Hope
by Victoria
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: I own nothing, except maybe the particular combination of words.
Spoilers: No.
Feedback: Yeah, please...it would be great, suggestions, constructive
criticism, comments, like it, love it, thought it was 'eh'.
“So then I told him…” The rest of the rant flowed directly through Faith’s right ear and then promptly out the left. The same story told so many times; a story of personal bravery, triumph, or ego in which the narrator was always the hero. The type of story she supposed a war veteran would tell, sitting around a rickety card table, picking at the poor and peeling finish and knocking the consumed ashes off the end of his cigarette. Stories that were told both with pride and some nameless, unexpressed regret given little heed by most listeners. She knew the tinge of remorse in the story; that was the cold reality of this place slowly unraveling that pride. Faith knew a lot of things. Her time here, if nothing else, gave her the space to learn how to think. Tossing her cigarette to the sandy grounds of the recreation area, she snuffed it out with her foot.
Everyone in this place had those type of stories. She guessed that it was some attempt to cling to the few times they were right. They needed it, because the humming lights, the slamming iron doors, the monotony, the pure artificiality of this place served as a constant reminder of just how wrong they’d become. The story was now over. A long, drawn out, awe-filled curse from the inmate beside her served the same grammatical purpose as a period.
Faith smirked… obviously a fairly new prisoner. She had learned to take pleasure in small things, whether the fresh gullibility and hero-worship of a newbie or the way the colors danced under your eyelids when you closed them and looked toward the sun. The sun… it had become something foreign, something holy only available for one precious supervised hour out of twenty-four. The greens and blues and purples spreading and flowing along an overwhelmingly orange background and the bright warmth that blanketed her unaccustomed face… there was happiness in small things. She knew that now.
Prison had given her a sort of peace. Her life had up till now been lived on the edge. An edge where there was always the gnawing, nagging, twisting fear of being knocked off… a controlling panic that bent you, shaped you, until it left you barely hanging on, overwhelmed by the desperate wait for the proverbal next shoe to drop. Whether she thought of her father, of school, of fights, of being a slayer, of her... It all was like a massive weight crushing her, slowly squeezing and tightening until she finally lost her grip.
Here… this was the other shoe. There was nothing left to happen and in this quiet, near stagnant environment she could finally breathe. There was nothing she had to do, nowhere for her to go, and nothing for her to run from. Everything was still; the motion and push of life didn’t exist here. For the first time it all fell into place, her pride, her feigned control, her entire façade had faded with want of use, of necessity. It was a complete and wholly new honesty. It gave her peace…not happiness, but finally peace and the ability to overcome things that had been ripping and tearing at her soul since possibly the day she was born.
She had spent many nights awake, just thinking, analyzing, and ultimately accepting her life. The way it had happened, the things that were her fault, and more importantly the things that were not. It had been a full year since she first stepped into this microcosm of cement and steel. It had taken her most of it, to get this point. The anger she once cherished and revealed in was unnecessary. Looking back through the cataloged and judged chronology of her life she had but one regret, one thing that she could not come to terms with, and one thing where closure or at the very least acceptance escaped her. The difference between happiness and peace. A thought, a shadow, a ghost in the shape of a girl…in the shape of Buffy Summers.
It was the utter lack of resolution that gave her all she truly needed to survive… the one thing that she had been left with after all else fell away. Hope.