one with her friends, and the one she never lets her friends see. Faith blurs the line on occasion, but for the most part, she belongs firmly in the latter.
It’s not on purpose, it’s just inevitable. Buffy gives her days to her friends and her nights to slaying, and slaying has started to become ubiquitous with Faith.
Sometimes Faith bleeds into the day and the library, and sometimes her hands wander in the fidgety way they do, tapping Buffy’s thigh or brushing her back, but for the most part Faith seems to know better.
What happens at night cannot happen in the light of day.
It’s not – it’s not like that. Not yet at least.
Perhaps something nameless rests between them, something unspoken until Faith will eventually blurt it out because the silence got too loud, or maybe one day the feeling will burn so strongly in Buffy’s heart that it escapes her body and ignites the space between them, but until then, it’s something else.
Something just as undefinable and just as secretive, the person Buffy is with Faith isn’t a person Willow or Xander would recognise – not at first at least. That doesn’t mean it’s not Buffy. In a way, it’s more Buffy than any other version of her. Far away from Fiesta Queen and ice skates, far away too from the sheets in his house and the empty space he left beside her.
Faith draws out from Buffy the thoughts she’d never even voice to herself, some want take have philosophy and Faith will take it all. She takes Buffy’s desires and her secrets, and her pain and she spills them all out before them both, lets them rest, mingled in with her own which slip from her mouth, stolen away by spring air before Faith even realises.
She wonders whether anybody else has ever known Faith like this.
She wonders whether anybody else has ever known herself like this.
She wonders if this is the truest version of her, some pure representation of her soul spelled out between tombstones and dust being carried off by the breeze. Between high fives and quips and the touches which linger now where they didn’t in the daylight.
Buffy lets her hand brush against Faith’s, and she can hear the sirens blaring in her mind.
This only leads one way – this. All of it. The touches and the secrets and the want take have of it all. Buffy can’t keep separating night and day, each bleeding into the other and running down the clocks which hold the expiration dates on Buffy and Faith effortlessly.
Before anything else, time will break them.
They cannot last, not like this. Not with the sirens coming and the sun rising.
Not when Willow thinks Faith is a slut – though Willow would use kinder words – and not when Xander wishes Faith were a slut.
Not when they refuse to search behind her delicately-fixed mask, and not when they refuse to see past Buffy’s own apparent goodness that Faith could never live up to – that Buffy could never live up to.
They see the surface level flaws and accept them as the worst of Buffy, not knowing how deep the pits are, and it terrifies Buffy, because one day the alarm clocks will ring and the façade will be over, and they’ll turn to her with accusing eyes and blame her for hiding a part of herself from them that they did not want to find.
Faith, Buffy thinks, is the one person who wants to find the worst of her.
Joyce, Giles, Xander, Willow – Angel. They want the heroic Buffy, the snow-white, unblemished slayer who will always march the armies forth against the beasts that Hell lets out. They want to use her as a mirror for the goodness in them and will curse her for distorting their reflection when one day her mirror tints darker shades.
Faith wants the dark. She bathes in it, thrives in it. The days when the moon slips under the covers of the clouds are the days where Faith is brightest. Buffy’s hand will brush against Faith’s and Faith – just for a moment – will take it in her own. She’ll swing their hands together and squeeze tightly, once, twice, thrice, until they walk out of the shadows and under a streetlight, and Faith will snap away carelessly.
Faith likes Buffy best when Buffy mirrors herself in Faith.
She likes Buffy dressed in dark shades, low-cut tops which cling to her body and hide nothing. She likes to look at Buffy, and she likes to see that she is not alone. It is not just her.
Faith looks at Buffy to find that echoes of her darkness exist beyond her; but she looks at Buffy and sees that perhaps her reflection isn’t so dark.
Buffy doesn’t know what it means that Faith relies so much on looking at Buffy, but she likes the way that, when Faith’s touches don’t always linger, her eyes always will.
No one looks at her like Faith.
No one knows her like Faith.