BtVS: "Twenty Facts about St. Clare’s Academy Not Found in the Brochure" (Faith/Kennedy)
Title: Twenty Facts about St. Clare’s Academy Not Found in the Brochure
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Pairing: Faith/Kennedy
Timeline/Spoilers: 2017-2018 school year. Spoilers for all of Buffy and Angel.
A/N: For the Happy Endings ficathon. Yeah, I’ve just readjusted the entire concept of “late.”
Twenty Facts about St. Clare’s Academy Not Found in the Brochure
1. In the 2017-2018 school year, St. Clare’s Academy houses 300 students, divided more or less equally between the four grades of American secondary education. Of these students, 180 are girls. Of those girls, three are Slayers.
2. 40 girls and 25 boys are Wiccan, sorcerors, or otherwise magic-users. (At least two worship chaos.) Roughly one-twentieth of the student body can lay claim to some sort of demon blood in their lineage.
3. The official uniform resembles the typical uniform at any Catholic school: dockers, a dress shirt, and a tie for the boys; a blouse and skirt for the girls. In addition, each students wears a red blazer (which is also part of the official uniform) and a cross (which isn’t).
4. The rector and headmaster of the school is a somewhat unorthodox Catholic priest who founded the school in 1967 as a way of keeping track of the Hellmouth which lies beneath it. He does not answer to the Bishop of Diocese of Cleveland, but rather receives his orders directly from the Vatican. The staff of His Holiness Pius XIII knows better than to be too specific in telling Father Marcus what to do. Roger Wyndam-Pryce hasn’t quite learned this lesson yet.
5. Dawn Summers replaced Roger Wyndam-Pryce as Fr. Marcus’ liason to the Council shortly after her elevation to High Watcher. The relation between St. Clare’s Academy and the Council of Watchers has improved notably since that time.
6. The head of the language department is a Sister of Charity who knows not only French, Italian, and Latin, but several demon languages as well, including Fyarl and Drochnii. She has taught at St. Clare’s since the beginning.
7. Ever since the year 2004, one of the best-loved gym teachers is the formerly-rogue Vampire Slayer named Faith. In 2006, she was pardoned by the President of the United States for the murders she was convicted of committing. She coaches the boys’ soccer team.
8. In the spring of 2015, Faith traveled to the United Kingdom to visit the graves of fallen friends and comrades. When she returned to Cleveland, she was accompanied by a six-year old child named Madelyn and a thirty-ish woman named Kennedy. Madelyn eventually returned to her aunt in Britain. Kennedy never did leave.
9. Kennedy now teaches history at St. Clare’s. She hates history, as it is full of dead men and battles no one remembers. She much prefers the present, which is also full of dead men, but she certainly remembers the battles. She also coaches the girls’ field hockey team.
10. In the school year 2017-2018, Ohio is one of the twenty-seven states in which same-sex marriage is still not legal. There is a part of Kennedy that, much-needed civil rights aside, hopes that it never will be. That is the same part which fears that the moment the possibility of formal commitment appears will be the moment that Faith bids their relationship adieu. As long as their love dare not speak its name, then Faith doesn’t have to face the fact that she’s slept with the same woman for the last two years, and Kennedy doesn’t have to worry about losing her.
11. One day, Mr. Eutychus, the theology teacher, went home sick and Kennedy had to cover his class. Marriage, she informed the class deadpan, was a relation between a man and a woman that was sanctified by God. Any sexual activity outside the bond of marriage, including masturbation, was sinful. No one bothered to argue with her, although one student laughed.
Thomas Perrier passed a love letter to Robert Meyer. Kennedy didn’t say anything.
12. The last name on Faith’s passport is Lehane, and the birthdate is September 20. Kennedy is fairly certain that both pieces of information are incorrect. She has never seen Faith’s pardon.
13. There is a strictly enforced curfew at St. Clare’s, but every night Faith and Kennedy take the three students who are Slayers off campus and into the streets of Cleveland. The girls are out of uniform, of course; the vamps know better than to attack a girl wearing a St. Clare’s blazer. Rare is the night when each member of their party doesn’t dust at least a couple of vamps.
14. They return to campus around three in the morning. The girls slip into their dormitories, careful not to wake the other girls. Faith and Kennedy return to their apartment in the faculty dorm. Kennedy always gets the first shower, and when Faith is finished Kennedy is waiting for her, dressed in a different colored negligee.
15. Faith never did know how to be gentle, and Kennedy hopes that she never learns.
16. If you had asked her before she became a Slayer, Faith never would have figured she’d become a teacher, even a phys ed teacher. If you had asked her after she became a Slayer, she wouldn’t have figured she would become anything at all, except maybe dead.
17. Now that’s she has been teaching for well over a decade, she can’t imagine doing anything else.
18. In the years Faith has taught at St. Clare’s, there has been exactly four years in which there has not been a major apocalypse in Cleveland sometime between the beginning of April and the end of June. This is viewed by the graduating class as a sign of bad luck: each of those years, it rained on graduation.
19. While many St. Clare’s students move onto college following graduation, some are immediately recruited into the workforce. Between the two organizations, the United States military and the Watchers’ Council of Britain is responsible for employing over 90% of these students.
20. Each year, after the commencement ceremonies are completed and the graduated students are busy hugging each other and signing everybody else’s yearbooks, Faith thinks about the life she never had. She never stood proud as someone announced her name and handed her a diploma. She never shouted in delight with her girlfriends over what colleges and universities had accepted her. But then she takes her girlfriend’s hand in her own, and looks at the eager but nervous faces of the students she has taught, and she knows that as long and difficult as her path has been, it has been worth it all.