homeTitle: Debt to Society: Faith
Author: Green
Pairing: none, but mentions some f/f
Rating: R
Summary: Faith thinks about prison, Sunnydale, her dreams, and what's to come.
A/N: Vague spoilers for S7 of BtVS, spoilers for S3 of AtS. Thanks to Beamer and Sunlit5 for their quick and relatively painless beta reading.***
Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. - Janis Joplin
***Faith
It isn't too bad here, really. I mean, I've been in worse places, had to live with people ten times more violent and vile than these women.
I don't really have what you would call friends here. Actually, I've never really had a whole lot of friends in my whole life, but that's just me. I have trouble getting close to people, trusting people. I know that, I understand it now. Now that I've had time to think. God, have I ever had time.
Being locked up is sort of how I would imagine summer camp to be. That is, if summer camp involved body cavity searches.
Like I said, I don't really have any friends here, but there are a few women I've gotten to know good enough to talk to, to swap out some candy bars with. Snacks, they're like currency here. In all the prison movies, you always see people buying favors with cartons of cigarettes, but here on the inside, it’s all about the Little Debbies. And stamps. Hell, a book of stamps will get you just about any favor you want.
Nobody really messes with me too much anymore. Every once in a while, someone will get transferred here from some other joint, and she'll try to be all badass and decide I'm small enough to bully. That doesn't last long; it only takes one time for her to learn. I never use my full strength; hell, I don't want to kill anyone. Else. But they get the picture real quick, and then they don't bother me anymore.
So I haven't made any long lasting attachments or anything. No soul mate, girlfriend, or even a friend, really. Sure, every now and then I have a "date", but it doesn't mean anything. I'm not doing that again, that thing where you put your heart out and have it stomped on. So what if the girls I hit on all look like her, it doesn't mean anything. I'm totally over her.
When I first got here, I was one of the youngest. Haven't been here all that long, but now, I feel like one of the oldest. Seeing the younger ones come in, it always gets to me how innocent they look. It's relative, of course. Innocence. Been a while since I've seen something *completely* pure, so anything that isn't black and evil can look innocent to me.
But the girls that come in, most of them have been in juvie before this, and they expect it to be the same. As easy as a little day trip. They learn real quick, after they’ve been treated like criminals.
But it really isn't so bad in here. I mean, if it was *really* bad, I could leave. I could bust right through this cage and run so fast and so far that they would never catch me. But I'm not doing that. I'm paying for what I did. Or at least that's the idea. For real, it doesn't seem like I'm paying for anything. I've had it worse than this when I was free. I've slept in cold, hard places and I've eaten cold, hard food and cold hard people have pushed me around. Damn, when I think about all that, this seems like a fucking day spa.
I dream every time I close my eyes now. Not just Slayer dreams, although God knows I have enough of them, especially lately. We'll talk about those later.
Sometimes at night, I dream of her. I dream of her soft blonde hair and her oh-so-innocent looking green eyes, of her sweet little pink mouth, and that tiny little body that could move like a cat in the jungle. Things would get to her, and she'd be wound up so tight that you would think she was gonna just bust at any second. I tried to get her to relax, tried to show her how to just let go... I think I was getting there too, 'til I went and fucked it all up. Nothing new there, I shoulda been expecting that, really. But in my dreams, she's smiling at me, and laughing, dancing, holding my hand... In my dreams she trusts me with her heart. That's how I know that they're dreams.
Sometimes at night, I dream of Angel. I dream of mournful brown eyes that see right through me, that broad, hard chest (what a hottie, that one) that he held me against when I was raging and trying so desperately to die. He's a safe place, and I still don't know what to do about a man that's a safe place. Course, I use the word man in a loose way. In one of my dreams about Angel, he's a priest and I'm a nun, and he's beating me with a cat-o-nine-tails. Don't try to tell me what that one means, I really don't want to know.
I have lots of dreams about SunnyD. I guess it's cause that's where it got good, and where it turned bad. That's where I found love, for the first time in my life. Not just her, even though she's the one I always think about when I hear the word love these days. I found a love in my Boss, and it was... I don't know how to explain it. For the first time in my life, I had a man look at me and talk to me and love me without wanting my body. I would have done anything for him. Kill for him, plot the apocalypse with him... anything, just so I wouldn't disappoint him. So I wouldn't lose his love, his faith in me. He treated me right, too. He even wanted to help me hurt B, the way she had hurt me. At least, the way I imagined she had, at the time. Looking back on it all, I guess it hadn't gone down the same way I saw it. I made some major fuck ups, but I can't change any of that now.
So where was I at? Oh yeah, Slayer dreams. I still have them. More now, since this summer. I wonder all the time why I still have the dreams. I know I'm still a Slayer. I know it isn't something you can just get rid of. But you would think that those Powers that Angel goes on and on about would realize that I can't do a thing about prophetic dreams while I'm in the Women's Correctional Institution, and they would stop sending these damn things to me. For a while I had dreams about B dying, and I felt this electricity run through me, and it was like *I* was dying. Sometimes, I still feel her. I think I can feel her sadness, and her Calling weighing on her like cement blocks. Maybe it's just me hoping to feel *something* with her. But then there are the new dreams. Bad dreams, dark and shifty, like a big black shiny snake crawling around in my brain. I see these girls that run and run away from something that always gets them in the end. These girls, they feel familiar, but I don't know why. These nightmares, prophecies, whatever, tell me that something is there, something is coming. "From beneath you it devours," and doesn't that sound like a fucking riot? They scare me, the dreams do, but I don't know what I'm supposed to do about them. I wrote a letter to Wesley, since he's the closest thing I have to a Watcher these days, but he hasn't answered me. I wrote to Angel, too, but I haven't heard from him in ... almost a year now? More? God, its been a while. He used to come by at least once a month, but that stopped right after the whole baby thing. A vampire with a baby. That's just... weird, but if anyone deserves a kid, it's Angel. I hope he's having fun with the kid. He should be walking now, saying his first words... I've been around enough babies to know all about them. Never a shortage of babies in those stop-over houses or foster homes.
If the whole Chosen One gig hadn't done a thing but take me away from the child welfare system, it was worth it.
So anyway, this is supposed to be me paying my debt to society. I'm starting to think it's all just bullshit. I'm not doing the world any good by sitting here, I'm not giving back whatever I took. I'm not making anyone happy or safe, sitting around reading these trashy romance books or playing basketball in the yard. How is this the right thing for me to do? I know it's what she wanted, what she expected, what *she* would do, I just don't know why. Couldn't I be paying my debt by Slaying, making the world safer, giving people a better chance of living? How the hell is me being here changing a goddamned thing?
One of these days, I'm just gonna get fed up with it all, and bust my way out of here. But right now, it’s like a net under me. I don't have to go out there and hope to hell I'm doing the right thing, and I don't have to be scared that I'm not gonna keep it together, and hurt someone again. Maybe it's safer for the world if I stay right here. Maybe it's safer for me if I don't have to face those people... the ones that reached out to me, the ones I hurt. I think about Xander, coming to me, telling me he could help. So damn naive, that one. He couldn't reach me, 'cause he didn't understand it. None of them did, nobody but Angel. Some days, when I'm feeling it all the most, I wish he would have just killed me instead of making me face all this shit. Some days, I say, but those days are getting to be less and less, and they don't come up one on top of the other like they did at first.
I don't want to get myself killed anymore, I just want to figure out how to live with all this shit smeared all over my soul.
**End**