Disclaimer: I don't own Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I'm not making any financial/material profit from this piece of fanfiction, and no infringement is intended. In other words, please don't sue.

Red Flower Sunset

She didn't believe in love. Love wasn't something you could believe in, it wasn't constant, it wasn't reliable, and you couldn't eat it in the morning. She believed in sex, because it was just a question of physics and movement, not that you could eat sex either.

She didn't love Robin, she knew that, and she wasn't really sure if she believed in him. He left the top off his toothpaste and always ate her crusts, and she knew she didn't love him. He stayed with her, maybe because he thought he could make her love him, but Faith didn't.

He was /hope/ for her, a last chance made physical, because she'd already had first, second, third chances, and how many chances did one girl get, after all?

He was good in bed, anyway. Not great, Faith would be willing to admit that, but good enough that she'd stayed for four and a half months, and then another one and a half because you couldn't let go of last chances that easily.

Then she'd met a girl in a bar, with messy black hair and exotic dark eyes, with a name like Peru or Peta, and not only was this girl hotter than hell, but it turned out she was another Slayer. Faith thought about taking her home, remembered the toothpaste and her last chance, and went home with the girl instead.

She came back to Robin smelling of sweat, sex, and other people's skin, and she watched the look in his dark, dark eyes, darker than Peru's but without that Slayer-fire. She stayed a week, figured she owed him that much consolation prize, and then she packed her bags and hauled the hell out of there.

She found quiet towns that had shit going for them, she moved in, she cleaned up, she moved on. All over the place she was bumping into other Slayers, girls with that same hard brilliance in their eyes, that same dangerous grace to their movements. All around the world, fighters, real fighters, were being born.

It made things interesting. Faith was a fan of interesting.

Somewhere, she realised that chances were what you made of them, and she bought a ticket to L.A because Buffy would always be in the hotspot for trouble. It was part of her nature.

They found each other in a bar, of all places, a far cry from meeting in some dark alley or cemetery. Faith grinned, said hi, bought Buffy a drink that was radioactive blue and had a pink straw in it. Buffy gave that odd little smile, half-shy, half-amused, half-wanting-to-tell-Faith-off, and took a few sips before she pushed it away.

Faith gulped down two mouthfuls, the burn of it still searing her throat when she leant forwards and kissed Buffy. She kissed with everything she had, tongue sliding hot and wet over Buffy's lower lip, and then she pulled away and moved out into the night.

It wouldn't work out anyway, but chance was what you made of it, Faith knew that now, and she bought a ticket out of L.A to go and find her own town somewhere. Somewhere that needed a little faith, somewhere that didn't have an angel watching over it.

She needed a home, a place of her own, somewhere that she could be not just Faith the vampire slayer, but Faith the good ol' gal as well. She found it in a dusty little village in the middle of nowhere, where the air smelt of heat and the apples were crisp and sweet against her tongue.

She got her own little shack, fixed it up under the cautiously watchful eyes of the village's menfolk, aware all the time that disbelief was turning to admiration when she wielded a chainsaw with deadly skill. Faith didn't tell them that the chainsaw was a weapon, and she knew weapons the way she knew the shiny-slick texture of the scar on her stomach.

She ate thick, gritty pieces of bread smothered in home-made jam and butter, and she hummed under her breath when she stood barefoot outside her shack, watching the sun disappear under the horizon so that she could stop being the good ol' gal and become the vampire slayer again.

Faith thought she might know what love was, that comfortable contentment curled in her stomach, a constant warmth that made her punches that much harder when someone- /something/- tried to threaten the serenity she was finding. Faith felt like a reborn buddhist, all cosmic harmony and something that wasn't delight, but was very close. If Faith had been into poetry, she'd have found her muse right here.

She made friends, not close ones, but people who smiled at her when she passed and who left fresh eggs and milk outside her door in the morning. They had some idea of what she did for them when the sun went down, and they never told her, but she had jam and eggs and bread and milk that was smooth and cool on her tongue when she drank it straight from the bottle.

She got postcards from the others, now that they knew where she lived, pictures of exotic places and people with messy scribbling on the back, a relief in its triviality. Faith tacked them to the inside of her door so that she saw them before she went to sleep, and immediately when she woke up. Sometimes, she wrote her own little notes, buying a piece of card and doing a messy doodle on the front with a little note of what it was supposed to be, and then filling up the other side with nothing in particular.

Faith had got very good at talking about nothing much, snapping strawberry gum when she leant over the counter to smile at the pouty-lipped boy behind it. He was slim and lithe and tanned brown brown brown from the sun, and Faith grabbed his hand when he passed her a pack cigarettes so she could count the freckles on the back of it.

He was great in bed, teasing and smouldering and all sorts of other fiery words, and Faith liked the fact that his skin tasted like spices and sweat and sunsets. Three months in, and she should have invited him to come and live with her, but she didn't. She bought cheap cigarettes from him and let him light them for her, sometimes kissing him, sometimes just walking out the door. She liked the predictability of the uncertainty.

Sometimes, when she wrote her notes, Faith noticed that she wanted to use the word 'home'. She had found one, after all, in a dusty little village that was too small to go on a map, with a boy who had dark eyes and a dirty smile, with crumpled cartons of cigarettes and sticky jam-fingers, a place where she could be two things at once and be both of them together, and for the first time in a very long time, Faith had found another very important quality.

Peace.