Touch Me, Make Me Whole
by Ria
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: If you don’t know who they really belong to, then what on earth have
you been watching? Yeah, they don’t belong to me, I’m just playing, honest.
Spoilers: Not really.
Author's Notes: This is F/B slush. Which I’m really getting into now. Hope it
makes sense.
They stood; total silence surrounded them, cloaked them, held them in its comforting shroud.
The darkness of pre-dawn limited the vision. Wispy shadows floated, holding half promises of surrounding items, that they weren’t alone out there.
They might as well have been.
The wind breezed a whisper, not daring to intrude, to lift the fallen leaves from their watchful perches on the ground, to make waves in the puddles that the earlier rain had left.
Total silence. For once neither spoke. They had said all they had to say. They had expressed every emotion that they could with the limiting use of words, of the emotive use of action.
They had been friends. Briefly, but they had shared friendship at one point.
They had hated.
They had screamed.
They had fought.
They had on many times been locked in heated battle.
A barrier had always existed, though.
They could be friends, but they would never be totally honest.
They could scream, but they could never be totally true to the hatred.
There was always something more, something that however much they tried, they could not express to the other. A deep seated expression that neither had enough words, enough emotions to express.
So they stood.
Nothing else had worked, but they had never tried silence before.
They had never just looked.
Time had changed her.
Older, wiser.
Broken.
By life, by love.
She had experienced pain, suffering, lost her innocence, bleed from deep within the soul, cried out to the heavens to bring about an end.
She knew the darkness of humanity, knew what the end would be like.
She had had many fronts, many faces, but none had been true.
But as she stood, looking, Buffy realised how deluded she had been.
Faith’s mind, at best was a blank. Nothing. She had tried to be everything else, and now, she had nothing left to try. She was just her. Just Faith.
Faith had come back to Sunnydale, without the delusions of old. Without the old pretences, the old wildness. It had to be this way. Faith didn’t have the strength to be anyone else. She was tired.
Tired of trying to match people’s expectations, or living a lie. So she stood, looking, watching Buffy, wanting her to see.
To see if Buffy could possibly love Faith, the way that she loved Buffy. Because she wanted Buffy to love her, love the real her.
Wanted her to see.
Prison had changed her, more than Buffy could have imagined. As she stood, she could see the haunting in those deep brown eyes. A haunting even with all that she had seen, she had never experienced before. As though the pain was slowly killing her inside, was robbing her of everything that she had once been. The walls that had eternally surrounded Faith had fallen dramatically, so that the person that stood before her was a barely living shadow of that girl.
And Buffy was glad. Because behind that smile, behind those clothes, behind the make-up was a beautiful young girl.
And she still was young. Barely out of her teens. Even with those three years locked away.
The horrors that she had experienced, the cry for help that Buffy had been so blind to before was all evident.
If only she had looked. If only she had actually seen what Faith was, and not the person that Faith was trying to be.
Without that, without the pretence, Faith was just a girl.
She wasn’t even wearing leather. The blue denim jeans rode low on her hips, a small T-shirt barely skimming the waistband. Her hair was tied back from her face, revealing her high cheekbones, slender neck. Without the makeup, the skin on her face held its own natural glow that not even the dearth of prison could repress.
Her eyes held Buffy’s till she forgot to breathe, forgot who she was, forgot that anything else existed except the girl stood before her.
There was something else in those eyes. Something that Buffy in all her life would never had associated with Faith. A need, a want.
From Buffy.
A need for what?
Buffy didn’t think she knew. Didn’t think that she had anything that Faith could possibly want. What could you say to someone who had lost as much as Faith, who hurt as much as she obviously did?
Buffy struggled to think of something, anything. The silence feeling suddenly unbearable, suffocating. She had nothing to give Faith; for once, she was lost for words.
This was what she had wanted wasn’t it? For Faith to go away. Atone for her sins in the only place that Buffy thought fit. In prison. She hadn’t known that Faith was barely seventeen at the time. But then, she had hardly known anything about Faith at the time. She had found out by accident, one night, when she had found herself inexplicably drawn to Faith’s old apartment. There, amongst the evidence of a diet of junk food, and reading material of comics, Buffy had unearthed something that she had been craving for, something that had been digging at her mind ever since seeing Faith at Angel’s. She wanted to know who Faith was. It had started out at a casual indifference, an idle thought that she didn’t know how old Faith was. And for some reason, it bothered her more and more, till it had spread to every other part of Faith’s life that Buffy didn’t know and hadn’t bothered finding out about.
That night, in Faith’s old apartment, haunted by memories of the stabbing, Buffy had found Faith’s ID. Found out her age, her surname, her old address in Boston. And in a quest that began to eat into every part of her life, she had found out as much as she could about Faith’s life before Sunnydale. That she had been orphaned as a toddler. Had grown up with a senile Grandmother who had had more of a relationship with alcohol than Faith seeing as she had died from liver disease when Faith was thirteen. From there, it was easier to trace. Foster parents, state homes, up until Faith was fifteen, and suddenly the records stopped, no more information available, the year, Buffy knew, Faith’s watcher came to claim her.
And now, as she stood before Faith, she filled in the blanks, the parts that written records had decided to ignore. The memories that haunted Faith, the past that held her, battled inside her, stopped her from being the young girl she was.
And the realisation came to Buffy. What Faith was asking of her? It wasn’t words, it wasn’t half thought up promises of a better life ahead.
Faith had heard all of these, and was living proof of how untrue they were.
As the sun began its assent into the sky, beckoning a new day, Buffy reached out. Touched Faith. Laid her palm against the smoothness of her cheek. Held onto the look, even as the tears spilt. Even as some of the haunting disappeared, some of the hurt, some of the pain withdrew from the touch.
All Faith had wanted from her was a single touch. But as Buffy touched her, she knew one single touch was never going to be enough. Could never be enough. She wanted to know the real Faith. To see Faith in all her completeness, in all her intimacy. She wanted to make all the pain go away, and if it took a lifetime she would show Faith true happiness.
What Buffy didn’t realise, was that in that one touch, Faith had already found it.