Fic: Faith, healing (part 3)
Here's the next bit of the fic. The smut is going to take a back seat for the next two or three parts, while I attempt to build up a tentative friendship vibe between Faith and Xander, so it's work safe.
Warnings: Some adult language
All parts are here
The previous part is here
***
Faith didn't bother looking too deeply into the reasons for it, preferring instead to simply enjoy the reprieve, but, after Harris had his fun and returned to his room like a good little dildo, she'd fallen into a deep, dreamless sleep that left her feeling great when she woke up the next day. Mornings were brutal on most people who worked nights, even more so when the nights in question were spent literally fighting demons, so this was a change for her. She'd grown accustomed to the dull buzz of fatigue strumming constantly across her nerves. When she woke up, though, it was gone, replaced by the urge to whistle as she jumped out of bed, showered, pulled on her clothes and got ready to face the day.
All things considered, it could be said that Faith was in an embarrassingly good mood when she left the hotel room that morning. Luckily, it didn't last very long.
By an unspoken mutual agreement, neither of them had mentioned what happened when they met up in the lobby. They didn't talk about it as they paid their separate room bills, they didn't talk about it in the roadside diner where they grabbed some breakfast a couple of hours later and they most certainly didn't talk about it during the long drive to the next stop of the council-mandated patrol route. They spent the best part of an entire day specifically not talking about what happened the night before. By the time they'd had dinner, in another roadside place not far from their destination, they'd spent so much time not talking that the silence was almost deafening.
Eventually, the good mood snapped and so did Faith.
"Just forget it, Harris."
He blinked. "Excuse me?"
"Last night. Forget it. It didn't happen."
"Um. O-kay?"
"Seriously. We were buzzed, we had a bit too much to drink and we spiraled into the twilight zone. But now we're back in the land where what happened last night... didn't happen. Understand?"
"... No?"
Faith sighed. "We got naked. We had some fun. It doesn't change anything."
"I know that."
"Hah!"
"I do!" Harris protested. Sensing this lacked conviction, he proceeded to commit the anatomically impossible and shove his foot so far into his mouth that he was all but kicking his tonsils. "You're the one who brought this up. I didn't say anything."
Faith took a moment away from focusing on the stream of cars around them to glare at him. "No. You didn't. You've been not saying stuff ever since we set out this morning. You've been not saying stuff all goddamn day. This from the guy whose motor mouth was voted 'Most likely to get him killed' in senior year. Face it," she hit the gas again and swerved to avoid a station wagon with a nodding dog in the back window, "there's so much you haven't been saying that it's pretty much all I can hear now."
The idiot beside her worked his mouth a few times, trying to find the right words to frame his protests. It took a while and he looked put out when he next spoke. "Okay. Maybe I have been... Maybe it's been weird. Today. After what happened. I'm sorry if... I'm sorry. But the weird factor isn't just me."
"Are you saying I'm the one with the problem?"
"You're the one who brought it up!"
"Only because you didn't!"
"I knew this was a bad idea."
"'This'? What 'this'? There is no 'this'."
"What happened last nigh-"
"Will you get over yourself?! It didn't happen, remember?"
"Except that it did. It happened and oh shit, watch out for that guy on the left! Turn, turn turn! Holy crap!"
Faith stuck her head out the window. "Learn to fucking drive, asshole!"
Behind the wheel of the old red station wagon that had nearly succeeded where several apocalypses, countless demons and Buffy herself had failed in killing Faith, an eighty year old grandmother with blue rinsed hair and a face like a prune scowled and very pointedly shot her the finger.
"Wrinkly old bit-"
"Faith!" hissed Harris, grabbing the wheel to steady them as they nearly careened into a passing SUV.
"Yeah, yeah, fine." Ducking back inside, she pushed him away and took over again. "I swear, they give licenses to anyone these days."
"Says the girl currently doing... one hundred and eight miles an hour on the shoulder of the expressway."
"I never said I had a license either."
"I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that."
"Whatever."
Silence returned for a few more miles as the excess adrenaline drained from the air.
"Any idea how we're supposed to deal with this cult thing?" she asked, a couple of minutes later.
As means of changing the conversation went it was a solid ten on the scale of awkward, but the words were out of her mouth before she'd realized she was going to say them and at least talk about their upcoming mission made a semi-plausible topic.
Their brief was simple enough: roll into a town with a cult problem, liaise with the agent that the council had already sent ahead to gather intel on the whack jobs that had set up shop there and were preparing some kind of summoning ritual and stop them before all hell quite literally broke loose.
Easy enough on paper.
Potentially migraine-inducing in practice.
Dealing with demon worshipping cults was at the top of every council agent's shit list. There was a fine line between harmless crackpot and genuine evildoer and most often the real deal knew how to protect themselves in every sense of the word, meaning that you were just as likely to be met with a hail of lawyers and legal actions as you were to be met by a hail of arrows. Either way your life would be screwed but, in the former case, the council might somehow be exposed and that would spread the shitstorm to people you did not want to piss off even in the afterlife. As a result, standard procedure was to watch and wait, to sit on the cultists until they did something truly, certifiably demonic and then be sure to use 'utmost caution' in dealing with the problem, a euphemism for 'don't get caught or we'll hang you out to dry'.
No one liked pulling cult duty. The field watchers were usually the ones who got stuck doing the surveillance work, calling in a slayer for help only if blood was about to start pouring out of bodily orifices in the very near future.
Harris hesitated.
"No clue," he admitted finally. "Roberts should have more info for us when we get there."
"Roberts?"
"The guy we're supposed to meet. Nicholas Roberts."
"The name doesn't ring a bell. What's he like?"
"Who?"
She shot him a look. "Who'd you think? Roberts. He's part of the brotherhood of Tweed, same as you. What's he like?"
"Oh! Well, um, he's definitely very... He's a... Uh..." Harris peered down at the file in his lap. "A fan of good grammar?"
Faith frowned. "You don't know?"
"Not so much, no," he admitted without missing a beat. "Not at all. Never heard of the guy, actually." He grinned apologetically. "I'm just going on the name in the report."
"I thought you boys all knew each other."
"It's not like we get drunk together every year at the company picnic. There are over three thousand watchers on the payroll these days, spread across five different continents and four separate dimensions."
"Huh." She shook her head. "Talk about branching out. I still remember when we set this whole thing back up again. Doesn't seem like it was more than-"
"Ten years ago? You're right. It's closer to twelve now."
She blinked.
"Remember?" he continued, clearly trying to jog her memory. "London, a year after Sunnydale?"
"... Wow. Guess it has been a while."
"Didn't you ever read the monthly newsletter? Willow spent hours putting that thing together. All the latest info about what's up in council-land, delivered straight to your inbox. Details about the exciting opportunities for worthwhile employment with the IWC's charity outreach programs around the world. Offers of sponsorship deals for doctoral students in archaeology, theology, anthro-something-ology... Twelve years is a long time. There are people working for us now that none of us has even seen before."
"Well, shit."
"How do you not know stuff like this? Have you been living in a cave somewhere?"
"Cleveland is a big damn city, not some speck of fly dirt lost in the desert like Sunnydale. Keeping a lid on the vamps and other shit that came crawling out of Hell every week was a fucking hard job. So long as the supplies came in every month and the salaries were paid, we didn't give a shit about internal council politics. It's not like I don't have the overall picture, I'm just a little shaky on the fine details." A thought occurred to her. "Hey, who took over after Giles retired, anyway?"
Harris looked stunned. "Council management is not a 'fine detail'! There was a general election, for Pete's sake!"
"Who won?"
He stared at her some more.
Intellectually, of course, she'd known that the council had grown over the years. It was a hard thing not to notice when a bunch of suits you'd never seen before summoned you to their pocket-dimensional boardroom to 'review and assess your work performance' and subsequently pink slip your ass out of your so-called sacred duty. Still, perhaps subconsciously, she'd held on to the belief that the old crowd was still mostly on top of things, even after B kicked the bucket, boss Tweed announced his retirement and Willow took her transdimensional sabbatical. At some point, guarding the Hellmouth became her main focus and she just didn't have the time to worry about much beyond that.
But she did now.
"You're serious?" asked Harris.
"Listen, there's still a ways to go before we arrive. What say you fill me in on what I missed?"
"I can't believe this. Okay. Fine. Where do I start?"
"From the beginning. I'll tell you if you're boring me."
"You're so tactful." He shot her an acid smile before sighing. "Alright then. Well, after you took up the Hellmouth, that freed up most of our North American assets, so we were able to reassign several teams..."
***
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