Not Fade Away (Key of Life Remix) by Lar

i.

You don't know anymore where the memories that are real begin. Or where the ones they made up for you and everyone else end. The monks created so many of the false ones that you never trust anything to be genuine anymore. You look around you now, suspicious of the very universe.

You feel sixteen-times-a-thousand years old whenever you try and work it out. Your head hurts, your brain might burst with the effort of trying to unravel the threads. You stop trying, you really do. But the threads won't leave you be now that you've picked at them, and whenever you want to pretend you've given up on trying to work it out, it's still always there in your head. Whispers and shouts that make you desperate for something to make them shut the hell up.

Homework doesn't solve anything. You have straight A's, and Buffy smiles at you, and Willow tells you that you have a naturally brilliant mind. You smile back and nod and eat the ice cream they buy you, special treats for the little girl they will always see you as. The whispers are still there long after the tests are over with and the grades forgotten as something else crawls into town and tries to end the world.

You hate your life. You aren't even sure that it's yours to hate, but you do anyway. You'll always be something else underneath the skin that covers long legs and shockingly full breasts. You'll always be different. They are all part of the whole; they are all the insiders. They are all special, and you will never be good enough.

The books you steal from Giles to read talk about other Slayers. Struggling through the badly written pages distracts you, and you learn their names, and their stories, and their deaths. When you find the ones Giles has kept himself, you read things that you remember and things you don't. Your memories shift and slide to accommodate the new information. Angel and Darla, sketches in pen and ink. Spike, painted in words that make you run hot and cold. Drusilla, a name that you taste on your tongue and file away to use the next time you need something to hurt him with.

When you read about Faith, your world stops unraveling. You devour every word, burning them on the back of your eyelids. You listen, ears sharp whenever there's talk about LA and it doesn't take you very long to piece it together. It doesn't take very long to find out where she is, either. Willow should lock her private things with a spell instead of a password that's so easy to guess. A few tries, there's the email from Cordelia, everything in plain text on the laptop screen. You murmur, "Naturally brilliant mind" as you copy the address down in a notebook, purple ink on white sheets

Writing the letter is easy. Dropping it into the mailbox gives you a thrill so intense that you think about it that night when you touch yourself, fingers recalling the moment of release as the slide of fevered, slippery skin. You muffle your groans in your pillow and they all sound like Faith's name.

*
ii.

Every eye in the place is turned on you and the girl you're dancing with. You wear your sister's clothes and fill them the way she never did. Long legs topped by the suggestion of a skirt, a wisp of cloth tied around your neck and wrapped round your breasts, your hair a swirl of silk painted blue and red under the lights. Faith's leg presses between yours, leather against bare, sweating thighs and when you grind against her, she smiles with white teeth and the flick of her tongue visible. She lets you grind and rub there until you're sure you're going to come right here. Right now, with your body reduced to one sharp nerve, the backbeat of the music making your heart pound to its raging techno sound. When she spins you away, denying you the climax, your eyes flash in anger.

"About fuckin' time you let yourself go," she tells you over the chest-tightening throb of the music. "The good girl act's wearing really thin." She grins at you, all dark eyes and red lips, and when she shows her teeth, you shiver.

You never consider walking away.

*

iii.

You hate her for leaving. You hate her for making you need her and then walking out as if she didn't give a damn about what it was you'd gotten addicted to. "You don't have to go, you just can't stand the thought of Buffy getting all the credit."

She doesn't even look at you as she pulls on her jeans and zips them over bare skin and dark curls still wet from your mouth. "You know me, I'm always lookin' for the spotlight. Gotta stand up and show 'em that B's not the only hot chick with super powers around here." Black kohl smudges under her eyes make them look wild; they glitter when she pushes her hair back from her face so she can stare at you. "It's not like you never knew how it would be anyway, you grew up listening to the stories about me. Don't break out the whining, it was fun and now it's over."

She bends down, not looking at you anymore, and you feel like you're disappearing, another false memory that's blinking out of existence. You suck on your bottom lip and taste her there, girlsweat and wetness, tang of your own blood from biting your lip when she fucked you with her fingers and made you come until you were whimpering. You can't tell if your blood makes it more or less real, but the tightness in your chest seems to draw everything in to a pinpoint of focus, a dot of light that's going to be gone when she walks out the door.

"Liar," you whisper, rubbing your hand across your mouth to scrub away the taste of her but it won't come off.

When she opens the door, you tell yourself not to get up and beg her not to go. You picture yourself on the bed in the middle of the tangled covers, knees drawn up and long arms wrapped around them. You close your eyes and think that maybe if you wish for it hard enough, this will be one of those false memories, too. Or a bad dream, the kind that make you turn on the lights when you wake up, just to keep the dark away. You put your head down and press it hard against your knees, the bones there making your eyes pulse at the pressure, red and white and gray spots inside your head.

You don't see her looking back at you before she goes.

*

iv.

"You think you can just come back and we'll be the same?" Your chest is tight, familiar constriction around your heart. You feel so very young as you look at her, just a baby who doesn't know what to do with the emotions that are a thousand times bigger than anything else ever. "I'm not some pathetic little kid, I don't have to sit around waiting for you to decide you might want to have... whatever."

She looks old when she lifts her eyes to yours. Her body is cut and bleeding; the darkness under her eyes doesn't come from kohl this time. It's pain, and exhaustion, and you don't care anymore. You don't give a damn about girls who can go out and save the world, who can shut out everything and everyone whenever they feel like it. You're tired of being the one who asks for more, needing something that they don't have in them to give. Buffy doesn't have it, and Faith doesn't have it and you don't care anyway.

"It's not you didn't know how it would be." You throw her words back at her and turn around, chin lifted because you're not going to cry again.

Her hand on your arm is dirty, and strong, and when she pulls you back against her, you don't fight. That's not what you do, that's what she does. That's what they all do, and you don't. And you can't. You won't.

"Liar," she whispers against your hair, her mouth on your ear and her breath warm as it drifts inside.