Rumble thy Bellyful by Hth Security at Sunnydale General Hospital was just about as fucking poor as you'd expect. She had time to see that stupid, badly dressed chickie's curiosity turn to fear, and then to terror, and Faith smiled at her before she slammed her head against the wall. The plaster cracked, an impact web tracing its way out from the place where her skull had connected, and she slumped down to the floor. Faith needed the clothes. Even Faith didn't exactly know why she kept hitting her. Maybe because her clothes were such crap, and now Faith was stuck with them. Or maybe not. Maybe there was no reason, just the impact of knuckle on cheekbone, nails on lips, Faith's hard, thin shoulder coming up and under abruptly to impact the girl's brittle sternum. On the way out of the hospital, curiosity did make her stop briefly to look at the clipboard chart at the foot of her bed. No change, whatever, whatever, IV drip, medical bullshit. She flipped back to the back, searching for her name. Something better than Bed 119. They had to call her something, didn't they? They weren't allowed to just call her nothing, were they? Assholes- Here. Faith Summers - Summers? She tore the sheet off and ripped it in half - four pieces, eight, sixteen, thirty-six - no, thirty- fuck. *Fuck.* FUCK! No goddamn right. Not your goddamn wife, you dumb, clumsy fucking whore. Another thought softened her anger just a little - Joyce. Maybe it had been Joyce, not wanting her to be a Doe, nobody's kid with nobody's name. That would be kind of... typical. Her head hurt, and as she passed a hand across her eyes, it was impossible not to see a door swinging open, warm golden light from inside and the smell of cider and ham, colored lights blinking off snow from a can and Joyce's soft eyes and slow, peaceful hands - and the mistletoe at the foot of the stairs, and the softness of chaste, closed lips against hers- *Wake up, girly. Run.* ***** //Run faster run lost no time never mind night too short run now sound of coyotes little sisters I can sing but not tonight full moon time to fight sing another time I sing like that beautiful I howl words I'm not your sister I eat I fight run sing your names later and you'll be famous they'll listen and hear the night and the kill and how beautiful you were how beautiful I was am tonight full moon bloody run nowhere stop til dawn animal singer woman I Run Run// ***** She flagged a car over on the highway, but at the last minute she decided she'd been down long enough, and getting into a little metal box sounded like no fun at all, so she dragged the driver out through the passenger door instead and pushed her down into the ditch, way more scared than hurt, and took her purse off the floorboard. She flung the keys out into the woods and ground the woman's cell phone under her ill-fitting sneakers. That should keep her here for a little while, long enough for Faith to put some distance between herself and the scene. Heading north, up the coast. She knew her way in this direction, at least up until UC Sunnydale, where she used to hunt. The action was better up this way, and that was how they both liked it - Buffy staying close to home, one eye on the Hellmouth and one eye on her posse, while Faith took out up the road, right outside the circle of light where the vampires gathered, hungering to get in closer to the Mouth, but too afraid to leave their cushy gigs eating off the transient college population. The best and brightest of them found a way in, cronies of Wilkes or the Master or who the hell ever was lording it over Sunnyhell's vamps that week, but the rest just hovered around the outskirts, squabbling and posturing among themselves. They weren't canny like the players in Sunnyhell. They just ate and fucked and came out to get dusted by the Slayer, like rats, like bugs. Faith went north toward campus when she needed exercise, needed to work something off, needed to get her kill ratio up. She knew the area, and she could lose herself there, until she decided where to go next. The good Samaritan in the Camry had a decently well-stocked purse - forty bucks in cash, a Visa Platinum, several department store cards. The usual girly-girl palette of lipsticks, some other shit that Faith dumped. She took off the shoes, which fit so bad that it was hurting worse to wear them than it would to hoof it, kept the microcassette recorder, ate the tube of Lifesavers - goddamn, but she was beginning to get hungry - and hung onto the ID, too, in case she found someone who could alter the picture. Samantha Fletcher, a reasonable, no-comment kind of name. Fifteen miles was a hike on foot, but Faith had made it before in just over three hours. Of course, that wasn't after coming out of a coma. She was slower now, deliberately. Saving her strength - and anyway, it was early. It would barely be two by the time she made the Quad. Early, but still not so early that there was much open by the time she made it to civilization. What kind of goddamn college town was this, anyway? There was a BreakTime, and she bought coffee and a bag of Doritos there. The fag at the counter looked like he was going to complain about her tracking in mud and blood on her bare feet, but Faith gave him a look that made him think harder about that. On her way out, she noticed that someone had left a car unlocked. Looking around quickly to establish that no one was watching it very carefully, Faith opened the door, popped the trunk, and took the tire iron. Good college kids, smart college kids. Daddy's lecture on road safety paid off. Now she had cash and a weapon, and she could go anywhere she wanted, anywhere in the world. Free. Faith crouched down by the gas pumps to eat her chips, finally not too distracted by the question of personal maintenance to think her situation through. Wilkes was dead - if she hadn't been so groggy, she would have realized from the beginning that she never would have been in some public hospital not being watched by a bored nursing staff if he were alive. That thought made it hard to swallow the sharp corners of chip for a minute. Dead. Contemplatively, she sucked the orange dye off her fingers. Not good. Poor bastard. Must have come as quite a surprise to him. He'd always had such confidence in himself - in both of them. Pretty naive, for a demon-tainted dictator. People always let you down, even yourself. *Up one day, down the next. That's the spin of the wheel, girly-girl. Live it up while you're on top, and never be too proud to keep your head down when it isn't your day. Ride it out, the good and the bad.* Pretty dire straits, when she was actually looking back on her mom's advice with some mild appreciation. So Wilkes was dead, which meant that Buffy was probably alive - unless she'd gone down in some wildly bizarre kamikaze dive. Tendrils of her sickness-dreams brushed at the edge of Faith's memory. White drift, airy floating in the sunshine, bed and Buffy and blood that poured warm and sensual down her belly and between her legs. Just as tenuous, tendrils of the past. Buffy, with those wide, serious eyes and the way she giggled silently against Faith's thigh. Giles, who always seemed so amused by Faith and made her feel kind of witty now and then. Angel, everyone's big, *big* brother. Willow, with her weird, twisty, smart way of talking, and Xander with his great shoulders and stuttering self-consciousness. Joyce, with her mom clothes and mom perfume and raised, reproving mom eyebrows. They might all be still alive. She could see them. Warm blood, thick and trickling down her cunt and legs. The serrated edges of her own knife chafing at the softest parts inside her, until Faith could feel herself unraveling from the inside out, feel her death turning her whole body into juice and meat before her Slayer strength would allow her to let go. They could kill her. If they knew she was coming. ***** //Home home. Played here sang here ate here died here. Almost died. Pain pain pain. Slept for many days. More than one moon, passed by, lost, no songs coming from this ripped throat. Slinking away to sleep, pass the days and nights until pain faded into forgetfulness. Hunting, sleeping, hiding, from the alpha. Alpha male with alpha female. Should be, best way. He is mad, he is sick, he is broken, he is blind. He is silent, and when he howls it is agony music, pain worse and worse like a cut that gets sick and full of poison. I could have made him sing. Alone now. True alpha, only alpha, alpha bitch. The male is no good. He hunts his own kind, cannot be trusted. Hunt me, hurt me, left me dead. Home home. Home but I do not smell him. Strange feeling, happy and not. So beautiful, my own kind, eyes full moon pale, hands long and broad with music, head busy with many-scented thoughts. Miss his smell, long for him, my alpha, my mate, my male. Fear him. Almost died, pain pain, sleeping and eating and hiding from his fury. Stay away, never see him again, must fear of pain and killing much fear pain and teeth and hating. Home. Played here ran here sang here fucked here died here loved here came and became here. My land, my earth, my sight of moon over ocean, night over tide, blood underfoot, my ground, my run. True alpha, only one, returned// ***** No vampires. No kill. Belatedly, Faith remembered: she didn't do that anymore. Vampires weren't her problem now, and Slaying wasn't her job. Leave that to Buffy, sad and sanctified Buffy Summers, Princess Courage and Heroine of the World, with her cherry-flavored lip gloss and her elaborate guerrilla strategies and her soft and diffident fidgeting and those doomed, impassioned affairs that she never could lay off of. Maybe they softened the blow of knowing that a Slayer's clock was always ticking. Not Faith's, though. Buffy might die brave and pretty, but Faith would win out by sheer quantity of life - not to mention quantity of pleasures. Pleasures. Who the hell cared what Buffy's new pleasures were, anyway? Grief and frustration, probably, exactly what had flipped Buffy's switch all along. This new jarhead would be more of the same, one way or another. One more pretty face, seduced by Nuestra Senora de Sunnydale and doomed to live horny and hopeful forever after, dreaming of a stone killer wrapped up inside a Homecoming queen wrapped up inside Jesus fucking Christ's second coming. She didn't deserve it - not Mr. Aryan America's well-cut body, or Angel's dark, roiling heart, or Faith's - any of Faith. She'd done nothing but torture Faith since the beginning of their relationship, and no amount of mistletoe or sisterhood or sweaty, screaming, muscular sex could make up for the way that Buffy wasn't dying inside right now, wasn't being slowly consumed by the fear and desperate violence of their last moments together the way Faith had been even at the bottom of her coma. Buffy deserved to suffer. It was as clear as that. Faith was in that serene state of absolute confidence when she found herself in a park just after dawn, where a girl with short, cruel scars all over her neck and stomach was pulling purple velvet pants over her thong underwear. A sign from God if ever Faith had seen one. ***** Veruca could smell rain on the wind that whipped the short straw of her hair against her cheeks, and as her vision and clear head slowly came back to her, the subtly shifting images in front of Veruca's eyes resolved into leaves being bent low and fog picking up and rising off the ground. She didn't have much memory of the night before - she never did, in the morning - but there was still a crystalline purity to Veruca's feelings that no human should possess, and there was no mistaking the bones-and-tooth contentment that verified what her blood-caked fingernails and slightly swollen belly had already informed Veruca. It had been a good night. The smell of human reached Veruca faintly, drowning in the moist smell of the fog - two separate scents, but one source. Veruca paused in dressing and closed her eyes, trying to isolate whatever it was that her lingering canine sense was picking up on. It moved with preternatural silence, and it was upon Veruca the moment she let her eyes fall shut. The smell of it and the heat of it enveloped her suddenly, thin, strong arms pinning Veruca firmly. For a moment, Veruca was hopelessly trapped, snared against a body that was damp and breathing sharply, and she was torn between twisting in on herself to make a defensible ball of dead weight and lashing out, ripping through the soft, slippery flesh of her attacker. Out of nowhere, their silent grappling stopped, and Veruca's situation came home to her in brilliant clarity. There was a girl, no older than Veruca, with stringy dark hair and hollow, haunted, beautiful eyes, who had Veruca by one arm and around the ribcage, and she looked both tired and worried. Somehow, though, Veruca didn't think that meant this girl was presenting any weakness that she could exploit. The stillness became more and more unnatural; the girl's arm was tense around Veruca, almost as though she were warning Veruca against struggling - or clinging to her. Lulled by the interlocking rhythms of their sharp breathing, Veruca began to find her rational, human center, and to realize that they had more than scent and instinct with which to communicate. "I'm Veruca," she said in a dry, taut voice. "I'm a singer." "I need your clothes." The other girl's voice was just as rough and stressed as her eyes, just as dogged and hopeless. "Okay." Gingerly, Veruca brought her hand down and pushed against her captor's thigh, trying to lever herself more or less gently out of the girl's now-wooden grip. "Whatever." It surprised her and didn't surprise her when a hand, superficially frail and yet eerily strong, descended over Veruca's breast. She moaned gently, and the shove against the dark girl's leg turned into a tight grip on her sweatpants, and then into a caress. ***** At first Faith thought the skinny chick would fight her, and she was ready for that -- looking forward, even, to a fight that would tone her up, help her work her kinks out before she had to face a real opponent. Instead she was liking it, or at least Faith guessed so. She was moving a little, but not struggling, and her nipples were hard between Faith's fingers, although that probably had something to do with the cold air, too. She was built as differently from - from anyone Faith had fucked in a long time as humanly possible, ribs like piano keys connecting narrow shoulders to in-swept curve of pelvis. Anorexic little dyke. She probably dried herself into a bloodless scaffolding of bones and neediness, just hoping to look like some indie princess fresh from Lilith Fair. She'd probably never had those twitchy, chip-painted fingers on anything as sublime as Buffy Summers' soft, round tits and ass. But that was okay. She looked a little more like Faith, even if her body was shaped to the whims of fashion instead of for more efficient ass-kicking, and anyway Faith wanted the fondness for Buffy's body that lingered on a skin and bones level to go away. Maybe a spikier, gristlier, less voluptuously warm and pliant kind of fuck would...wake Faith up. And it was getting better. The more Faith touched her, the more natural it started to feel - the small, sharp-nippled breast, the ladder rungs of her ribs, the way the ridge of her thong stood out under the texture of those cut-velvet leggings, the tendons through her neck. Yeah, Veruca the singer was good enough to fuck, good enough under Faith's hands that she could linger here for a few more minutes, just to see if Veruca tasted like she felt. Casually, reveling in the strength that was quickly returning to her in full force, Faith slung Veruca the singer away from her, flat against a tree. Faith rounded and fixed her in her hunter's gaze. The foot that snapped out and caught Faith in the kidney, propelling her backwards instead of forwards, was not only unexpected, but had more force behind it than Faith ever would have guessed. "Bitch!" It burst out of Faith, more a vocalization than a word, and it seemed so expressive and so satisfying that she had to say it again. "Bitch!" she snarled, and she had to go into full kill mode, her reflexes snapping out of her control and into the warrior's trance, in order to block Veruca's escape. She crumpled under Faith's weight, but there was no sound of bones cracking or popping out of place, and she grunted but did not scream and did not stop struggling. She was stronger than Faith ever would have guessed, and if the sharp light of dawn hadn't been sparking down through the dark stormclouds, Faith might have been thinking vampire. When she grabbed Veruca's hair near the roots and she didn't flinch, Faith wrenched it harder, hearing her own heartbeat rabbiting nervously in her ears. What was this girl-thing underneath her? Should she screw it or kill it, and was it exciting or irritating that she didn't just break under Faith? It - she - was twitching, her legs rubbing cricket-like up and down against Faith's. Her eyes, which had been slitted down to gold-hazel spears, opened gently, and she met Faith's gaze just as the first drops of rain fell, invisible in the fog. "Bitch," she whispered, but not as though she was saying it at Faith. Almost like she was agreeing. Faith tasted rain and blood and rot in Veruca's mouth as she kissed it, and her hands were weirdly gentle on Faith's matted hair. As she pulled the stretch pants down Veruca's angular hips, Faith paused to run a thumb over the white scars that shone like rivulets of milk or inlays of pearl across her torso. "What happened here?" "My - boyfriend." "Oh. A kicked bitch." She was disappointed, just a little. Veruca was a spoiled kill now; strong as she was, Faith wasn't the first to put her down, and that took all the new shiny off of it. But Veruca looked serene, or at least stoic. "It wasn't his fault. He was sick." "That's everybody's fucking excuse." "He really was." ***** Sick, bloated on the endless, bilious, billowing black clouds of thought in his mind. Filling him, black daylight, treacherous sun-blindness, heady, crystalline, calcified, cartilegeous ideas. An animal, cage-crippled. A man, froth-blooded from infinite cannibal ecstasies in infinite killing fields of dream. God, how she had wanted him. What had she loved behind those gunmetal eyes? The music. The wolf. The illness. Yes. All of these things. And there were visions behind the dark girl's terrible, infested eyes, but they ran without a soundtrack, just the soft flicker of a movie projector in someone's basement, frame after frame of things that never should have been filmed. No melody, no lyric, no transcendence. Snuff and stalkings and fantasies of every black kind on an endless, endless loop. Veruca sang, a very slender and insubstantial string of cry, as the girl's fingers touched her deep, parting her, making her wet and tense. Rain splashed on her teeth, in her eyes. Thunder sang back. Unexpectedly, she leaned down and put her mouth on Veruca's. Not human enough to be a kiss - were either of them human? Sick - so much sicker than the pheremonal need for her touch that had so agitated the male. Veruca tasted pain on the tip of her seducer's tongue, and rape and cruelty, but all of those tastes were so carefully preserved in the hard set of the girl's wide, generous mouth that Veruca might have been eating violence that was days or years old as easily as fresh. With a hand deep in that long hair, Veruca caressed the finer, shorter hairs at her scalp, petting her from beneath the brown coils. The taste of her was venomous, but her weight on Veruca, pushing her into the softening ground, was an uncomfortable pleasure. Each light flick of the dark girl's thumb against her clit seemed to pierce, until it was easy to imagine that the warm wetness Veruca could feel like steaming rain, making her cunt slippery and her legs tremble, might taste sweet and dark like blood. She howled, twisting her hands tighter into that dry, soft hair. The language and logic of humans drowned in the mud welling beneath Veruca's back, leaving nothing but nerve endings and a nauseous fear like a craving as the girl's mouth closed on her throat. Veruca had been here before, on the ground, throat bared, a kicked bitch, slave to unreasonable desires and the absurd but unshakable dream that one day it would all come to this, hunger then satiation, run then rest, want then wanted in return, life then death. Wax and wane, rise and set, bleed and stanch, wolf and woman, the nature of Veruca's body and being, someday, someday the nature of her life, too. It wasn't about murder, or magic, or any other human illusion, but about the things that Veruca knew in fluid and bone: water and parasites and change - tide and life and time - the things she was constructed out of. The bitch she was, the woman she always had been. Thunder and orgasm and this woman's strong hand, and now the contractions, the cycles were coming closer and closer together. High then low, pain then pleasure, woman then animal, and the girl's tongue sweeping long and thorough all over Veruca's swollen cunt as she convulsed, each orgasm passing rhythmically into a softer, deeper one. Song, song, song moving through her, so many songs blossoming in her warm, wet animal mind that Veruca knew she would be writing them down for days. She'd need another band, she'd make another life, she'd live forever because she had learned the secret of saying yes instead of no, every time, every single time. ***** Faith knelt up, and surveyed the wreck she'd made of not one, but two sets of clothes that weren't hers. Wasn't that just the way - *spin of the wheel, girly-girl....* *Thanks, Mamma, thanks a whole hell of a lot. You always kinda saw me this way, didn't you? Down in the mud, doing some stranger. Your girly-girl, your filthy slut. Just like you. *I had a girl of my own, you know. A nice girl, the kind you hated, with fake-blonde hair and cherry-flavored lip gloss and a closet full of shoes. You said that kind would always look down on us. *You win, okay? You fucking win. Now get out of my head.* There was a thrum of erotic thrill in Faith's belly, low down. And maybe she felt a little sweet on Veruca right now, looking at her all lazy and satisfied, sprawled out without minding the rain. Pretty lips, cute little chick, even if she was skinny and probably worthless, like most people were. But Faith had a life, places to go, and her impatience was outpacing her half-hearted desire to lie down and let this unknown girl finish her off. It wouldn't be enough, anyway. It never was anymore. She put on Veruca's clothes, which were muddy and cold, but at least had been cool once, which was more than Faith could say for the last set. Veruca stayed on her hands and knees to get dressed, not exactly in fear, but more like she was just comfortable low to the ground, using her whole body to move herself around. That was good; Faith liked to see that. A girl who could put her back into life. "Not going to kill me or anything, are you?" Faith had to laugh; it was such a weird thing to say, and yet so totally reasonable, all things considered, and the way she said it was so bored and flippant. "Got nothing against you, girlfriend," Faith reassured her, just as casually. Veruca knelt up too, wearing nothing but the sweatpants and a bra still unhooked behind her. There was something serious in her eyes now, a sharpness that reminded Faith of - a lot of people. Certain vampires, certain stepfathers, the boss, Buffy in the right mood. Killer instinct. "I've come here to kill someone. You have, too, haven't you?" Well, had she? Had she? Maybe. Nah. Well...maybe. Faith didn't like this blank spot inside her, this indecisiveness. Well, did she want Buffy & Co dead or didn't she? Yes or no, yes or no, look at you, you stupid bitch, *move.* You're gonna get yourself killed, dithering back and forth. Thinking too hard. Don't know. Don't know. Oh, that's bad, real bad. Bad way to be, not knowing. Faith didn't like it at all. She frowned intensely at Veruca. "None of your damn business." It didn't seem to offend her. "We could hunt together." "Hunt." What a beautiful word. It made everything seem so...natural. "Packmates." Crazy. Faith had been down this road before, best girlfriend, someone at her back. It had been good, and it had been hell. But hell just because it was fake, because she had been on Buffy's A list, but never in a class by herself. Not like Buffy had been for her. This deal would be...more fair. Faith was the stronger of them, but Veruca seemed to have a game plan, seemed to know where she was going. It could be a good deal. "Who are you...hunting?" Her eyes narrowed, yellowed a little, like a wild thing. "A witch. Willow. She made my mate sick, made him run away." Willow.... Faith could see the girl in her head, a ball of stubbornness and clumsiness and petulant self-importance. One of the ones who'd shared the A list with Faith, stuck fast in Buffy's orbit, thinking she was smart, thinking she was the best, the chosen. Maybe the only person in the world who'd ever loved Buffy and gotten loved back in exactly the same way, the way she'd asked for. And even though the contempt and the bitterness churned through Faith almost palpably with each loud pump of her heart...well, how could you see Willow without the silver-gold watermark of Buffy behind her, the Buffy Summers Seal of Approval? She was in. She was one of Buffy's homegirls, and Buffy would die to defend her. She'd kill to defend her, that was for damn sure. Faith's eyes suddenly focused in almost preternaturally clearly on Veruca the Singer, kneeling patiently in the rain, waiting for an answer. Asking for her, wanting something from Faith and no one else. Buffy could off this chick without breaking a nail. She'd do it, too, if she knew there was a killer in there, nursing a grudge against her Thelma, against any of the Scooby Gang. Faith slipped her hand gently down Veruca's hair. She was cool. She was cool enough, compared to most of the world's bleating sheep. Too damn bad, really. Her skull split with a sharp crack, not the first but the second time that Faith hit her with the tire iron. Turned out the girl was strong, but not all that fast. Working alone wasn't the greatest gig ever - Faith would be the last person to lie to herself about that, even if she might to someone else, just for the sake of reputation. But there were things you could share with a girlfriend, a packmate, and things you never could *ever* give away even the tiniest piece of. Things that had to be yours for you to keep on going, to keep on being somebody at all. Things like Buffy Summers' hatred. She left the singer's body in the woods, and headed back into town. The rain seemed colder, her skin clammier. *The things I do for you, B. Goddamn.* Thunder, thunder and morning, and nobody's child with nobody's name. But she was the bitch here, the monster of the week in not-so-sunny Sunnydale, CA. So that was something.