Always With You by Dafmeister

Rating: R
Disclaimer: The Buffyverse is owned by Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Fox and a bunch of other people who aren't me. No infringement of copyright is intended blah blah blah...
Distribution: The Mystic Muse http://mysticmuse.net
Anyone, anywhere, as long as they let me know.
Feedback: Please don't make me beg.
Spoilers: Buffy seasons 4-7, Angel seasons 1-4. Assuming any of that's new to anyone, of course...
Author's Note: This story was written in response to the Prison Fic Challenge on the Oralfxatns list. It'ss dedicated to Shamrock, who is an awesome beta. The story is episodic and takes place over the course of seasons 4-7. Assume everything happens as in canon unless told otherwise. Dates are important. I've tried to be as accurate as I can, but most are approximations based on the few fixed dates that exist in the Buffyverse. I've learned to my cost that trying to plot Buffy events on a calendar is a recipe for a headache. If I've got a date wrong, forgive me.
Pairing: Buffy/Faith

Summary: Even after Faith's incarceration, she and Buffy can't get out of each other's lives.

Every corner, every staircase, every doorway led to another corridor, and at the other end she'd find another corner, another staircase, another doorway. Miles of them, miles of the same faded green walls and stained floors, leading her ever deeper into the maze her prison had become. And however far, however fast she ran, the monster was always behind her, just out of sight but always there.

Faith rounded another corner, her feet skidding on the bare concrete floor as she fought to change direction without losing speed, and she nearly collided with the far wall in her haste. The blood on her hands left a sticky trail on the paint as she pushed away and ran, another mark of her terror and guilt to join the dozens of stains she'd left in her wake. So much blood--it should have rubbed off by now, or dried, surely, but it was always there, always fresh, like it was welling up from inside her in an endless stream. The monster growled, echoing in the corridor behind her. She didn't want to look, but her head turned anyway and she saw its shadow cast on the wall, the hunched body, the mass of tendrils writhing around its head, coming for her.

She ran on, past a landing of empty cells, through a cafeteria that shouldn't have been there. Nothing made sense any more, nothing was where it should be, but she didn't have time to think, the monster was coming. The next corner led onto another corridor, and she ran for her life toward the door at the far end.

It opened, a blaze of light blinding her. She flung up her hands to shield her eyes and tried to stop, but her feet lost purchase on the concrete and she landed in a heap on the floor. Squinting against the glare she saw a figure appear silhouetted in the doorway and stride toward her, casting a long shadow that reached out to envelop her.

The door slammed closed again, cutting off the glare and leaving them in the pallid glow of the fluorescent ceiling lights. The figure stopped a few paces away, as though waiting for a sign. She blinked, clearing the sparks from her eyes, and looked up at it.

"Angel?" She leapt to her feet and embraced him, relief coursing like adrenaline through her veins. "Thank God you're here, you've got to help me. There's something after me, I can't fight it, I know I can't. We've got to get out of here."

He didn't respond, didn't even move, just stood there like a statue until she let go of him and stepped away, unease beginning to churn within her. "Angel? What's wrong?"

"Why, Faith?" His voice matched his expression, hard and rigidly controlled, but there was rage burning behind his eyes, she could see it now. "Why did you do you it?"

"I trusted you. I believed in you. I thought you wanted to change. How could you do this to me?"

"Liar!" His face twisted into a snarl and she could hear the demon growling in his voice. "They all tried to warn me, they all said I was making a mistake, but I didn't listen. I thought you wanted redemption!"

He took a step forward and Faith, suddenly afraid of him, flung out her hand to ward him off. He stopped, gasping in pain and looked down at his chest. He whispered 'Why?' before crumbling to ashes.

"No, no, please God no..." Faith stared in horror at the stake in her hand, blood soaking into the wood. She flung it into the corner and started backing away. She turned to run, but the monster was there, right behind her. She had time to see a mass of tangled hair and a face streaked with white, then a blade plunged into her gut and ripped her open.

She had no way to know how long it lasted. She had no sense of time, no sense of anything beyond pain and terror. And then it was gone. No warning, her eyes just opened and she was staring up at a bare concrete ceiling.

For a second Faith couldn't move, then her hands leapt to her stomach, desperately trying to stem the flow of blood as her body curled protectively around it. She knew it was a nightmare, but the instinct was too strong and for a moment she was certain she could feel blood on her skin. Then, as the primitive core of her brain accepted that she wasn't hurt, she laid her head back on the pillow and drew her hand away from a wound that had never been there.

Not like that, anyhow. Her fingertips brushed the scar above her right hip. Back to nightmares about things chasing me, huh? Least it's not B this time.

Her eyes ached with fatigue, but she made them focus on the ceiling of her cell regardless. The cell itself was dark, but even at this time of night some of the lights in the corridor were left on for the guards, and she had more than enough illumination to pick out flaws and signs of age and wear in the concrete. She knew them all by now, as well as she knew the sounds of booted feet pacing the halls and the creak of bodies moving on aging beds in the cells around her.

She wanted to blame the lights for her tiredness. It would be easier to say that they kept her awake than to admit that she was afraid to sleep. Since she'd run from Buffy on Angel's rooftop she hadn't enjoyed one unbroken night. Every time she closed her eyes she dreamed of things she'd done or things she might do. Things that part of her wanted to do. The old nightmares of being hunted, of being the victim, had disappeared ever since she'd understood the monster she'd become, and she didn't want to think about what their return might mean. Or what the creature she'd seen could represent. Or why she'd fallen asleep so readily.

Determined to avoid drifting off again, she rose from her bed and sat down against the far wall. The concrete was cold enough to keep her from getting anywhere near comfortable. The chill helped to push away the fatigue, if only a little, but didn't seem to help with the lingering full-body ache that had come over her out of the blue that day. She wondered if maybe it was a reaction to being caged in this place. Or maybe it was the waiting.

How hard is it to find a judge who can say "life"? She'd confessed, hadn't she? She'd given them everything they needed to put her away, but nothing seemed to be happening. She wasn't even officially convicted yet. The public defender she'd been assigned said it was normal, that even with a confession it would be a while before she was sentenced, but part of her wondered if maybe the suits at Wolfram and Hart weren't stalling things, covering their asses or just taking some petty revenge by dragging the process out behind the scenes. Not that it mattered in the long term, she'd be sleeping under prison sheets forever in any case, but now that she'd made the decision she just wanted to get on with it instead of hanging in some legal limbo.

Patience, her lawyer said. There were procedures to follow, avenues to explore. The idiot didn't seem to understand that she didn't want his help.

"Hey." She looked up and saw one of the guards watching her through the cell door. He was silhouetted against the light, little more than a dark shape, but she knew what the look on his face would be. They all looked at her the same. "Get back to sleep, you've got a date with the judge tomorrow and he doesn't want to be looking at the bags under your eyes."

For a moment Faith fantasised about reaching through the bars, grabbing him by the throat and squeezing until his eyes popped out. Then she rose, stretched herself out on her bunk, and got back to waiting.

It wasn't a particularly warm evening, by Sunnydale standards, but enough of the day's heat lingered to make Buffy wonder if wearing her new silk jacket had been a good idea. She wasn't hot, exactly, but there was a vague prickling sensation running down her back that said her body was considering perspiration as a viable move. What made it worse was that everyone else in town seemed to have got the memo; everywhere Buffy looked she saw t-shirts, tank tops, miniskirts, halter tops... she could feel her body temperature rising just looking at them, and to cap it all the sheer amount of cleavage on display had her half expecting to see--

Buffy stamped on the thought before it could completely form. It was a beautiful night, she was out with her friends, and she wasn't going to let thoughts of her spoil it, any more than she was going to let the weather get in the way. They'd be at the movie theatre in a few minutes, anyway, basking in the joys of modern air-conditioning, and she'd be able to concentrate on making sure the evening went as well as she'd planned. She'd put in too much work to let it be otherwise.

That had been her own fault, of course. She was the one who'd taken Xander's casual "Anyone feel like seeing a movie Friday?" and turned it into a formal triple-date with planning, pizza afterwards and the need for a new outfit including a gorgeous silk jacket that just happened to be on sale. The whole thing had caught everyone by surprise; Anya in particular hadn't quite grasped why she was making such a big deal out of it, but Xander had got her to play along. He, Willow and Riley had watched Buffy going into overdrive with a kind of bemused good humour, as though she was giving vent to her inner social queen because she was bored, and she hadn't felt like telling them the truth. This wasn't about the six of them spending time together. It was about four of them spending time with Willow and Tara.

Buffy knew she was over-compensating and she just couldn't bring herself to care. She still felt guilty about the way she'd treated Willow over the last year, first letting their friendship drift to the point where Willow felt she couldn't talk to her about Tara, and then her borderline freak-out when Willow finally did tell her. Ever since they finally got rid of Adam and the Initiative, Buffy had been trying to reach out and get to know this person who'd become such a big part of her best friend's life. It was hard, and Tara wasn't making it any easier--not that she was unfriendly, she was just so painfully shy that trying to talk to her could be an exercise in frustration.

Still, even an idiot could see how happy she made Willow, and as far as Buffy was concerned that more than made up for any social awkwardness. Plus, of course, Tara had been the first one to figure out that F--that she had hijacked Buffy's body, and then helped find a way to reverse it. That alone bought her major plus points. Add in the smile on Willow's face and Buffy was determined to make the new girl feel welcome.

It seemed to be working, too. Tara certainly wasn't the life of the party, but she'd already said more that evening than Buffy had heard her say in the previous week, and she was blushing less and smiling more. It was a nice smile that turned into an impish grin whenever Willow made a joke, like when Xander had been complaining about the aches and pains his new construction job was causing him. She'd made a completely unprompted comment, too, offering to put together a mix of bath oils she knew that might help, and they'd all had to laugh as Xander tried to balance his discomfort against needing to cling to some scraps of 'manly pride', as he put it.

They'd almost reached the movie theatre when Buffy stopped midstride with a faint gasp of pain. It was so sudden that the others had taken a couple more paces before they realised she wasn't with them. They all turned to find her rubbing her lower back and wincing. Riley stepped toward her but she waved him off. "I'm okay, I'm okay."

"I don't know," she replied. "I just had this pain, like I got hit or something."

"Have you been trying to reach things on the high shelves again?" Xander teased. "I've told you, there's no shame in needing a ladder."

"Yeah, laugh it up Mr. Can't-lift-his-arms-above-his shoulders," Buffy retorted, sounding rather grouchier than she'd intended. "Sorry Xand."

"You think maybe you tweaked something fighting that tusk demon last night?" Riley suggested. "You haven't been training all that much."

"No, not a crime. Evidence of craziness, but not a crime." Buffy hopped up on tip-toe to kiss her boyfriend. "Come on, we're going to miss the movie."

Sounds like a freaking pregnancy clinic. Or a nut farm. Faith tried to extract some humour from the thought, but she couldn't even raise a hint of a smile as she sat in the corner of the exercise yard, soaking up the late afternoon sun and contemplating her new world.

In a strange way, the yard was almost like being back in elementary school at recess. Everyone was outside, desperate to make the most of what time they had away from confinement, some burning off excess energy with frenetic games of basketball or sessions of weight training, while others sat around playing cards or making trades behinds the guards' backs. There were the cliques, the popular kids, the predators and the victims. And there were the misfits.

Faith landed squarely in that category. She'd made a few half-hearted attempts at getting to know people in her first few days, but the whole nature of the cell block's social structure made her uncomfortable. Everything was based on image, bravado and the threat--and use--of violence. A few months before, she'd have fitted right in. Now she wanted nothing to do with it. For most people, the misfit and victim categories overlapped, but two fights in the first week after her arrival had made everyone a lot more cautious. The first time, the other girl had been stupid and made her move right when one of the guards had been looking at them. Faith had knocked her down with a single punch, and the guards didn't give her any trouble. The second girl had been smarter, coming up behind her in the middle of a bunch of people at mail call so all the guards could see was two girls fighting. They'd both been on the receiving end of some nightsticks after that, but the way Faith took the beating, coupled with how fast she put her attacker down, had made a lot of people sit back and think. She still had occasional problems, but it was mainly new girls looking to build a rep straight away or opportunists who thought they'd spotted an opening, and she only had to be careful rather than paranoid. The last few weeks, most people just left her alone to brood on her new home.

She'd focused on the people first, but working out who was who, what the gangs and cliques were and who was likely to give her grief hadn't taken more than a few days; people who had groups backing them up made sure everyone knew it, so picking them out was child's play for a Southie. From there she'd moved on to considering the prison itself.

NCWF was supposed to be a medium-security prison, and for most people the security was pretty solid. Locks and bars everywhere inside. Fences around the cell blocks, topped with barbed wire coils. A concrete perimeter wall, with more wire. Guards in the corridors and the yard. More guards on the catwalks and in the wall towers, with shotguns. Getting out would require a lot of planning or a lot of help--for most people.

For a Slayer there were a lot more options. The walls and fences weren't high enough; she could easily reach the poles supporting the barbed wire and flip herself over the top in one move. The guards wouldn't have time to react, and she doubted they'd have picked their jaws off the floor before she repeated the move with the perimeter wall. Faith reckoned she could go from a standing start to being on the ground outside the wall in less than twenty seconds if she had to, and that was only one option. So much of the security seemed to be based on human limitations--doors a human couldn't force, windows left unbarred because a human couldn't withstand the fall without serious injury.

Once outside the wall, the hard part would be choosing which option to take. Somehow the staff had let a map of the local area end up in the prison library, and Faith had been stunned by how many getaway routes there were. Barely a mile east of the prison was a container depot for the east-west rail line serving Stockton. To the southwest, literally just beyond the outer wall, no less than four high schools--high schools!--were clustered together, all filled with hideout spots, fresh clothes and car-stealing opportunities. Two miles to the northwest, less than a quarter of an hour on foot for her, lay the suburbs of Stockton itself, while the smaller town of Manteca lay less than six mile to the south. Stockton Metropolitan Airport was only two miles to the west. Stockton even had its own seaport. If she could stay free for an hour outside the walls, she knew they'd never catch her. Getting out wasn't a done deal, but if she wanted to go, the odds were definitely in her favour--which meant the only thing that could really keep her there was her.

Her lawyer, some wet behind the ears idealist from the Public Defender's office, had actually been pleased about it. She was lucky, he'd told her. She could have ended up in Valley State or CIW, and if the stories she'd heard about those places were true then she probably should have felt lucky, but from Faith's perspective it had one drawback that, to her, pretty much cancelled out all the supposed good points. It was three hundred miles from Los Angeles.

Five hours driving, if the traffic co-operated. If Angel was going to visit her, he'd have to come up one night, then see her and drive back the next. He'd promised he'd make the trip as often as he could, but how often could he take that kind of time away? He probably would if she asked, but she couldn't. She couldn't make him wander off his road to redemption just because she needed help on hers, because she didn't know how to deal with the sentence they'd given her.

She'd been shocked when the judge announced the sentence; she'd just assumed it would be straight life. Angel had been surprised, too, but for a different reason. He tried not to show it, but Faith had known he was upset at the length of the sentence. He'd thought prison was the first stage of her redemption, and then she'd be let out to try and make amends. She'd thought she'd be inside forever. Instead, she'd landed in the middle, and it felt like the worst option of the three. She could get out, but she'd be too old to do any good. And then they'd packed her off to Stockton, and she couldn't even talk to him about it anymore.

At least he was able to write to her. A new letter had arrived that morning, she could feel it now, tucked into her pocket, calling out to her to open it, but she held back. She always read his letters in her cell, and then wrote back at once, before she had a chance to close up again. It was a ritual, something special, and she wasn't going to share it with the world.

When Faith got back to her cell, Cat was already stretched out on the top bunk reading one of the library's 'educational' volumes.

Somehow, Faith had never expected to have a cellmate. It was stupid, she'd seen enough TV to know better, but when she'd pictured what life would be like in jail one of the biggest parts of it had been lying awake at night, alone in the darkness. The thought had frightened her more that she wanted to admit, but having someone else around all the time just made the place more claustrophobic.

It could have been worse, though. If the stories were true, at Valley State and CIW they were three to a cell this size, crammed in around a stainless steel toilet unit and storage rack for what possessions they were allowed. Another reason she was lucky to be at NCWF, she supposed. And the company could have been worse.

Until she entered the prison system, Catalina Marquez had probably been a pretty girl, but her time inside had knocked a lot of the shine off her. A rough, institutional haircut almost forced attention away from striking eyes, so dark they looked black except under the brightest light. A ragged scar ran up one arm, half-hidden by a string of crude tattoos. She wasn't big, a couple of inches shorter than Faith in fact, but she was stronger than she looked and made sure people saw her working out so they'd know it.

Behind the hard-ass mask, though, there was still something of the person she'd been before getting caught with just enough cocaine to be charged as a dealer. That person liked to talk, and had a knack for pulling jokes out of just about anything that happened in the jail. If she had to bunk with someone, Faith reflected, Cat was as good as she was likely to find.

Unfortunately, she seemed to have decided that getting Faith integrated was going to be her pet project.

"Yo, Beantown." Cat didn't look up from her book, but something like a smile flickered across her lips. "Saw you outside, making friends and influencing people again."

"Yeah, I'm getting that, but this place ain't exactly about what you like, you know? You got to start getting in with people if you want to make it in here."

"Hey, I'm just trying to help," Cat said, and this time the smile was obvious. She glanced at the envelope in Faith's hand. "Your friend in L.A.?"

I'm sorry this is such a short letter. Ever since we moved into the hotel we've been working like crazy to make the place liveable, and all the time we don't spend on that's going on cases. It seems like things are picking up speed out there – we've got a half-dozen cases going already and it seems like every time we close one, we open up two more. It bothers me that we haven't heard anything out of W&H for a while. They're planning something, I know they are.

At least we've got some help now. You remember me telling you about Gunn? He's helped us out on a few cases the last couple of months, and I think he might want to join up full-time. He's a good guy. I hope you'll get to meet him some day.

How are you holding up? Are you still getting the pain? I know you're tough but you can still get sick. Maybe you should see a doctor? Promise me you'll take care of yourself, okay?

I have to go now; I think Wes has a lead on this low-life we're after. I'll write again soon, and I promise I'll get up there as soon as I can.

Faith re-read the letter three times, savouring every curl and flourish of Angel's handwriting. The first time he wrote to her she'd been afraid that she'd never be able to read it, but she'd quickly come to love the flow of it. It seemed to belong to a different time, and just for a while it took her away from everything around her.

Finally, she put the letter down on the sheet beside her and picked up the cheap notepad and pen she'd been able to buy from the prison store.

I guess there's always something evil brewing in L.A., right? Good thing they've got you watching the place. I hope some of those gigs are the paying kind.

Things are going okay up here. I'm getting used to the place--it's not like I've got a choice, right?

Yeah, I'm still getting the aches most nights, but I can deal. The doc gave me a check-up the day I arrived and she said I'm fine--I wouldn't trust her to diagnose death, but I think she's right, I'm not sick. They put me in this murder rehab program, the shrink says sometimes guilt makes people feel pain. Maybe he's right? It mostly happens after lights out, which is kind of a bitch, but I can deal. Feeling like I've been through a fight's not so bad.

The food in here still sucks. I don't know what the hell they're putting in the meatloaf, but it tastes like something I hunted back in the day...

Giles stirred his tea while he tried to control the mixture of worry and disappointment he was feeling. If he was honest with himself, he should have known something was wrong when Buffy came to see him at his flat instead of the Magic Box, and now that she'd told him, he could feel the tension settling over them both. He took a sip of the tea to steady his nerves, and then set the cup down on the coffee table. "And how long have you been experiencing these...sensations?"

"I don't know," Buffy replied. She was sitting on the couch with her shoulders hunched and she wouldn't look him in the eye. "A couple of months...more, maybe."

"Months?" The angry exclamation came out before Giles could stop it. "Buffy, for goodness' sake..."

"I don't know!" She sounded almost helpless. "It's pain, Giles. I'm a Slayer, I get hit a lot, bits of me ache after. I can't go running to my Watcher just 'cause I've got a sore spot the next day."

"I know, I know, I just thought..." Buffy sighed and lowered her head again, her hair falling around her like a curtain. "I thought it was me. I hadn't been training, not really. I thought maybe things were just stiffening up and it'd get better after I started working out again."

She shook her head. "It doesn't happen often, and most of the time it doesn't even bother me. I mean, I ache more after fighting one lousy vamp."

"Yeah. I was at home with Mom and all of a sudden I just started to hurt. It was like I was getting hit, a lot, except I couldn't feel anything hitting me, it was just the pain."

"No," Buffy replied firmly. "She was downstairs, and I don't want her to find out, she's got enough to deal with right now."

"Yes, I understand." Giles took another sip of his tea. "Was this the first time it's been this bad?" She just looked away. "Buffy!"

"I'm sorry!" She thrust herself up off the couch and started pacing. "It was just a couple of times before, I thought it was over."

"All right, all right, there's no sense arguing over it." Giles gestured for her to sit down again while he tried to think. "What else can you tell about these pains? Are they always in the same place? Do they always occur at the same time of day?"

"Just about the only time it hasn't happened is at night," replied Buffy as she resumed her seat. Now that she'd got the admission out of the way some of the tension had lifted from her, and she was becoming more animated. "Places...with the little ones, I guess it's mainly stomach or back--just one or two spots each time, like I got jabbed with something, you know? The bad days, it's always the same. All along my arms, my shoulders and down my back, lots of places one after another. Any ideas?"

"Well, there are a number of mystical ways of inflicting pain on someone at a distance..."

"Yes, that would be one way, but I really can't see what anyone would hope to gain by it."

"Hello?" Buffy waved her hand in front of his face. "Slayer here, vanquisher of all things evil and slimy."

"Well, yes, obviously there are things that want to hurt you, but why like this? It hasn't happened when you've been in battle, and it's not having any lasting effect, so what's the purpose behind it? Why not keep you in constant pain?"

"My point is, Buffy, that if this is an attack it's more in the line of a nuisance than a threat." Giles drained his teacup. "I'll investigate of course, but at the moment I think there are other things we should be focusing our attention on."

"No." Buffy could see him about to object and hurried on. "Giles, I'm not trying to be Mysterio-Girl here. The more people who know, the more chance there is of Dawn or Mom finding out. I can't let that happen."

"Yes, I appreciate that, but with everything else going on at the moment I won't be able to find an answer very quickly on my own. Could we at least tell Willow and Tara, with their knowledge of magic..."

"Yeah, but Will sucks at lying and I'm not sure Tara even knows how." Buffy considered the idea for a few moments. "Okay, I'll talk to them tomorrow sometime if I get the chance." She got to her feet with a grateful smile on her face. "Thanks, Giles. I know I should have talked to you sooner."

Faith stopped trying to find a comfortable position to lie in when she heard Cat's drowsy groan and gave herself a mental kick. "Am I bugging you again?" she whispered. "It's these cheap-ass bunks, girl. You start squirming in the lobby, the penthouse gets shook up too."

Faith started to laugh and had to smother it so the guards wouldn't hear her. "You want to trade?"

The top bunk's springs creaked and Faith knew Cat had rolled onto her stomach so she could see out of their small, grimy window. "What view? It's just couple of hills and some trees."

"It's more than that, Beantown. It's outside." The way Cat said the word was almost reverential, as though she were naming something holy. "You've got to remember there's a world out there, someplace to go back to when you're done with this place."

"Okay, what's with you?" Another chorus of creaks from the upper bunk signalled Cat changing position. "The way you talk sometimes, it's like you want to be in here."

"What's the..." Faith hesitated as she heard booted footsteps coming along the landing. They stopped for a moment, one or two cells down, and then carried on. The guard passed in front of their cell, a darker shadow moving through the twilight of the cell block. Faith waited until she guessed the footsteps were a few cells away before she whispered again. "What's the big deal? So I'm not always dreaming about the day I walk out of here, who the hell cares?"

"I do. I can't figure you out, chica." Cat sounded confused, almost frustrated. "Some days you're cool, you talk to people, shoot some hoops, whatever. Other times you just go off walking circles round the yard and don't say nothing to no-one. People don't know where they are with you, it bugs them. That's how problems get going."

"I know, I've seen you. Not the point. In here, only two kinds of people get stuck on their own--victims and psychos. Anyone who's seen you throw down knows you ain't no victim, but people think you're loco, they start getting twitchy with you. Maybe they start thinking they need to deal with you before you go off on them? Maybe one of them gets lucky, maybe not, but either way you're getting in more fights, so you get more crap from the chotas. They start messing with you, searching you, tossing the cell, maybe take away that sweet-ass work duty you got..."

"Oh yeah, the laundry room," Faith replied sarcastically. "It's wicked awesome, with the noise and the bleach smell."

"Hey, you could be working the kitchen. You really want to know what you're eating?"

Just for a second Faith almost laughed, in spite of everything else Cat had been saying, but she realised that she couldn't bury her head in the sand any more. Although this was the first time Cat had said this outright, she'd been pushing the same point for weeks and ignoring it hadn't made it go away. "Cat, look, I get what you're trying to do, and it's not like I don't appreciate it, but you don't want to get close to me."

"'Cause I'm not a good person to get close to." Even now, making that admission hurt. "The last girl who tried to be my friend, before we were done she had to stick a knife in me."

"You don't know her, you can't..." Faith hesitated, lost for a way to explain how badly things had fallen apart in Sunnydale. "I did a lot of things she won't forgive, and making her do that's one of them."

"Outside's always complicated," said Cat. "Inside's simple. You need friends in here, people to watch your back and stop you going crazy."

"Hey!" A flashlight beam caught Faith square in the eyes and she almost hit her head on the wall recoiling from the glare. "Lights out means you keep your god-damn mouth shut and go to sleep."

She couldn't see anything beyond the light, but the voice was one Faith had come to loathe. "God, Hartson, take it easy."

"I'm sorry, what was that?" There was a faint suggestion of movement outside the cell, enough to have Faith picturing Hartson putting her hand to her nightstick. "You need something to help you sleep, Lehane?"

Bring it, bitch. A bitter tide of adrenaline poured through her, the desire to lash out and hurt someone. Faith tried to keep any of it from showing on her face, but knew she'd failed when she heard Hartson's harsh snort of a laugh. Very deliberately, she rolled over with her back to the cell door and pulled the covers up over her shoulder. She half-expected Hartson to come in and yank her out of her bunk, but the guard just let out one last snort, clicked off her flashlight and strolled on down the landing.

Neither prisoner moved or spoke for a while, but after a few minutes Faith became aware of stream of muttered comments coming from the top bunk. Her knowledge of Spanish didn't extend beyond ordering Mexican, but she'd been around Cat long enough to recognise at least some of the obscenities. Part of her wanted to ignore it and just go to sleep, then get up in the morning and pretend none of that night had happened, and yet something in her wouldn't let her lie still, and finally she whispered "Cat?"

A faint but still-infectious laugh floated down from the top bunk. "Just between you and me, I think that's the problem. No-one's sticking nothing up her anywhere." Faith buried her face in her pillow to smother her own laugh, and Cat whispered "That's more like it, Beantown. We good now?"

Springs creaked, and Cat's head appeared over the side of her bunk. "I'm people too, yeah?"

There was something about the other girl's determination that made Faith feel utterly helpless, and it almost worried her that she didn't seem to care. "Five by five."

Silence reigned for maybe a quarter of an hour, then the bunk shook. Cat groaned. "Not this again, Beantown..." When there was no response from the lower bunk, she lifted her head, halfway to looking over the edge again. "Beantown? Faith?"

"Sorry, I-I guess I must've been laying on my arm wrong. I'm good, I'll see you tomorrow."

Muttering to herself, Cat settled down again for the night. In the lower bunk, Faith lay with one hand clenched around the metal frame, knuckles white, while the other clutched at her stomach, trying to smother the sudden flare of pain.

"Stupid coma dreams," Faith muttered as she picked up her pile of freshly-laundered sheets and carried them over to the cart that would distribute them to the cells.

Cat had been right, for the most part. The laundry room wasn't top of the list of plum work assignments, but there were worse places. A lot of the other inmates who worked there hated it; it was hot and boring, and there wasn't much chance of stealing something that could be traded. Faith, on the other hand, had settled into a fairly contented groove. She didn't particularly like working there, but after a few weeks she found herself drifting through her shifts, lulled by the relentless hum of the washers until she could go for hours without thinking about anything. She'd finish a shift sweaty and tired, smelling of bleach and cheap detergent, but for a few hours she had some peace.

Except on the days when they washed the bedding. Being surrounded by piles of clean sheets, still warm from the dryers, always brought back that same image of making a bed with Buffy. The contrast was so stark it hurt, a quiet domestic illusion laid over the institutional toil, and the sheets sure as hell didn't smell like summer.

Faith gave herself a mental kick and told herself to snap out of it, knowing in her heart that it would be futile, and set off back to the dryers for another load. Along the way she had to get past one of the other prisoners, Kara, who was feeding a batch of blankets into one of the washers. The laundry room was neither roomy, nor well laid-out, and it was a tight squeeze getting by. How come teeny blondes always take up so much damn room?

The thought killed of any chance of her not thinking about Buffy, and the glare she fixed on the dryer as she began hauling out sheets should have stripped the flaking paint right off the metal.

She couldn't put her finger on what gave her the warning; a glint of metal reflected in the dryer, a footstep behind her, an intake of breath...something so subtle it didn't even register consciously, but enough for her instincts to pick up on. She twisted out of the way before she knew what she was doing, and the shank did nothing more than score a line down the dryer's casing.

"We got a beef, Rayna?" Faith asked as her attacker recovered her balance. "'Cause I don't remember getting in your face about anything."

"Shut your mouth, whore!" Rayna snarled as she lunged again with the shank, more a metal spike than a blade, aiming for the pit of Faith's stomach. Faith dodged back a step, braced herself and snapped a kick into Rayna's chest that dumped her on the ground.

The rest of the laundry crew were clustering around them, some of them openly enjoying the unscheduled entertainment, others watching anxiously for the inevitable guards, most just part of the crowd. Faith glanced at the door, hoping the guards would be there, but there was no sign of them yet and Rayna was getting to her feet again. "You sure you want to do this, Ray?"

Everything Faith said just seemed to stoke Rayna's fury. Teeth bared, eyes wide and fixed, she attacked again, striking for the face this time. The guards were still nowhere in sight and Faith's patience snapped. She caught hold of Rayna's wrist and shoved it upward, sending the thrust over her head, while she stepped into the attack and crunched her elbow into Rayna's face. The other woman stumbled back a pace but wouldn't give up, trying to pull her arm from Faith's grip. Faith stepped to the side and swung her around until she was pinned face-down over a washer. "Drop it, Ray!"

Rayna tried to kick her away. Faith pressed her down on the washer and started to force her arm upward behind her, until finally the shoulder dislocated. Rayna cried out in pain and the shank dropped from her fingers. Faith let her go and she slumped to the floor, cradling her arm.

Half a dozen guards pushed their way through the crowd, Hartson in their midst. Her nightstick was already out, and as soon as she saw Faith her face twisted into a cruel sneer. She jabbed her nightstick toward Rayna. "Get her out of here."

Two of the guards picked her up and carried her off. One of the others picked up the shank, a few strands of steel wire twisted together and attached to a bit of wood for a handle. He looked it over with distaste for a moment, and then handed it to Hartson. She took it wordlessly and nodded toward the other prisoners, and the guard began hustling them out. "Okay, show's over, back to your cells, we've got a count in fifteen..."

Faith started to follow them, but Hartson's nightstick barred her way. "Not you, Lehane, you and me are going to have a little talk."

Hartson rammed the point of her nightstick into Faith's stomach. Faith grunted in pain but stayed upright as Hartson leaned in close. "Seems like a lot of people come after you, Lehane. I guess you're just not good at getting along with people, huh? Well I've got a newsflash for you, girl: I don't care how socially challenged you are. My job's to keep this place running smooth so everyone in the real world can forget you punk-ass bitches even exist. If you can't learn to keep your head down in here, my job gets harder and that's a problem for me, so I'm going to be on your ass every day until you figure it out. Got me?"

Faith's punch knocked her into the bank of dryers, and the second blow sent her to her knees. Hartson tried to strike back, flailing with her nightstick, but Faith just caught it and ripped it from her grasp. A second later the nightstick crashed across Hartson's jaw, spilling blood and broken teeth onto the floor. She started to scream, her ruined mouth warping the sound into a gurgling wail, punctuated by wet thuds as Faith bludgeoned her head, the skull crunching under each blow--

"Hey!" Hartson snapped her fingers in front of Faith's eyes. "I'm sorry, Lehane, am I boring you?"

Bile scorched a trail up Faith's throat, and as she forced it back down she tried to send the image of Hartson's shattered skull with it. Hartson's eyes began to turn angry at her lack of response, and she hurriedly shook her head, not trusting herself to speak. Hartson gave her one last, contemptuous look and dismissed her.

The intensity of Faith's vision frightened her, as did the seething pit of anger Hartson had cracked open. She knew she was a long way from being healthy, but she'd thought she was further along than that. Something about the way Hartson looked at her seemed to make her blood catch fire, and once the count was over she just wanted to hide in her cell and wait for it to stop. Only a couple of months previously, that's exactly what she would have done. Instead, after a few minutes she went looking for Cat.

The day room always reminded her of an under-funded hospital, with its white walls and tiled floor. Even the bare steel tables bolted to the floor had a vaguely medical feel to them. Cat was sitting at a table in the corner, playing chess with one of her friends. She looked up and smiled when Faith pulled up a chair next to them. "Yo Beantown, how's it hanging? Want to play the winner?"

"How about I play the loser, I might stand a chance that way," Faith replied with a hint of a laugh in her voice. Cat had been right; getting involved with people had been good for her, and Cat in particular always improved her mood. She nodded to Cat's opponent. "Hey, Michele."

Michele's dark eyes glanced up from the board for a second, then she reached out a hand the colour of chocolate syrup and moved her bishop out of harm's way. "Hey yourself, girlfriend. Word is you had a little dance with Rayna, that right?"

"Yeah, she's cool but she's kind of slow sometimes." With a gentle shake of her head at Faith's cluelessness, Cat explained "It's about Kara."

"Uh-huh. And Rayna's been wanting a piece of her skinny white ass for months, so she ain't pleased about it."

"Okay, hold up a second," Faith said, trying to get a handle on it. "Kara's gay? And Rayna's gay?"

"Gay for the stay, girl. People get lonely." Michele shrugged. "You seriously didn't know?" Faith just shook her head. "Well, she's a nice-looking girl, you ought to think about it."

"Sorry, I guess I'm not that lonely yet. And if I was, I sure as hell wouldn't do it with some little blonde chick."

A pair of guards came into the day room, one of them carrying a mail bag. Nearly all the prisoners perked up, listening to the names being called out, hoping theirs would be among them. Faith tried to ignore the whole thing, but after every name that wasn't hers, her eyes half-closed for a moment, just enough for Cat to notice. When the guards reached the end of the list, she whispered "Sorry, Beantown."

"Hey, don't get like that, chica. Guys who write you every week don't just stop. You tried calling?"

"Three times." Faith glanced at Michele, who was taking a sudden and intense interest in the state of the chessboard. "No-one's picking up."

"So maybe no-one's home? Maybe your guy had to blow town for a while," Cat said, trying to sound positive. "He's your friend, he'll be back."

Faith was leaving the cafeteria after evening chow--no-one who had eaten Stockton's attempt at spaghetti would dignify it with the word 'dinner'--when one of the guards called her over. She tried to act cool, but inside she tensed up, trying to figure out why she'd been singled out. The usual random harassment or something more deliberate? She hadn't broken any rules that she knew off, but that didn't mean that someone couldn't drop a word in a guard's ear suggesting she had, just to mess with her. When the guard told her what he wanted, though, her heart skipped a beat. "You've got a visitor."

All the way over to the reception block, she tried to convince herself that it wasn't him, that he wouldn't come to see her out of the blue after weeks of silence, but she couldn't dissuade herself. Who else could it be? The only other person from the outside who had any contact with her at all was her lawyer, and when he turned up they always told her. And why would her lawyer come on a Saturday, especially this late in the day?

Even so, when she entered the visiting room and saw Angel on the other side of the glass, she almost missed a step. Old instincts welled up inside her, and she slapped a mask of indifference over her anger and sadness as she sat down opposite him and picked up the phone. "Angel. I was starting to think one of the bad guys got you."

"Faith..." He was having a hard time looking her in the eye, and when she did catch his gaze she saw something in it that she needed a minute to recognise. She'd seen a lot of things in him before; anger, joy, sadness, disappointment, depression, fear, even hatred. She'd never seen shame. "Faith, I'm sorry."

"Okay, you've got my attention." She sat back in her chair, her eyes still cold. "What happened?"

"I stepped off the road," he said. "Something happened, and I got so caught up with beating the bad guys that I forgot why we're the good guys. I made some bad choices, I did things...some of them were bad, others were just really, really stupid."

"You didn't..." Faith hesitated, trying to think of a way to put it that others wouldn't understand. "You didn't eat out, right?"

"No, I didn't eat out." Angel almost laughed, just for a second, and then his face darkened again. "People died. I didn't kill them, and they weren't good people, but they died and it was my fault. My choices."

Faith didn't know what to say. He'd kept his voice calm, quiet, barely audible to anyone else in the room. If they couldn't make out the words, they'd have thought he was talking about the weather or traffic. The real message wasn't in what he said, or even the way he said it; it was in the way he looked at her. She could see the new shadows behind his eyes, the pain he felt over what he'd done and the feeling that he'd somehow let her down, not by abandoning her but by failing to be the person she needed him to be. It threw her, the sudden realisation that her paragon, the one she held up as an example of what she needed to do, could stumble. "So what happens now?"

"Start again, I guess, try to fix things with the people I care about." He looked away for a moment. "That's part of why I'm here."

"I got your letters, and I did like you asked, or at least I started. I didn't get far on my own, and you didn't want me to ask Wes, but I think I might know what it is."

"I need to ask you something first. Late October, you said it got really bad one night, like you were being stabbed."

"Yeah. I went to the doc about it, bitch said it was just indigestion, but you know I know what getting stabbed feels like."

"Buffy got stabbed there, around the same time. When she said it, I thought it might be coincidence, but now you're telling me it you felt it in exactly the same place. I think maybe--"

Faith angrily cut him off. "Hold up, you talked to B about this?" The idea that Buffy knew she was suffering lit a fire inside her.

"I had to go Sunnydale and we just talked, about a lot of things. She doesn't know about you."

Annoyed with herself for getting so wound up about it, Faith tried to pretend she hadn't even said anything. "So, what, you think when B gets hurt I get the pain? You're getting that from one sore gut?"

"It's not just that, Faith. You said it usually feels like you've been in a fight, with something stronger than human. It mostly happens at night, and then it fades the next day. Patrol, fight, heal in the morning, I know the schedule."

"Right," Faith said grudgingly. Can't even get away from her in here. "Any idea how it happened?"

"I don't know. Magic, probably, but that's a lot of ground to cover and I'm not exactly an expert." Angel shrugged helplessly. "Do you want me to tell her?"

"If it goes both ways, they already know and they're figuring out a way to stop it. If not...I don't want them to know, I don't need their help." She was speaking more quickly than she wanted to, she almost sounded desperate. She made herself take a breath and slow down. "Look, Angel, I dig that you want to protect B, but it'll be okay. I've got enough of a rep now that the girls don't bother me, and I can play nice with the guards. B won't get anything from me, I promise."

"I'm not loving it either, but life's not perfect, right? If it was, I'd be out there earning my aches for real." She leaned forward, resting her arms on the bench between them, and tried to take things in a more cheerful direction. "So what else is going on in L.A.? And how come you're making trips to Sunnydale, I thought you were a city boy now?" A flicker of sadness passed over Angel's face. "Uh-oh, that's not the happy look. I'm guessing you didn't just go to catch up?"

They talked for a while after that, but it all felt hazy and unreal, and as soon as Angel was gone Faith found that she couldn't remember a word of it. She followed the guard back to her cell block without even being aware of where she was going, and it wasn't until she was turned loose in the block that she started to think again.

The cells were almost deserted, most of the prisoners eking out the last bit of time in the day room before lock-up, but Faith felt no inclination to join them. She went straight to her cell and lay down on her bunk, trying to process what Angel had told her and the way it had made her feel. A cigarette appeared in her hand without her even thinking about it, the coils of smoke burning in lungs that weren't used to it.

Joyce is dead. Every time she said the words in her mind she rejected the idea. Joyce was supposed to be permanent, the simple, caring background to everything that happened in Sunnydale. She didn't go out on patrol, she didn't fight, she wasn't involved in the death and mayhem that bubbled under the surface, and if something did try to hurt her it was inevitable that Buffy would come to the rescue.

Except Buffy could only save her from monsters. The idea of a natural death in Sunnydale was almost perverse, and for someone in Buffy's circle it was unthinkable, but it was true. After all the battles, all the pain and heartache, the real world had done what no demon had ever accomplished. Faith tried to imagine Buffy without her mother's reassuring presence behind her, and it hurt her more than she could ever have thought possible. And Dawn...

She was still lying there when Cat came back to the cell at lock-up. "Hey, Beantown, where'd you get to?"

The sound of locks clunking into place echoed through the cell block. Guards marched past the cells, taking the final count of the day. Faith got to her feet and answered her name, then went back to sit on her bunk.

As the last sounds of lock-up faded, the bunk creaked and Faith felt Cat's arm slip around her shoulders. She stiffened for a moment, ready to pull away, but the old instinct drowned under the tide of unexpected grief. Cat held her for a moment, and then whispered "You need to talk?"

Faith tapped her head. "Tumour, in here. They cut it out, and she was fine for weeks, and then...pop! She's gone before you can blink."

Faith let out a brief, bitter laugh. "Not exactly." She turned to look at her friend for the first time and saw the question on her face. "It's complicated. She was a good person. It's not right, Cat, this shouldn't have happened to her."

"I'm sorry, amiga. Sounds like there's a lot of people that's going to miss her."

"Yeah. Yeah, a lot." Faith tried to crush the tears she felt gathering, but only succeeded in spilling them down her cheeks. "God, look at me, my rep's going to be in the tank after this."

"It's just you and me, chica. No-one's going to know." Cat's voice was soft as she brushed a tear away with her thumb. The touch, like a caress on her skin, made Faith raise her eyes until they locked with her friend's. They froze there for a moment, so close they could feel the heat from each other's skin, then Faith suddenly pulled back, just enough to break the contact.

Cat turned away, not fast enough to hide the flare of red on her cheeks, and made a show of examining her thumb. "Good thing about being in here, no make-up to get all messed up."

"No, it's cool, you're not into it." Cat stood up, composing herself again. "I just thought maybe you didn't want to be on your own tonight. Maybe you got someone on the outside waiting for you, I don't know."

"You're not into it. It's cool, no drama." Cat swung herself up onto her bunk and out of sight. "Sleep tight, Beantown, catch you for the oat bran."

"Night, Cat." Faith curled up on her own bunk and wondered if she'd really heard the quiver in Cat's voice.

As soon as Giles asked Buffy to meet him at his apartment rather than the Magic Box, she knew that whatever he wanted to talk about had to be serious, and when she arrived and found Willow and Tara already there, the list of possibilities dropped fast.

"Hey, guys," she said as Giles let her in. "I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess this is about my little achy-breaky problem?" She caught sight of what was on the coffee table. "Uh-oh, tea and cookies already? I'm not going to like this, am I?"

"Erm, yes," Giles said. He sounded nervous. "We did want to talk to you about the pains. Please, sit. How have they been lately?"

Buffy took the vacant spot on the end of the couch, beside the witches. "Better than before. Bump here, bang there, nothing major. I haven't had one of the bad ones since, what, January?"

"Good, good, that might perhaps indicate that the effect is fading." Giles settled himself in his armchair. "We believe we've identified the cause."

When he didn't say anything more, Buffy said "So, how are we going to do this? Charades? Pictionary? Twenty questions? Is it bigger than a breadbox? Giles, what am I dealing with here?"

"Well, it isn't Glory, or the Knights of Byzantium, or--" Buffy arched an eyebrow at him. "I'm afraid it was us."

"Us?" Buffy repeated. "Okay, in that case I think I'll start with the 'gee, thanks' and then move onto the 'huh?'"

"Buffy, you're one of the 'us'," Willow said, very quietly. "You, me, Giles and Xander. We did this."

"Did what? Will, what are we talking..." A switch clicked in Buffy's brain. "That spell we did to fight Adam?"

Willow glanced at Tara before she began. "Buffy, we checked everything we can think of before we got to this. We did detection spells, we checked your aura, researched every way we could find to cause pain at a distance. We had nothing, and then Tara suggested looking at the enjoining spell again."

"The spell called on your connection to the source of the Slayer's power, so the others could become a part of it and lend you their abilities," Tara explained. "It also let you draw a lot more power into yourself, made you stronger than a normal Slayer would be. Everyone assumed your connection would go back to normal after the spell ended, but I don't think it did. It's not the supercharged version, but it's stronger than it was."

Giles agreed. "You have seemed somewhat stronger in recent months, Buffy. And you have been feeling a more...shall we say a more primal hunting instinct?"

"And there I was thinking all my workouts were paying off," Buffy said with a scowl. "Okay, so I'm jacked in more than I was. Where does the pain fit? Is this Captain Cavegirl punishing me for taking the big slice of the pie? 'Cause if it is, she's really off her game."

Willow shook her head. "That's not it, Buffy. We had to do some really in-depth divinations to figure this out. The pain's not coming from the source of your power, it's more sort of echoing through it to you."

"Echoing from where?" Buffy asked, worried by the look on her friend's face. "This is the part I'm not going to like, isn't it?"

"You're..." Willow stopped and made herself look her friend in the face. "Buffy, you're not the only one with a connection to that power."

"Faith." The name tasted like ashes in Buffy's mouth. "God, she's in jail and I still can't get her out of my life! Why pain? Why couldn't she just share her boredom with me, my whole life's a cure for boredom." She jumped to her feet and started pacing around the living room. "Is it just me, or does it go both ways?"

"God, I hope so," Buffy muttered. She looked down at her hands, turning them over, trying to imagine someone else feeling what she felt, then she took a pencil from Giles' desk and dug the point into her palm. "Shouldn't it hurt less, if she's sharing it?" She glanced up, saw the others staring at her, and turned away for a moment. "Okay, I've got a hotline to Faith's house of pain, how do we cut the cable?"

"Wrong answer, Giles," she snapped. "I've got a crazy hellgod running all over town looking for my kid sister, who's trying to get herself kicked out of school, the spirit guides who were supposed to help me say death is my gift, a neutered vampire thinks he's in love with me and , oh yeah, my mom just died! I can't deal with any more crap from my evil twin right now!"

"Buffy, I know that this is difficult, but you said yourself that the...attacks have dwindled almost to nothing."

"Yeah, so far. What happens tomorrow? What if she gets a knife in the back, or mouths off to the guards, or passes the soap the wrong way? What if it happens when I'm toe-to-toe with Glory? I can't afford that kind of distraction, not now."

"I appreciate the potential danger, Buffy, but I'm afraid there may not be anything we can do. This is a part of your connection to the source of your power. It may not be possible to end this link to Faith without severing that connection, and the only way I know of to do that is death, so unless you're suggesting we kill Faith..."

"Don't tempt me," Buffy growled, but they could all see she was just venting. "So what am I supposed to do?"

"For the moment, just be aware of what could happen and try to be ready for it," Giles said. "In the meantime, perhaps we should contact Faith and see if the link does flow both ways."

"No," Buffy said flatly. "I don't care how repenty Angel says she is, I'm not telling her she's got an all-access pass to my nervous system. It's not like she can do anything useful, anyway."

"True. Buffy, if it makes you feel any better, if the link really is two-way, she'll be suffering a great deal more than you."

As if in mockery of her wish, a fresh burst of pain flared in Faith's arm, just below the elbow, adding to a collection of aches that had accumulated over the previous day. As much as she didn't want to care, part of her wondered what had caused it all. She'd felt the effects of two separate fights during daylight, that alone was something new, and then a third, brief but painful, in the middle of the night. And now this, whatever the hell this was, at whatever unholy hour of the night it was happening.

Faith tried to open her eyes, but they felt like they'd been filled with sand and glued shut. When she finally did manage to force one eyelid open, she groaned. Enough light made it through the window to tell her that dawn was breaking, but at this time of year that meant wake-up time wasn't going to be for a while yet. Damn, B, when did you turn into a morning person. This thing couldn't wait a half hour?

Fatigue was already clawing at her, but she knew that if she let herself fall asleep again this late, she'd feel even worse when she had to get up for real. The question was, would her body give her a say in the matter? She hadn't slept properly since Angel's visit. Before, when she'd thought the pain was something random, she'd been able to live with it, hiding it during the day and ignoring it as best she could at night. If it came, it came, and if it woke her, it woke her, she'd be cranky the next day but she could deal with it. Now, everything was different. As insane as Angel's theory was, it fitted too well for her not to believe it, and that had messed with her head until she wouldn't let herself sleep, not until she was sure that she wouldn't wake up feeling the echoes of another fight. She rarely got more than four hours sleep a night any more; nothing a Slayer couldn't handle for a few nights, maybe even a couple of weeks, but whatever the limit was, she was past it now and the handful of catnaps she was able to snatch by day didn't come close to making up for it.

A new wave of pain rippled from her face all the way down her front. It felt like she'd been flung unto a wall hard enough to knock the wind out of her, and she had to clench her teeth and grip the frame of her bunk to stop herself moving. The morning was going badly enough, the last thing she wanted to do was wake Cat up early. Nothing had been quite the same between them since the night Angel visited. Cat had tried to pass the whole thing off as just friendly comforting, and for a while Faith had been willing to accept that; since Michele explained the Rayna-Kara incident to her, she'd been looking more closely at the other inmates and she'd detected a number of relationships, and a good deal more casual 'comforting' going on. If Cat said that was all she was doing, Faith wasn't going to call her a liar, and she felt a little guilty about how abruptly she'd turned down the offer.

As the days went by, though, she'd started to doubt what Cat was telling her. Something was different; a slight hesitation in Cat's voice when they talked, a hurt look in her eyes when she thought Faith wasn't looking. Once, when she was lying awake waiting to be sure that Buffy wasn't going to get into a fight, Faith thought she overheard Cat crying in the darkness. She didn't know how to respond to any of it, and as lack of sleep eroded her self-control she started to fear what she might say or do, so she started trying to avoid her cellmate when she could.

Every nerve in her body ignited at once, the agony so sudden and overwhelming that it paralysed her, pinned her to her bunk, eyes wide and staring into nothing, hands clutching at the sheets, unable to even scream. And when it ended, after a few endless seconds, the emptiness it left behind threatened to swallow her whole.

She barely registered anything that happened on the first day. When she looked back on it later, she got flashes of events--eating breakfast in the cafeteria, Cat trying to talk to her, two girls throwing down in the yard--but none of it felt entirely real, as though it was something she'd read about or seen on T.V., not something she'd lived. She couldn't think, couldn't even feel, until she woke in the middle of the night lying on a pillow wet with tears.

On the second day, Cat caught up to her as she wandered aimlessly around the yard. "What the hell's with you, Beantown? You been like a zombie."

"Come on, chica, we're friends, yeah?" Cat glanced around, making sure no-one was close enough to overhear, but everyone else was too busy doing their own thing to bother them. Even so, she kept her voice down. "Look, people are talking. Rayna, Deb, some of the others, they think you're losing it here. You got to snap out of it, like now."

"Just leave me alone, Cat." Faith stepped away, opening a gap between them. Cat reached out and tried to pull her back, but Faith turned on her, snarling. "I said leave me alone!"

For a second Cat just stared at her, the shocked look on her face giving way to distress, then she shook her head and turned away. "Vaya con dios, amiga." She walked away and didn't look back.

With her went Faith's one connection to the rest of their enclosed world. All the prisoners Faith knew through Cat took a step away, leaving her in her own little bubble. She started to notice the looks she was getting from some of the prisoners, the furtive glances and whispered conversations that stopped when she came close. Even the guards started taking more notice of her, as though they knew something was going to happen to her. Some part of her recognised it all, but the hole inside her ached so much that she couldn't bring herself to care.

It might have been a week later--she'd stopped keeping track of the days--when one of the guards called her out of the day room and led her from the cell block. She followed him automatically, not even wondering where she was going, until she walked into the visiting room and saw the man waiting on the other side of the glass.

His hair was greyer than she remembered and looked like it hadn't been brushed for days. His eyes were red from lack of sleep. More than that, he looked hollow, as though the core he'd built his life around had been taken from him. Just for a second, Faith wondered if she looked as bad as him, and the thought lit a spark of pride in her. Not self-respect, it was the old, cheap pride that refused to let anyone see her suffering. She straightened up, squaring her shoulders as she took the chair opposite him and picked up the phone. "Giles."

He looked at her for a moment, considering a reply, then decided it would be better to just move on. "There's something you need to know. A few days ago--"

Her voice was completely flat and emotionless, but he flinched as though she'd struck him. "So the link does go both ways."

"We discussed telling you, and we concluded that it wouldn't accomplish anything. There was nothing you could do, and--"

She cut him off again. "B figured if I knew, I'd start pulling out my fingernails to get at her."

Faith leaned forward, elbows on the desk, staring aggressively through the glass. "Got a little update for you, Rupert: I'm over her. I'm over all of you, the Sunnydale scene, put the whole damn thing in my rear-view. You guys are the ones holding the bygones."

"Oh sure, and you guys were all waiting by the phone, just dying to hear my voice again."

Anger flared behind his eyes, but he shook it off and said quietly "Faith, I didn't come here to fight with you."

"Sure, you're just here to spread the word." Faith hesitated, not wanting to ask the question that had burned in her mind for days. "It was something big, right? No way she went down to some random vamp."

"Same old, same old." She felt tears forming again and ploughed on, hoping to distract herself. "You talked to Angel?"

"Willow went to tell him. I understand he's gone away for a while, a spiritual retreat somewhere."

She felt a brief surge of anger that he'd left without telling her, and hated herself for being so selfish. "I guess he took it hard," she said quietly. "So how come you're taking a day to play messenger, Giles? Shouldn't you be breaking in the new girl?"

"That's got to be a mistake," she insisted. "Come on, we both know how this works. Soon as one of us kicks it, some girl gets a boatload of nightmares and starts opening beer bottles with her pinkie. You just haven't found her yet. You guys missed Buffy for years."

"Missing a potential Slayer is one thing, Faith," Giles said. "As careful as the Council is, it does happen, probably more than we think. Missing a new Slayer is something else entirely; there are signs, mystical indicators. When...when Buffy was called, they knew she was in Los Angeles within hours. I'm sorry, Faith, it's just you now."

They're going to kill me. Faith's head slumped as the thought ran through her mind. Part of her was terrified, another part welcomed it, and as she tried to reconcile the two she almost missed what Giles said next.

He lowered his voice, making sure no-one could overhear him. "It's time to come home."

"...no..." The denial wasn't so much spoken as released on her breath, an instinctive rejection of the idea of her leaving.

Maybe he didn't hear her, maybe he was ignoring her, but when he spoke it sounded like he was repeating a message verbatim. "The Council have informed me that they are arranging to have you extradited to Britain, where you will be removed to their custody."

"Subject to the results of a new evaluation, and following completion of any necessary rehabilitation and retraining, you are to be returned to active duty under a Watcher to be determined at a later date, with your primary responsibility being--"

"No!" She flung herself back from the desk, overturning her chair as she scrambled away from him. She yelled through the glass "You tell them to stay the hell away from me!"

She snatched up the phone again. "They come anywhere near me, I'll kill them all, you got that?" She flung it down and stormed away. The guard at the door opened it before she arrived, and she never broke stride, leaving Giles staring uselessly at her back.

She couldn't escape, though. By the time she was back in the cell block, walking into the day room, her blood was pounding in her ears and her chest felt like it would explode. It was as though seeing him had brought everything into focus; the rage, the pain, the hopelessness was all poured into a voice that screamed in the back of her mind.

She almost fell onto a chair at one of the tables, clutching her head. "Stop it, stop it, please..."

Someone nearby whispered "Hey, check it, looks like she's cracking." Faith glanced up and saw a group of prisoners standing a few yards away, staring at her. She didn't even register their faces, only the contemptuous smirks and the condescension in their voices, and something inside her broke.

She grabbed hold of the edge of the table and flung it aside, the bolts that had held it in place torn free or sheared off. Shouts of surprise and alarm echoed through the room, but she didn't even hear them as she leapt at the woman who'd whispered and knocked her to the floor. The rest of the gang scattered in all directions as Faith began raining blows on her victim.

She never remembered when she started to scream. She never remembered how many punches she threw, how often she slammed the girl's head against the floor with the force of her blows. It might have been two, or five, or ten before boots pounded on the floor, and then someone hooked a nightstick around her throat and dragged her off. She struggled for a moment, then she just covered her head and let them do what they wanted to her, the pain meaningless now that it was hers alone.

Someone hit her in the stomach and she crumpled to the floor. A boot struck her low in the back, and she heard Hartson's voice. "Get the bitch into the Hole, now! And tell the doc to get a blood sample, I want to know what the hell she's on."

They shackled her hands behind her back and dragged her away. They tossed her into a tiny cell and slammed the door behind her. As they walked away, Faith curled up on the floor with her arms around her head, and wept.

Eddie Rhodes had been in the job long enough to know the rules. Not the regs, the endless stream of minutiae spewed out by the Department to make his job harder; the Rules, the simple, unspoken maxims that told people like him how to keep a lid on things in a place where most of the inmates would happily stick each other for a packet of smokes. There was no rulebook, no official list you could learn from, you either picked them up on the job or you found another job. Somewhere high up on every guard's list was 'Never get invested in a convict, because the handful that pay you back won't make up for the dozens that let you down.'

He knew the rules as well as anyone, but sometimes he just couldn't follow them. And so, when the phone rang on the fourth day of his month's duty watching over the Hole and one of his colleagues announced "430019 coming down," he couldn't stop himself feeling a pang of sadness.

They hadn't even bothered to avoid her face when they beat her this time. Her cheek was covered by a livid bruise that could only have come from something like a nightstick. Dried blood stained the front of her shirt; her face had been cleaned up a bit, but traces of blood still clung to her nose and he was amazed that it wasn't broken. There had to be more bruising hidden under her clothes, but there was no sign of pain in the way she walked. Even with her hands cuffed behind her back and her legs shackled, her movements flowed easily, as though nothing in the world could touch her. Maybe it couldn't, he thought as he looked into her dark, empty eyes. Maybe there was nothing left to touch.

Prisoner 430019 Lehane, Faith stopped in front of an empty cell while her escort removed the shackles from her legs, then stepped inside for them to close the door and remove the cuffs. She didn't make a sound throughout the procedure, and once she was locked in she just sat down with her back to the wall, staring into nothing.

Rhodes took one of the guards aside when the others left. "Hey, Grodin, what did she do this time?"

"Threw down with three of Carter's crew, right in the middle of the damn yard," Grodin replied. "Sanchez got a busted arm, Regan lost some teeth before we could get in there. The girl's lost it, man."

"She hurt any of our people?" Rhodes asked, and when Grodin shook his head he continued, "So how come she got wailed on so bad?"

"'Cause she's a psycho, Eddie! She's been going off on people for months, you know it. What the hell were we supposed to do? Hartson's gone to the Warden, wants to get her tossed in the psych unit."

"Yeah, like they've got a spare bunk over there," Rhodes muttered in disgust. "You got the paperwork on this?"

Faith was aware of them talking about her, but nothing they were saying made any impression on her. The moment the cell door locked behind her, she began pulling back into herself, everything beyond her skin fading away until the only thing that was entirely real to her was the grief.

It was so intense, so bound up with rage and guilt that at first she barely knew what she was feeling, but the truth had been laid bare at last. How could she not have known? There hadn't been a day that went by when she hadn't thought about Buffy, and yet somehow she'd deluded herself that she didn't care. That fiction hadn't survived her first stint in solitary, the endless hours confined to a tiny cell had left her with no refuge from her thoughts, and one by one the lies she told herself had been peeled away. All those nights when she'd lain awake, she hadn't been waiting until she was sure there would be no more pain. She couldn't let herself sleep until she was sure Buffy was safe for one more night. But now there would be no more silent vigils in the darkness, no more waiting. There was only the grief, and even as it dragged her down Faith clutched at it, because it was the only piece of Buffy she had left.

Rhodes leaned back in his chair with a groan, closed his eyes and started to massage his temples. Staring at the cheap computer screens in the prison always gave him a headache, but it was the only way he could review an inmate's records while he was on duty. Of course, in this case, at least half the headache came from trying to make sense of what he was reading in Lehane's file.

It wasn't close to the first time he'd read the file. Rhodes made a point of reading up on every new arrival, and over the years he'd become quite adept at spotting potential problems just from the paperwork. Lehane's file had struck him as unusual from the start. How did a teenage girl from South Boston end up in a small California town called Sunnydale? The local police had considered her a suspect in a back-street murder--of the town's deputy mayor, no less--along with a local high school girl who had briefly been the prime suspect in another murder the previous summer. Lehane's name was mentioned in connection with yet another murder, a geology professor, but before that investigation could even get off the ground she'd turned up in the local hospital, comatose, with a stab wound in her abdomen, and her doctors had told the local PD she wasn't going to wake up. Both cases went to sleep for eight months, then out of the blue Lehane got out of her hospital bed, beat up a girl who'd got lost in the building, stole her clothes and walked out like she'd just woken from a nap. The next night, she attacked the high school girl, now a college student, at her home and was knocked unconscious. The police arrested her, but she was snatched from a squad car by persons unknown. About a week later she surfaced in Los Angeles, committed a string of assaults and robberies, then for no apparent reason she walked into an LAPD precinct and confessed to both murders, although she refused to say anything about why she'd killed either man. According to the file, there had been enough indications of premeditation in the professor's killing to make a case for Murder One, but Lehane's public defender had used the confession to bargain the D.A. down to Murder Two.

The whole story had made Rhodes curious the first time he read it. Why had she confessed? Pleading guilty in exchange for a lesser charge or shorter sentence was one thing, freely walking into a police station and confessing without even seeing a lawyer was something else entirely. Rhodes had seen exactly one case like it, and that time the prisoner had slit her wrists less than a month into her sentence, so he'd kept a special eye on Lehane from the start.

If her file had puzzled him, her behaviour at NCWF was almost baffling. A prisoner as tough as her could have ruled the whole cell block, but she'd kept everyone at arm's length for months, and when she did start to get involved with the other prisoners it was all done through her cellmate, Marquez.

Rhodes had reviewed the file a couple of times over the winter, trying to find some clue as to why Lehane acted the way she did, but he'd come up blank. Her disciplinary record was good; a rep like hers inevitably attracted occasional challenges, but no-one had ever caught her starting a fight and she'd never raised her hand to a guard, no matter what they did to her. The psychiatrist's reports were filled with the clichés--anger-management issues, poor impulse control, low self-esteem. The only thing that stood out was her absolute reluctance to talk about what happened in Sunnydale and L.A.

When spring arrived, Rhodes had decided to drop the matter. He still didn't get her, but she didn't cause trouble and it seemed as though the other prisoners were becoming reluctant to start anything when she was around, so he concluded it was better to stop looking that gift horse in the mouth and leave well alone.

Then she'd had that visitor, the middle-aged Englishman. No-one knew exactly what he'd said to her, but it had knocked her completely off her feet and she hadn't been the same since. First she'd beaten Rayna Mitchell so badly that Mitchell had to be transported to Manteca hospital to have her jaw wired back together, and only a couple of days after getting out of the Hole for that attack, she'd sent two more prisoners to the infirmary. That had set the pattern for the summer. Rhodes wasn't sure what bothered him the most, the sudden bursts of violence or the way Lehane acted once she was back in solitary. Different people dealt with solitary in different ways; some kept as active as they could, others withdrew into themselves, but he'd never seen anyone shut down as much as she did. Rhodes had gone over the file again half a dozen times since it all started, trying to figure it out, but it made even less sense than ever.

It was after eleven when he went down to the Hole to check on the prisoners. The other three were all in their bunks, either asleep or faking it. He wasn't surprised that Lehane's bunk was empty, though; sometime during her second stint in the Hole she'd taken to sleeping curled up on the concrete floor of her cell, without even pulling the covers down over herself, and after a few days the guards had given up trying to stop her. Some days, she barely even moved from that position, not even to eat. The bunk hadn't been touched in the week since she arrived for her latest stretch.

Tonight, though, she wasn't asleep, she was sitting up against the wall, staring into the gloom with that horrible empty look in her eyes. Rhodes stopped outside the cell and watched her for a minute. If she knew he was there, she didn't give any sign of it.

"What's got into you, kid?" Rhodes whispered, more to himself than her. "You've been in and out of this place for months. You keep this up, someone's going to kill you, or Hartson's going to dump you on psych and they'll keep you so doped up you might as well be dead."

"Doesn't matter, Eddie." The sound of her voice made him jump, they were the first words he'd heard from her all week. She turned her head a little, not quite enough to face him, her eyes glistening in the dirty yellow glow of the night lights. "She's gone now, none of it matters any more."

"She kept us all safe, you know? Protected us, but nobody saved her. So now there's no-one, there's just me, and I can't do it, I've got to be in here 'cause I'm one of the bad guys, and I can't even get out the way and let the next girl have her shot 'cause I'm too damn scared to finished it." Tears left shimmering lines on her cheek. "You know why, Eddie? 'Cause I know where I'm going, and it's not...she's not going to be waiting there for me. So she's up there, and I'm here, and now the whole world's going to burn." Her head jerked upward and Rhodes found himself staring into her eyes; the misery and terror he saw chilled him. "You got a family, Eddie? Wife, kids? You look like a wife and kids kind of guy. Tell them...Don't wait for tomorrow, 'cause someday soon there won't be one."

Her head slumped forward and the movement cascaded down her body until she was lying flat on the concrete. Rhodes tried to keep her talking, but for all the reaction he got, he might as well have been speaking to a corpse.

Tears pooled on the floor beneath her, seeping in between the chill concrete and her skin. Her body shivered, but her mind didn't even register the cold; speaking to Eddie had felt like her final confession, and now she just wanted everything to end.

Something passed through her, so fast that she almost didn't notice it, but her eyes opened and her head lifted almost imperceptibly from the floor. It felt like the echo of someone far away crying out in the darkness, a voice she was sure she knew but couldn't place. Her eyes started to move, searching the gloom for some clue, but there was nothing. Then, without any warning, she bolted upright on the floor, scrabbling backward away from something she couldn't see or hear until she collided with the bunk.

It felt as though a second heart was pounding in her chest, beating in terrified haste, too fast to count. Then her lungs started to burn, like she'd been running flat out for hours, and her eyes, her eyes, aching as though she'd looked straight into the sun. Her own heart quickened in panic, throbbing in time with the phantom pulse she felt, while pain blossomed in her hands, blows across her knuckles and tiny points along her fingers, like needles stabbing into her skin. Her eyes stared heavenwards, too terrified to believe.

I'd better be. Faith closed her eyes and took a few deep breaths, trying to calm herself. She'd spent so long planning for this moment, considering her options and stripping away everything that wasn't completely focused on what she was going to do next, but deep down she wondered if maybe that had been too long. Perhaps, now that it came down to it, she'd find she'd over-thought everything.

For the first day or so after the pain returned, thinking at all had been almost beyond her. For a while, she'd been sure that she'd finally lost her mind and everything she was feeling was some kind of hallucination. She'd stayed huddled in the corner of her cell for hours, both afraid that it was true and afraid that it wasn't. Eventually she'd collapsed from sheer exhaustion, the strain of the previous months breaching the last of her defences, and when she woke, she knew what she had to do.

And then she had to wait. That was the hardest part, not driving herself insane while she served out the remaining three weeks of her confinement. There were times when she almost broke, when she could feel herself about to scream with frustration or beg the guards to help her, but something, a scrap of pride or the fear that they'd think she was crazy and send for a straitjacket, let her keep control, however tenuous. She'd made herself slow down, when her body screamed to be up and moving, and somewhere along the line she'd learned that, in fact, she was the one in control.

Eddie had noticed the change. Maybe some of the other guards, too, but they just seemed to be relieved she wasn't sleeping on the floor any more. Eddie was different; she knew she'd freaked him with her late-night confession, but in spite of her inability to explain it to him he knew something was different and he seemed to trust it.

She must have done something right, she reflected, or he wouldn't have come to bring her back to the block.

Eddie opened the door and escorted her into the block, then walked with her as far as the day room. As he handed her over to the guards on duty he whispered "Good luck." She didn't dare reply.

One of the guards opened up the day room door and she stepped across the threshold into her old territory. The place was full, and everyone turned to look at her; she felt like a character in a Western, walking into the saloon while all the locals stared. It took an effort of will not to stop in the doorway.

Keep it together, okay? After a few moments the murmur of conversation started up again, but she could feel eyes on her as she made herself walk calmly between the tables, just like it was any other day. There was hostility in the air, and some apprehension, but not as much as she'd expected. The overall atmosphere was more like anticipation, people wondering what she was going to do next.

A glance at the clock had confirmed what Faith already knew; the commissary had closed for the day. She'd allowed for that in her planning, though, and moved straight on to plan B. She went straight up to her cell. As she'd expected, everything that had been left out in the open had been pilfered in her absence, but luckily no-one had looked hard enough to find her little stash, rolled up in a sock and wedged into one of her bunk springs. It wasn't much, but it should be enough.

Stuffing the sock's contents into a pocket, Faith headed back down to the day room. As she walked in, she caught sight of Cat sitting with Michele and a couple of others, but aside from one glance as Faith walked in and the conversations died again, Cat ignored her. Faith's stride faltered for a moment as she remembered the way Cat had looked at her that day in the yard, before Giles came to see her, but she had something else to do before she could start fixing that.

It took a few moments for her to spot the woman she was looking for, but before long Faith had her; a skinny thirty-something with dirty blonde hair, sitting at a table with a couple of her buddies. They all looked up as Faith approached, trying not to seem apprehensive.

"Hey Sasha". Faith took a seat across from the blonde. "I'm looking for a phone card, can you hook me up?"

"You want a phone card?" Surprise overtook caution for a second, but Sasha got herself under control again quickly. "I've never heard of you trading for cards before."

"Never wanted to make a call before," replied Faith. She kept her voice low and calm, trying to sound non-threatening.

It seemed to work; Sasha's body language relaxed a little. "Okay, let's talk. What do you got?"

They haggled for a couple of minutes, then the exchange was done under the table. Five minutes later, Faith was slotting a new card into one of the cell block's payphones and dialling a number she'd spent a day dredging out of her memory. She tried to stay calm, but by the time she'd finished dialling her hand was shaking so much that she could barely hit the right buttons, and as the phone at the other end of the line began to ring Faith leaned against the wall and made herself take a few slow, deep breaths.

Faith had spent days thinking about what she was going to say, but as soon as she heard Buffy's voice her mind blanked."

Faith wracked her brain for something to say, and the best she could come up with was "You're alive."

There was a barely-audible gasp at the other end of the line, and then "Faith? "

The line went dead. Faith listened to the cut-off tone for a few moments, then she hung up and rested her head against the wall, not sure if she was supposed to laugh or cry.

Faith took a long drag on her cigarette and held the smoke in her lungs, letting the nicotine seep into her system. Smoking wasn't having the usual calming effect that evening. All through those weeks in solitary, she'd been so completely fixated on confirming that Buffy had returned that she hadn't been able to think beyond that point, and now all the other questions were piling in on her.

Angel came back from hell, right? Something pulled him out and dropped him back in Sunnydale.

Yeah, but B wasn't in hell. Who'd want to take her halo away and dump her down here?

The Scoobs? They'd want her back, but raising the dead? Can they even do that? Can't be easy or everyone'd be doing it. They'd have done it to get Joyce back.

There's no-one else, though. It's not the Council, they didn't even like her. Can't be Angel or he wouldn't have gone away like he did. Had to be them. They couldn't hack it without her, so they brought her back.

The cigarette burned down to the filter. Faith stubbed it out on the floor, and then lay back on her bunk with her hands behind her head. She sounded tired. Maybe she's not sleeping? It's got to be rough, waking up down... oh God! Please, tell me they didn't bury her first. She stared at her hands, remembering the blows she'd felt. She was in a coffin. The stupid bastards brought her back in a coffin.

Footsteps rang on the staircase outside the cell, accompanied by a low murmur of conversation as the other women of the block returned to their cells for the night. Faith took her place on the landing for the final count of the day. Cat stood silently beside her, and for the first time since she got out of solitary--or, if she was honest with herself, for the first time since she first went to solitary--Faith had a good look at her cellmate.

She looked different, and not in a good way. The changes were subtle enough that Faith could only see them up close, but they were there. Cat had lost weight; her cheekbones were more prominent than they had been, her chin more pointed. Her posture was different, too, more slumped around the shoulders. It wasn't much, but it had Faith worried.

"Cat, can we talk?" she asked as they were locked in for the night. Cat ignored her, so she reached out and put her hand on Cat's shoulder. "Please."

Cat shrugged her off. "Go to sleep, Lehane." She climbed onto her bunk and lay down, facing the wall.

The buzzer went off too early, just like Faith remembered it. One of the few advantages to being in solitary was that no-one really cared if you slept late, but on the cell block you got the buzzer at the same time every morning. If that didn't wake you, the chorus of groans and curses that echoed from every cell on the landing would.

Faith sat up on the edge of her bunk, rubbing at her eyes. Her side ached from whatever fight Buffy had been in the previous night. Back to that again. Same old, same old. Guess I'll just have to get used to it again.

She stepped over to the sink and splashed some cold water on her face to clear her head, then turned around to grab her uniform shirt. That was when she noticed that Cat hadn't woken up. "Hey, come on, chow time."

She put her hand on Cat's arm and gave her a shake. Cat's hand slide over the edge of the bunk and hung there. A syringe dropped from her fingers.

She'd been sitting in the office, hands cuffed behind her, for maybe half an hour when Hartson walked in. They'd kept her in the cell at first, made her watch while the doctor came, while they confirmed Cat was dead and put her in a body bag. Then two of the guards had brought her down here, getting her out of the way so others could pull the cell apart.

"I didn't even know she was using! I just got out of freaking solitary, Hartson, how am I going to know what she's doing?"

There was a knock at the door, and a moment later one of the guards who'd been searching the cell came in. She tossed tiny bag of white powder onto the desk. "Found it stuffed inside the bunk frame. Doctor Stephens said she found track marks on Marquez's thighs, looks like she's been injecting for a couple of months."

Hartson looked at the bag with contempt. "Tell the Warden, and keep checking the cell, make sure there's nothing else in there. You," she turned back to Faith, "get your clothes off."

"I've got a dead convict on my block, Lehane," Hartson said, taking a pair of latex gloves from a box on the desk, "and I find anything, anything, that connects it to you, I'll make your life a living hell."

The memory of Hartson's fingers inside her made Faith's skin crawl, but she didn't give herself time to dwell on it. When they finally let her go it was rec time, and everyone was outside in the sun. Seeing them all out there, carrying on like nothing had happened, was enough to get the old demons whispering in the back of her mind, telling her to make someone else hurt the way she was hurting.

She stopped at the edge of the yard, fists clenched, nails digging into her palms, until she'd got herself under control. Today, she had a job to do, and she wasn't going to let her old self mess it up.

It wasn't easy picking out one person in the mass of bodies, but after a minute or two she'd spotted Michele at a table on the other side of the yard, playing cards with two others. Faith made her way over, avoiding a game of basketball that didn't seem confined to the court. "Hey Michele."

"What do you want?" Michele asked, her voice rough and angry. The other two women at the table edged away, sensing trouble.

"I know whose fault it was, bitch, I'm looking at her!" Michele jumped to her feet, getting right into Faith's face. Everyone around them stopped dead, waiting for the explosion.

"You dumbass ho, you don't get it, do you?" Michele's voice dropped so no-one else could hear her. "She liked you, gaynip. She liked you, she got worried about you and you told her to go to hell. Well nice job, 'cause while you was off getting your skank ass tossed in the Hole, that's right where she went. This one's on you, 'Beantown', this one's all on you."

"It's called a salad, Bev." Faith speared a piece of celery on her fork and wished her new cellmate would shut up for once.

As oblivious as ever, Bev replied, "Couple of mangy lettuce leaves and some celery don't make a salad. You got to have tomatoes, peppers, salad cream, tuna, mayo, that's a salad, am I right?"

Like it's not messed up enough having salad for lunch three days before Christmas, now I've got to listen to this... The others at the table made various noises of assent that Bev would no doubt interpret as a ringing endorsement. Faith knew better; they were just agreeing in the hope that she'd stop bitching for a while and let them eat in piece. No-one else at the table seemed to have any interest in starting a conversation, and that suited Faith just fine.

Everyone had been wary of her after she left solitary, but as days turned into weeks and she didn't attack anyone, things gradually returned to normal, or something close to it. The days when people would only share a cafeteria table with her if there were no other options were over, but she still kept everyone at arm's length, unwilling to let them get close.

Most of the women on the cell block had treated Cat's death like it was just another part of being inside. People took drugs, people died, it was sad but it happened. As far as Faith could tell, only Michele knew anything more than that. She hadn't said a word to Faith since their confrontation in the yard, but Faith could feel the animosity pouring off her any time they were in the same room. She barely noticed it any more. Michele couldn't make her feel any worse than she already did.

She hadn't even had a chance to grieve in peace. Only two days after Cat died, Faith returned to the cell after a shift in the laundry and found a new girl there, a parole-violator who stayed a week before she was shipped back down south to finish her sentence. The day after that girl left, up rolled Bev Turner. Bev was just beginning a stretch for attempted murder; the scuttlebutt in the yard was that she'd heard another mom at her kid's school say the kid was fat, so Bev cracked her skull open with a claw hammer. It wasn't her first time inside, though, and there were a few inmates at NCWF who already knew her. She had a rep as a loudmouth, but she was tough enough that not many people called her on it.

Unfortunately, she seemed to have decided that hanging out with a girl who'd spent the summer putting gangbangers twice her size in the infirmary was the perfect way to make herself look tougher. Either that, or she really didn't get how much Faith hated being anywhere near her. Faith reckoned she was stupid enough for either to be true, and the constant complaining about the food, the clothes, the bunks and whatever else happened to occur to Bev was starting to wind her up.

Great, start feeling sorry for yourself, that'll help. Ignoring whatever it was that Bev was saying at the moment, Faith started looking around the room for something to distract her. Someone had taken a load of paper napkins, cut them into snowflake patterns and hung them all along the edge of the serving counter. It reminded her of the frost patterns she'd see on the windows back in Boston, and she smiled, remembering snowball fights in the street outside her home. It only lasted a moment, but the recollection felt good, a reminder of a time when things were simple and she knew where she belonged.

A murmur of angry voices from the other side of the cafeteria broke her out of her reminiscing. Two rival crews had wound up at adjacent tables, and they'd been trying to stare each other down all through lunch. Now, as a latecomer went to join her gang, words were being thrown, and then someone flung their arm out and flipped the new girl's meal tray out of her grip. The new girl, a stocky Korean with a rough scar under one ear, jumped on the tray-flipper, a heavily-tattooed blonde, and yanked her out of her seat. The blonde's buddies leapt to her aid, and in moments all hell had broken loose.

"Nice!" Bev was out of her seat before the first punch was even thrown, shouldering her way through the crowd to get a good vantage point for the fight. Faith just picked up her tray and headed in the opposite direction, stopping by the serving counter along with a handful of others who'd decided they didn't want to get caught in the crossfire when the guards intervened.

Someone, probably one of the kitchen staff, hit the panic button and the emergency siren started to wail, but the handful of guards in the cafeteria didn't wait for backup before wading in and trying to put a stop to the fighting. The crowd of onlookers slowed them down as much as possible without actually holding them back, but inside a minute three guards were pulling the two sides apart.

Someone shoved one of the guards, who stumbled, hit his head on a table and went down.

The guard scrambled clear with blood streaming from his forehead. The others abandoned their efforts to stop the fight and concentrated on getting their colleague out, clearing a path for him with their nightsticks. Someone near the centre of the mob flung a meal tray at them, striking one of the guards in the face, and just like that the whole focus of the violence moved from the two gangs who'd started it all to the retreating guards.

A tray crashed against the wall a couple of feet from Faith's head, showering her with leftover celery, and she decided it was time to be elsewhere. A few others had the same idea and were heading for the cafeteria door. They got out into the corridor just as a dozen guards came charging toward them. Faith flattened herself against the wall, hands high in the air. The others followed her lead; one wasn't fast enough and got bundled out of the way. One of the guards who'd been in the cafeteria waved his nightstick at them and yelled something to the reinforcements. Faith couldn't make out the words over the din, but two guards started herding her little group back to their cells.

"Man, that was awesome!" Even hours after the guards suppressed the brawl--it never escalated far enough to call it a riot--Bev was still excited, pacing the meagre length of the cell while telling and retelling the glorious tale of her part in it all. "Did you see what happened to Hartson? That arm's not going to be working right for a long time. Should've been there, celly, it was so cool."

"Yeah, wicked cool," Faith muttered. She was lying on her bunk with a cigarette in her hand, staring up at the top bunk and trying not to remember the noises it made when Cat moved in her sleep. The memory of those discordant creaks seemed almost musical compared to the sound of tortured metal when Bev moved her bulk. "Throwing down with the guards, great idea."

"Aw come on. Rep like yours, I know you dig it," Bev said with a vicious grin. The split lip and bruised ribs she'd picked up didn't seem to bother her in the least; if anything, she looked pleased to have taken a few hits, like it showed how tough she was. "Throwing down's what it's all about in here."

"Great, so you guys have your fun and now the whole block's on lockdown for Christmas."

"Oh, big freaking deal, you miss out on your turkeyloaf, who the hell cares? I'm talking about payback, man, scoring some points on the damn hacks!"

"You know what, Bev?" Faith could feel her patience dangling by a thread; she took a drag on her cigarette and held it for a moment. "I think I'm done hearing your voice today."

"Oh yeah?" Bev's cheerful belligerence soured in a heartbeat. "So what you going to do about it, huh? I hear a lot of talk about you, but I think you've gone soft since your girlfriend baked herself."

Faith shot off the bunk, and before Bev could move she was pinned against the wall with Faith's arm across her throat and the glowing tip of a cigarette poised inches from her eye. "Don't screw with me, Bev. You think you're tough 'cause you put some soccer mom in the hospital? I've killed people. I've fought battles you can't imagine. Only one person ever took me down, and you are not her. You could never be her."

Faith stepped back and Bev collapsed in a heap on the floor, clutching at her throat and gasping for breath. She looked up at Faith with eyes filled with fear and hate. Faith just stared back, her eyes empty and cold. "We're going to set some new ground rules. I don't care what you do out there," she jabbed her cigarette toward the cell door, "you can talk trash all you want and throw down any time you got the urge, but in here you're going to keep your head down and watch your mouth. You do that and we're going to get along fine. One more thing." Faith knelt in front of Bev, dropping her voice to a whisper. "I ever hear you talk about Cat like that again, we're going to finish this conversation, got me?"

The look of fury in Bev's eyes was answer enough. Faith stood up, sucked the last hit out of her cigarette and flicked the butt into the toilet bowl. As she turned away, she said, "I'm not like everyone else in here, Bev. I'm a monster. You don't want to make me remember that."

One of the fluorescent light tubes in the ceiling flickered, buzzing like a wasp caught in a jar, and then went out. A moment later there was a ping and the tube lit up, only to begin flickering again in seconds. There was something hypnotic about it, the regularity of it, which was almost soothing. Buffy watched it struggling to stay lit, then turned away and looked around the office. Everything was so quiet; there was hardly a sound except for the light above her. "This is different."

"It looks bigger without all the cops," Faith replied as she walked between the rows of desks.

"I guess." Buffy picked up a nameplate from a nearby desk. "Detective Lockley--wasn't she the one who--"

"Yeah." Faith's head dropped for a moment, and then she straightened up and looked at Buffy with her old grin. "She had a wicked beef with Angel."

"I remember." A hint of smile crossed Buffy's face, and then faded as she returned the nameplate to its place. It occurred to her that she shouldn't be this at ease with Faith around. "Why are we here?"

"I know. How come we're getting in each other's heads again?" Faith stopped by the window, across the desk from Buffy, looking out between the slats of the blind. "Maybe 'cause you need to talk to someone."

Buffy felt a moment of shame at the implication, but the mask she showed everyone fell into place in a moment. Sitting on the edge of a desk, trying to look relaxed, she said, "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Come on, B, this is me you're dealing with." Faith turned and leant on Lockley's desk. Her hair fell around her face, and she glared out from the shadows like a cop interrogating a suspect. "All those little bumps and bruises? Bites, scratches on your back, the down-low ache? I know what makes a girl hurt like that."

"I thought you'd be cheering me on. You always said I needed to find the fun." "In case you didn't notice, I talk a lot of crap sometimes." Lockley's chair creaked as Faith lowered herself into it. "Never pegged you for a cheater, Buffy."

"That so?" Faith gave her a sceptical look. "Riley's not into that stuff. I know, I tried, the guy's bones are vanilla."

"I'm not with Riley anymore," Buffy replied. She should have been angry that Faith could talk about it like it was nothing, angry that she'd even mentioned it at all, but the anger wouldn't come. She saw a question in Faith's eyes and mustered enough venom to mutter, "Don't flatter yourself."

"So I'm not real. Doesn't make me wrong. Look, I know you're hurting, but this stuff you're doing, it's not you."

"Don't." Faith cut her off hard. She got up from the chair and stepped around the desk, facing Buffy with eyes that shimmered in the light. "I'm not buying it. You can play Angel and the Slayerettes with that 'back from hell' story, but not me. I'm the one making payments on a condo by the lake of fire. No way you wind up down there."

There wasn't even a hint of doubt in Faith's voice; Buffy had never heard her sound that certain about anything. All of a sudden, Buffy couldn't stand to look at her, couldn't face what she saw in Faith's eyes. "They didn't know what they were doing, they just..."

"They needed you back, so they told themselves it was the right thing to do. I dig it." When Buffy looked up again, Faith was still gazing sadly at her. "You've got to tell them, Buffy. Let them help."

"I already told them." The words carried with them all the hopelessness she felt. "They can't help me, Faith. God, everything's so messed up right now, I don't know how I can fix anything."

"You'll figure it out, B, you've just got to try." Faith stepped forward, and Buffy went to meet her. "I need you to be okay."

"I didn't start climbing out of this hole so I could pass you coming the other way." Faith raised her hand and brushed a strand of hair from Buffy's cheek. "You're supposed to meet me at the top."

It always took forever to rinse out the shampoo. Faith stepped back under the shower head and pulled long strands of wet hair back from her face. Trickles of tepid water snaked across her skin, carrying away the lather in dribs and drabs.

God, I miss real showers. The bathroom she'd had at the motel in Sunnydale, with its endless supply of hot water, seemed like the most decadent of luxuries when she though back to it. A hot shower had always eased the aches after a fight, and even though she knew that her taking a hot one wouldn't help with the bruises Buffy had picked up the previous night, she couldn't help wishing she could test the theory. The hot water in NCWF's showers barely lasted long enough to fog the mirrors, then they had to make do with water that only the most generous person would describe as warm, and the pressure, never high, only got worse as the weather warmed up.

Not long after she'd arrived, Faith had concluded that the water pressure was a big reason why so many of the inmates opted for shorter hair; the feeble spray from the shower heads made washing long hair a tedious exercise at best. She knew that some people thought she was crazy for letting hers get as long as she had, but she couldn't bring herself to get it cut. Faith couldn't say if it was vanity, masochism or simple stubbornness that stopped her, and she didn't particularly care. The hair was part of who she was, and there were a lot of changes she needed to make that ranked above her appearance.

Out of the corner of her eye, Faith saw one of her blockmates handing off something to another prisoner. She'd seen so many contraband trades in the showers that she barely noticed them anymore; it was too easy to palm something behind the privacy screens, even if the guards were watching like hawks, which they weren't. That day, all but one of the guards were men, and she'd noticed that most of the male guards overcompensated when they were on shower duty and spent so much time not looking at the naked women that they'd barely notice if a riot broke out, whole those that did look were usually too wrapped up in whatever sweaty fantasy their brains had cooked up to see anything at all. It was the female guards who saw things. Hartson had been notorious for picking up on shower-room trades, and for the way she came down on anyone she caught making them; the news that she'd been put on disability after the 'Christmas Smackdown', as it had become known, caused a surge of illicit deals. The only way to stop it would have been to cavity-search every prisoner after every shower, and there would never be enough manpower.

One last turn under the showerhead and Faith decided that her hair was a rinsed as it was going to get. She was reaching for the faded towel hanging on the privacy screen when the pain hit her.

A jackhammer impact flared in her chest. It hurt so much that her first thought was that she was having a heart attack, but the blood pounding through her veins told her she was wrong, that it wasn't coming from her at all. She tried to be ready for it all the time, and even expected it at night, but she'd never felt pain from Buffy at this time of the morning. The shock of it buckled her legs beneath her and she landed in a heap on the tiles, splashing water and soap suds everywhere. A chorus of jeers and catcalls rang through the shower room, mocking her for her clumsiness, but it was all just background noise. Faith's hands had jumped to her chest, instinctively protecting the wound she felt, and now she forced them down again, clenching her fists as she tried to control the pain. It was unlike anything she'd ever felt before; it struck like an inhumanly strong fist but pierced deep inside her like a blade. Her vision started to blur, and for a moment it was all she could do not to pass out.

Booted footsteps rang on the tiles as a pair of guards came to investigate the commotion. They probably thought there had been an attack, and when they saw Faith sitting on the floor, uninjured and staring up at them, the woman stopped and stared back in confusion. The man tried to keep his expression neutral but there was a leer in his eyes as he took in the view.

"I-I slipped," she replied to the unasked question as she pulled herself up. Even she could hear the trembling in her voice, and in the depths of her minds she knew the guards would think she was covering for someone who'd hit her, but that wasn't important. She grabbed her towel and started drying off. The guards took that as a cue and began chivvying the others along.

Her hands kept fumbling as she dressed herself, trying to hurry and fighting against a body that couldn't handle the contradiction of such pain without injury. The delays felt endless, the pain didn't ease in the slightest. She could feel it sapping her strength but she was terrified that it would end. That could only mean one thing.

As soon as she was released back into the cell block, Faith rushed up to her cell and grabbed the phone card she'd traded for all those months ago and kept hidden ever since. Clutching it in her hand, she made her way down to the payphones. By the time she arrived she could barely see straight.

The phone seemed to ring forever before the machine picked up, taunting her with the sound of Buffy's voice before letting her speak. "Buffy! If there's anyone there, pick up, please. Buffy's hurt, you've got to find her. Can anyone hear me? Damn it!" There was no response from the other end. She hung up and tried to think.

"Yeah, I need a number in Sunnydale, California. The name's Giles, Rupert Giles."

There was a tapping of keys, and then the operator said. "I'm sorry, ma'am, I have no listing under that name."

The call went through to another machine. She called out, hoping he would hear her, but nothing. She hung up, dialled 411 again and asked for the Rosenberg house.

"Damn it... R-O-S-E-" The pain in her chest vanished as suddenly as it had arrived.

The handset began to slip from her fingers as she waited for the void to tear open inside her, willing it to finish her this time. It never came, and as the moments passed she realised that the she could still feel the bruises from the night before.

"...never mind..." Faith hung up the phone and slumped against the wall, sliding down until she hit the floor, her head bowed.

Buffy caught herself fiddling with her bracelet again and very deliberately put her hands on her knees. She couldn't have felt more out of place, and the way one of the guards kept looking at her wasn't helping at all. In a way she couldn't blame him, she didn't exactly fit in with the other people in the visiting room. It was full of boyfriends, husbands, parents, children--pretty much everything except twenty-one-year-old women.

What the hell am I doing here? She started a minute examination of her fingernails, just to give herself something to concentrate on apart from how ridiculous she felt sitting there. She'd come all this way and walked into this place, a place where they searched you before they'd let you talk to someone through a sheet of glass, and why? Because of a couple of phone messages and a half-remembered dream she'd convinced herself was nothing more than that.

Every noise from the other side of the glass was muted, but Buffy caught the sound of one of the barred doors opening and looked up in time to see Faith walking into the room. She did a tiny double-take, so small that anyone who didn't know her wouldn't even see it, but it made Buffy feel a little better that she wasn't the only one feeling surprised. Somehow she'd expected Faith to look the same as always, all dark makeup, denim and attitude. The sombre-faced woman in the shapeless blue shirt walking toward her wasn't what she'd prepared herself for. It wasn't the Faith who'd betrayed her, the Faith who'd woken up and sought vengeance, or the Faith she'd confronted on Angel's rooftop. It was someone else, someone she didn't know how to deal with.

It was someone who sat down opposite her, picked up the phone and waited. Buffy snapped herself out of her daze and did the same. "Hi."

"B." If Faith was feeling as uncomfortable as Buffy was, she didn't show any sign of it. "They said you asked for a visitor's pass, I thought maybe I was hearing things. What's the deal?"

"You tried to call me, I got your message. So did Xander. You sounded...I don't know, worried, I guess."

"Worried... yeah, you could say that." There was something in Faith's eyes that suggested it wasn't exactly the right word, but Buffy had no idea what that word could be. The idea of Faith, the real Faith, worrying about her was off-putting enough already.

"Yeah." Buffy felt her hand straying toward her chest and put it back down on the desk. "I was shot."

"Shot? Like, shot, with a gun? You've got..." Faith glanced around for a moment and lowered her voice. "You've got uglies carrying guns now?"

"It wasn't an 'ugly'. It was just a guy, some pathetic little man trying to be a supervillain He couldn't handle getting beaten by a girl."

"So he shot you. Son of a bitch." There was real anger in Faith's voice, and Buffy could see her having to work to keep it under control. "You got over it kind of quick, even for us."

"Neat. I'm glad everyone's okay." Faith must have seen something in her face, because her expression changed in a moment. "Everyone's not okay."

"Tara..." Faith's eyes narrowed as she tried to place the name. "Willow's girl?"

"Damn." The anger flared again, burning deep in Faith's eyes. "Tell me you got the guy, B."

"He's..." Buffy swallowed, trying not to remember seeing Warren die. "He's gone."

"Gone, you mean..." Faith stared straight at her, her face shocked. "You didn't..."

"Oh God." The dark eyes closed for a moment, and Faith bowed her head. "What happened to her?"

"Took her to England." Faith nodded like it was the obvious thing to do, but there was something in her voice that set Buffy's teeth on edge. "Maybe I should have taken Wes up on the offer."

The old buried anger surged up Buffy's throat. "Don't you dare compare yourself to her. She was caught up in something, something dark and powerful, for months, and then she lost the person she loved. You can't imagine what she went through."

"Yeah, you're right, I've got no clue how it feels getting swallowed by the dark."

"She is nothing like you." Buffy stopped, trying to make herself calm down. "Faith, wait, I'm--"

It was too late; Faith was slamming the doors closed before her eyes. "Why'd you come here, B?"

"Take care of yourself, B." Faith hung up the phone and walked away, never looking back.

Buffy felt as though she was about to explode as she made her way back through the security checks. Stupid, stupid stupid... What's wrong with me? I can't even be in the same room with her? She was furious with herself for falling back into the old pattern so easily, and what bothered her the most was that she didn't understand why she was so angry. Faith didn't have any right to think that way, did she? So why shouldn't Buffy get angry at her? It all churned through her mind, and she had to fight not to let it show until she got back to the car. She got in behind the wheel and slammed the door shut, then smashed her fist into the dashboard. She'd meant to just vent some of what she was feeling so she could get away, but once she'd opened the door she couldn't close it again. Her fist pounded the dash over and over until it was covered with a spider's web of cracks in the plastic, and then she slumped forward over the steering wheel and let herself weep.

Down in the dayroom, someone raised their voice in complaint about something, probably what was on the TV that evening. Faith ignored it, concentrating on her pencil as it traced a long graceful curve across the page. She shifted a little on her bunk, angling her sketch pad toward the light, and examined the line for a moment, deciding whether or not it was right. Satisfied, she started stroking her thumb gently along it, smudging it to soften the outline.

Faith looked up and saw Eddie standing in the cell door. "Yeah, the shrink says it'll help me externalise my rage or some crap like that." She wanted to smile at him, but that would have been against the rules of the unspoken agreement they seemed to have come to over the last year. She pretended he was just another hack, he pretended he wasn't watching out for her. She wasn't sure, but she suspected he was the one who'd got the shrink to put her on the art program in the first place.

"Hey, I've seen it work," he replied. "You know the light's better downstairs, right?"

"I know. I just like working in the quiet. Don't get a whole lot of it round here."

"Yeah, I get that." He glanced down at the sketch pad. "Marquez, right?" Faith just nodded, not trusting herself to speak, but he must have seen what she was feeling. "It wasn't your fault, Lehane. Sometimes people just fall apart in here."

"Didn't help much, did I? Wasn't even here." She added a touch more shading under Cat's jaw line. "I don't know how close it is."

"I think you got her down," Eddie assured her. "You're getting good at this stuff. You mind showing me some more?"

"Go ahead." Faith pointed him toward the small stack of sketchbooks and loose drawings on her shelf. Then she remembered what was hidden inside. "Wait..."

Too late; he'd already found the little notebook hidden in the pile and was flicking through it. "These are real good. Who is this?"

"Just...someone I knew a long time ago." She wanted to play it down, but she knew she was wasting her time trying to fool him.

"Must have been more than that, you keep drawing her like this. Is she the one you talked about in solitary? The one who died?"

"Yeah. Yeah, that's her. She's not dead though." Eddie looked at her in surprise, and she shrugged. "It's complicated."

Faith couldn't help laughing, even though acknowledging how crazy the idea was hurt her inside. "God, no, she'd have a coronary if anyone thought me and her were getting nasty together. She's...I don't know, she's like the way things could have been, you know? We could have been friends. She wanted to help me, but...I didn't want help."

"Sometimes you can." Eddie handed her the notebook and smiled. "I'd better get going."

"Yeah, we don't want people thinking you like me, I've got a rep to protect," she grinned back.

After he'd gone, Faith added a few touches to her sketch, but she couldn't concentrate on it any more. She set it aside and picked up the notebook, turning the pages one by one. A dozen Buffys looked back at her from scenes half-remembered, half-imagined. The night they killed Kakistos. Christmas Eve. The notice board at the college. The night they stopped off for pizza during a patrol. As always, she finished with her favourite; the Homecoming dance, Buffy in her ball gown, her face streaked with dirt but still beautiful. A perfect image from the time before everything got complicated.

She was putting the notebook away when something hit her in the back, and she'd reached out to steady herself against the wall before she realised it was Buffy who'd been struck. Fresh pain blossomed in her cheek, and then below her ribs, the hardest blows she could remember feeling for a long time. She thought of the phone card again, a voice inside her screaming that she should make contact, warn them that something was wrong, but she couldn't. The memory of Buffy's visit held her back, made her do what she always did. Huddle up on her bunk, grit her teeth and wait for it to end.

"Sure, no problem Giles. I'll let her know. Take care." Willow hung up the phone with a faint sigh of relief. As much as she knew that Giles could take care of himself, with everything that was going on she felt better for hearing his voice.

The house felt even more claustrophobic than usual. Potentials seemed to be everywhere, squabbling with each other and generally getting in everyone's way. For a moment, Willow considered going to the basement to see Spike, just to get away from it all, but she had a job to do. A teeny little job, but still a job.

"Uh, yeah, I think she's out back. She interrupted training and sent us all back inside."

"Huh." It sounded odd; Buffy had been pushing them all to train harder for days. "Okay, I'll go find her and see what's up."

Getting through the kitchen was a nightmare--Andrew was trying to keep half a dozen girls away from a batch of muffins that hadn't cooled yet--but she made it out onto the back porch. The garden looked empty. "Buffy?"

Willow followed it around the corner and found Buffy sitting on the grass in the shadow of a bush, her back up against the wall. Her head was down, her hair hanging loose around her, but Willow knew her too well not to realise that she was in pain. "Buffy? What happened?"

"I don't think so, Will. I could feel it happening. Whatever did this, I don't think it was human. Maybe the First sent something after her, I don't know."

"Well, she's alive, right? I mean, if she wasn't alive, you wouldn't be...yeah?"

"Yeah, yeah, I think so. I'm okay, Will, I just need a minute." Buffy raised her head and pushed her hair back, wiping her hands across her face as she did so. "You were looking for me?"

"I was? Oh, yeah, right. Giles just called, he said to tell you he should be back tomorrow."

"I'll be fine, honest. I just didn't want the Potentials to see me like this, they need to... Can you get them together? I want to go through some stuff with them this afternoon."

Buffy stayed seated until Willow was out of sight, then she stood up, quietly wiped away the last of the tears she'd been hiding and went back to work.

For a few hours in the afternoon, the last bus out of Sunnydale reduced the emergency department at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital to near-chaos. No sooner had the staff begun to deal with the wounded and pack the critical cases off to surgery than the police arrived, wanting to interview the refugees, and after them came the reporters trying to piece together the story of the abandonment and destruction of an entire town.

The hospital more or less kept the reporters at bay, and Giles did his best to deal with the police, who seemed to buy into his story that they'd taken the school bus when the ground started shaking. In theory, that left Buffy free to watch over their rag-tag army, but as some were taken away for treatment and others went in search of food or a place to rest, she started to lose track of them. All the adrenaline had soaked out of her system about five minutes after they reached the hospital, leaving her with nothing to hold back the fatigue built up over months of violence and fear. To make matters worse, one of the doctors figured out that some of the blood on her clothes was hers and started insisting that she needed to be examined. Buffy tried to say no, but that just earned her a sharp look from her sister and she was too tired to argue. By the time the doctor had looked at her wounds and run a battery of tests, her people were scattered all over the hospital and beyond, and it was a long time before she'd accounted for all of them. All but one.

She ran into Dawn in the lobby of the emergency room. "Hey, have you seen Faith?"

"Last time I saw her she was headed for surgery with Principal Wood, but that was like right after we arrived. Maybe she's waiting for him?"

"No, I was just up there; they said she came back down here hours ago." Buffy's eyes swept the E.R., searching for dark hair or a denim jacket.

"I don't know. I hope not. Okay, look, you stay here and grab her if you see her, I'll go check outside."

In all the upheaval that followed the battle, Buffy had so lost track of time that she when she stepped outside she was surprised to find that it was almost dark. The sun was disappeared below the horizon, staining the western sky red and orange like a pyre marking the death of her home town, and for the first time she truly felt the enormity of what had happened. Her whole life was gone, buried at the bottom of a miles-wide crater in the desert.

No, that wasn't true, she told herself. The places were gone, but most of the people she cared about were still with her, and that was enough. Assuming she could track down the last of them.

A trail of smoke drifting over the top of a hedge caught her eye as she crossed the parking lot. She found Faith on the other side, sprawled on a bench in the shadow of the hospital. There was a cigarette in her hand; she seemed to have forgotten about it as she sat with her head back, eyes closed, as though she was soaking up the last of the light. She looked relaxed, almost at peace, and for a second Buffy didn't want to disturb her, but then Faith opened her eyes and glanced her way, and her demeanour changed. She tensed for a moment but then it faded, leaving behind a sense of sadness that made Buffy wish she'd left Faith alone.

"Hey." Buffy walked over to the bench and stood there, arms folded in front of her. "I was wondering where you were."

Faith's eyes darkened for a moment; Buffy could almost hear her thinking you thought I took off. "Figured I'd better keep my head down when the cops showed up."

"We are so not calling it Excalibur. And no, I got the scythe off the bus before they showed up. Will and Kennedy went to get some motel rooms for us, they're looking after it."

"Damn, B!" Faith's eyes lit up with amusement. "That's wicked harsh. I know you're not a fan of the brat, but you had to sic that guy on Red?"

"There wasn't anyone else!" Buffy protested. "Giles was talking to the cops, the doctors wanted to check on Xander's eye, Vi says she's not going anywhere until Rona wakes up and most of the girls were hurt one way or another."

Buffy found herself staring at her own toes. "I...kind of want to keep her close right now."

"Cool." Faith hesitated, then looked up at her and asked "Did you hear anything about Robin?" Buffy looked faintly queasy, and Faith's brow furrowed. "What?"

"You had sex with my little sister's high school principle, in my bed. It's...creepy."

"I'm not grading on a curve here." Buffy shook off the image. "The doctors say he'll be okay, but it's going to be a while. He got hit pretty hard."

"He's not the only one." Faith glanced at Buffy's stomach. "You sure you're okay?"

"I'm okay. The docs had a minor freak-out about it, but nothing major got hit and it's all closed up, so..." She shrugged.

Buffy almost launched into the same 'Stoical Slayer' routine she'd been using on everyone else, but for the first time in years she didn't care if Faith saw how she really was. She sat down on the bench beside Faith, groaning a little as she did. "Honestly? I'm tired, I ache, my home's gone, my worldly goods consist of a kick-ass scythe and one outfit with the cutest little blood-stained holes, I've got a couple of dozen people all looking at me like I'm this great hero and waiting for me to tell them what to do next, and about an hour ago I remembered I left my wallet on the dresser, which means I have no drivers licence, no money, no credit card and no ATM card, so right now the mighty leader can't even get herself a cup of coffee out of a vending machine."

Faith listened, thought for a moment, then pulled a pack of cigarettes out of her jacket pocket and offered them to Buffy.

"I'm good. And I'm sorry about the bitchfest, I ought to be glad I'm even here at all."

Buffy giggled. "Neat. I always wanted to start a trend." The moment of levity passed, and she looked over at Faith again. "How about you, are you okay?"

"Five by five. Biggest sore spot I've got's yours--but I guess you know that already."

"Yeah. You know Will thought there was a chance we'd break the link when she did the spell?"

"Yeah, that would've been bad," Buffy agreed, trying not to picture all of them feeling each other's wounds. Each other's deaths.

"Kennedy said she saw her go off the ledge." Buffy closed her eyes for a moment. "I'm kind of hoping the fall killed her."

"Yeah," Faith whispered, knowing it hadn't. "That makes, what, seventeen new Slayers and us?"

"Plus all the others we never knew about. Will told me she could feel them, all of them, getting their power."

"Don't remind me. I try to think about what we're going to do, and all my brain's coming up with is 'I want to go to Disneyland'." Buffy let her head roll back and looked up at the stars starting to appear in the darkening sky. "You know what? I'm done. I'm off the clock for tonight, all this stuff can just be tomorrow problems."

"Sounds good to me." Faith leaned back herself and gazed up into the night. "Still feels weird, looking up and seeing stars. It's pretty."

"I know what you mean. I spend so much time outside at night, and I'm looking everywhere except up. Maybe we'll have more time now." Buffy let the view sink in for a while, then she turned to look at Faith. She was staring upward as though she wanted to memorise every star in case she never saw them again; seeing that look on her face made Buffy want to comfort her, but she didn't know how or for what. "You know, we haven't really had a chance to talk since you got back."

"Yeah. My fault, I guess. I'm sorry about the way things went down, B. I swear, I never thought it would go that far, I just wanted you to slow down for a bit."

"No, you guys were right, I was being an idiot. Not about going back to the vineyard, but there's no way taking the Potentials was a good idea, not with Caleb there. We'd just have been giving him more targets, and we couldn't have kept them all safe and gotten to the scythe."

"No. I should have gone in with you. One of us keeps him occupied; the other one grabs the scythe." Buffy let out a sigh born of shame as much as regret. "I don't know why I didn't realise that at the time. If I'd been thinking straight..."

"And if you don't do something right away, you feel like you're letting them down."

Faith stopped looking at the stars and her eyes met Buffy's. "I always thought you were the lucky one, having all the people around you. I guess sometimes it's easier being alone."

They held the gaze for a moment, and then Faith looked away. "Yeah, well, all I know is I never want to be the one giving the orders again."

"And I've never done that," Buffy said. She almost reached out, but held herself back. "Seriously, you kept them all together, that's a lot."

"Come on, B. You got William the Bloody getting his soul back and saving the world, and the way I hear it Angel wasn't exactly the champion type when you guys met up. You made them better." Faith took a last hit from her cigarette and let the smoke drift out into the night. "Too bad it only works on vamps, huh?"

The way Faith spoke made Buffy look up sharply, but Faith either didn't notice it or pretended not to. Buffy hesitated, and said, "They loved me. It changes people."

"Yeah." Faith ground the cigarette under her heel, looking very carefully down at the ground as she did. "Yeah, I guess. And you loved them."

Don't say something you can't take back. Buffy didn't know where the thought came from, or which of them it was aimed at. "I don't think I'm ready to love anyone right now."

"I don't just mean that." Do not mention the cookie dough metaphor, she'll never let it go. "I just need to be single for a while, you know?"

"Lots to do," agreed Buffy, grateful for the way out. "How about you, any plans?"

"I'm not going to make you go back to jail, Faith," Buffy said. She tried to make eye contact, but Faith kept avoiding her. "What do you want to do?"

A fuse Buffy hadn't even known was burning ran out. She sprang off the bench, too upset to think before she spoke. "Okay, that's it, I'm done with all this avoidance mixed-signal crap!"

"It's all we ever do. We start talking, then one of us shuts down and I've had it! Just be honest with me, Faith. Tell me what you want."

Faith stared at her in shock, obviously not sure how to respond. Buffy didn't say anything more, but she wouldn't look away, and eventually Faith surrendered. She lit another cigarette and took a couple of drags, then said, "You know the worst thing about being in jail, B? Nothing you do matters, you can't make a difference anywhere. Three years, Buffy, I felt every fight you had, like I was always with you but I couldn't do a damn thing to help. I hated it, but I thought I had to do my time to make things right. Except my time's never done, there's no parole board waiting for me, and it's not about where I am, it's about what I'm doing. I'm supposed to be helping people, making the world better, being a Slayer again. And I want to do it, I want to do what's right, but..."

"But I can't!" Faith yelled at her. "Don't you get it? I want to do the right thing, but I can't, and I hate it!"

Faith stared at her in disbelief, and then suddenly ground her cigarette out on her own palm. Buffy gasped as the burn flared in her hand. "That's why!" Faith snapped. "We can't both be out there, B, I'll get you killed."

"I felt you die, Buffy," Faith whispered. Her head was bowed now; she looked as though her outburst had drained her. "I felt you die, and then there was this hole inside. I can't go through that again, I can't."

"Faith, listen to me," Buffy sat down again beside her. "We'll figure out how to break the link."

Faith shook her head. "Forget it, B. Giles already told me he could never find a way. I mean, you died and it's still there."

"That was before. Willow's way more powerful than she was, and we've got the scythe now. If it can call every Potential in the world, it can help us with this."

"We'll work something out," Buffy insisted. "We'll do shifts, alternate days or something. Maybe one of us can slay while the other one trains the new girls, I don't know."

"Yes." Buffy felt the urge to reach out again, and this time she didn't fight it. Her hand closed over Faith's; the other girl looked up in surprise, but she didn't pull away. She looked like she was about to speak, but Buffy stopped her. "Faith, just listen to me, okay? I know we've never been friends, but we should have been, and I want us to be. When I was at the vineyard, and I felt you get hurt...I thought you were dying, and I was terrified that I'd never see you again. I know it sounds weird after everything that's happened, but I'm glad you're back in my life, and I want you to stick around. I don't know if we'll be friends, or co-workers, or...or Option C, whatever that is. I just know I want us to be okay. Do...do you..."

"Yeah." Faith nodded, and then looked away. "You figured out how to make it work?"

"God, do I have to think of everything?" Buffy protested, but for all the indignation in her voice she couldn't keep herself from smiling. "Do you have any idea the kind of day I've had? I got run through with a sword, you know."

"Oh, you're so going to regret that." Buffy punched her on the arm, and then she grew serious again. "Look, we already saved the world today. Can we be a tomorrow problem?"

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Always With You

by Dafmeister

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Dafmeister@hotmail.com