faith_5_by_5 (faith_5_by_5) wrote in city_limits, @ 2009-04-14 20:44:00 |
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Entry tags: | connor reilly, faith lehane |
Positive First Step
Connor ended up going back to Rhiannon's in the taxi he called for her, then slept on her couch that night. In the morning, he lingered long enough to make sure the Slayer was okay by herself, then went to reclaim his bike from Jackson Park. The day was overcast, like his mood, and he decided to walk so he could do some thinking. Lots of things were going on for him right now, and he was trying to keep a handle on all of it. For the most part he felt like he was doing an okay job, although he supposed it was all relative. He was going to have to help Rhiannon with this mysterious guy, though. Getting her powers back seemed like cake compared to his issues.
He got back to the apartment and found it empty, so he showered and changed clothes, then ate the rest of the pizza that was in the fridge while reading. He should probably give Clemence a call, see when she was available for dinner. This was how he maintained his equilibrium when he wasn't hitting things, by keeping himself occupied. No matter what form that occupation took.
The bruise on her lower lip wasn't gone yet, but it was pretty close. This was the first time in five days Faith walked without a noticeable limp. She'd considered looking up Alec, since she remembered him saying something about being a doctor, but the truth was Faith wasn't as bad off following her encounter with Grace as she had been when the vampire stabbed her in the stomach. A couple nights of laying low, letting the body mend itself, seemed to do the trick.
Besides, Faith had more important things to worry about.
For all her anger at Dr. Forbes -- for a number of reasons -- her visits to jail had shown Faith one thing. The Slayer didn't have to answer to the doctor for what she did to Jessica, but that didn't mean she got off completely scot-free. The Slayer still had to answer to Jessica, not to mention Connor. In many ways, she especially had to answer to Connor, because they had a trust and a friendship that Faith's selfish impulsiveness ruined.
Could they get that trust back? Probably not; in Faith's experience, lost trust never returned. Still, she owed him an apology, and as much as the thought terrified her, she'd have to take whatever venom he had to spew. Because she deserved it.
That was the scary part. For all her past sins, Faith never once had to answer to a friend. The Council, law enforcement, Buffy's social network who she thought never really gave her a chance ... not that answering to those entities wasn't important, but it didn't require the level of courage and personal investment answering to a once-trusted friend did.
Taking a deep breath, and noticing her left hand shaking, Faith forced herself to rap her knuckles on the door. She did so, glancing over her left shoulder.
God, she felt the urge to run ...
The Destroyer had finished the chapter he was reading when he heard the knock, and he checked his watch before getting up. The guy from FedEx had knocked twice at the apartment he shared with Francess with packages that belonged to the address across the street, and he had just about decided to tack up a sign outside saying 'Wrong Address' to forestall anymore mistakes. Apparently being able to read wasn't a requirement for delivering mail or something.
He took a minute to get a soda from the fridge, tossing out the pizza scraps before padding to the door. The can cracked open before he turned the handle, and he had it halfway to his mouth before he realized it wasn't Ian, the hapless FedEx worker. For a long minute, the Coke can hovered there, and then he took a long swig before wiping his mouth with the back of his free hand. "Oh."
He wished now it had been Ian.
"I heard you were out," he said to Faith, one hand coming to rest on the doorjamb. "There was an article in the paper." Given some time to calm down, his first instinct was no longer to lash out against the Slayer. Instead, the feeling had solidified into something that maybe didn't even have a name, something that was more intractable. Like his father, Connor could be very unforgiving. He could already feel his jaw setting.
"You come by to lecture me again about being a bad friend for not coming to see you behind bars?"
It took a deep breath for Faith not to lash out in self-protection. Logically, she realized she deserved shots like that. The mature thing to do was take those shots to the chin and bear them while trying to make her case. But even in her early 30s, Faith found that the mature thing to do wasn't always the easiest, and it took a lot of effort on her part to not let her instinctual reaction be the one he saw.
Because frankly, that would make things worse. The Slayer swallowed back a lump in her throat, hoping she wasn't trembling enough for Connor to notice. At this point, another 10 rounds with Grace seemed like a more appealing option.
"No," she let herself speak once a wave of anger passed. "I'm here to, uhh ..."
Another deep breath, Faith closed her eyes. Why was it so hard? It was just the word apologize. Was it really that hard to say? She'd certainly spent a good bit of her life apologizing for things she did. So what made now any different?
It all went back to Connor having been her friend and that trust being broken.
"... Apologize. I'm here to say I'm sorry."
His expression shifted a little, and the aluminum can crinkled in his strong fingers before he set it down on the table just inside the door. Looking for the calmest thing he could say, so he wouldn't lose what little equilibrium he'd managed to regain over the last couple of weeks.
"You just ... don't even know what you did to me, do you?" he asked evenly, his blue eyes coming to rest on Faith's face as if he'd never seen her before. "Nathan was one thing and I got past that because things happen after what you went through. But this was deliberate, something your brain decided was okay before your fists started moving. Tell me you at least thought about it that much."
As if that would make it okay, a modicum of forethought. But he wasn't yelling, and that was a start. A start at what, he had no idea.
Faith rose her shoulders, her arms extended as a sign of helplessness, a general cluelessness as to why she did what she did and the logic behind it all. Faith never had been good at that aspect of life, and that was probably another reason why apologizing was so hard. She deserved every ounce of anger and hate thrown her way over this, yet her very nature didn't allow her to take such things without lashing out in anger in return.
Even now, she could feel her pulse quicken and the urges return. Her fingers practically screamed to be curled into fists, her shoulders begging to lunge forward to attack Faith's verbal aggressor.
But again ... that wouldn't help, and she knew it. So another deep breath, the Slayer lowering her arms again. They slapped lazily against her sides, and Faith's feet rocked back and forth on the dingy carpet below her. Right now, Faith wasn't even sure she could stand on her own two feet correctly.
Few things in life were as humbling as knowing you hurt a friend so bad an apology wouldn't even fix things.
"I didn't think, okay?" she replied in as even a tone as she could muster, more pleading in her tone than anger. "And no, I don't know what I did to you. I suck at this sort of thing. I'm the shit when it comes to dustin' vamps and partyin' like I'm still 20, but ... real life shit? Friendships and all that? I fucking suck."
She took another deep breath, averting her gaze before adding, "I'm not just apologizing for Jessica. For before, too ... trying to tell you what being a good friend's like, when I'm not even sure.
"Guess there's a reason I've never had that many friends."
It would have been easy to feel sorry for her, to relent just because she looked like such a kicked dog standing there on the threshold of his apartment, but Connor was kind of beyond relenting at the moment. Whatever did or didn't happen with Jessica was beside the point; the point was, Faith violated his trust and abused his good feelings towards her. That he was able to speak calmly was a testament to his own new maturity, a hard-won wisdom that he'd worked for, shed blood to get. Now it was her turn.
"If I was not Angel's son, would you still want to be friends with me?"
Because he'd been thinking about that too, how much of this was the Slayer wanting to hang onto the last vestige of her relationship with his vampire father. "You'd rather have him but he's not here, so you're settling for me instead? Because I'm not going to be a proxy for him, not even for you. You're not so amazing that I have to be grateful you'll talk to me." Both of his hands were attached to the doorjamb now, fingers anchoring him to his spot on the floor as if she might try to enter the apartment against his wishes.
"Which of us are you friends with, Faith? Because Angel's not here. He dumped us both."
The urge for violence was gone; now, it was replaced by the desire to just leave. Not flee, run away from a problem so as not to have to deal with it, but so Faith wouldn't have to answer such a ridiculous, asinine question. How the fuck could Connor, with whom Faith fought side-by-side with on numerous occasions over the last year or so, ask something like that? There was no anger in Faith's heart over this, but ... more like disbelief.
She shook her head, not even sure what to say. She couldn't say no, because that just wasn't true. Connor was one of the first people to come see her when Grace put her in the hospital, a fact that hadn't been lost on the Slayer. That was why she'd wanted to help him when she last saw him and it was blatantly obvious something was troubling him. In a way, it felt like she was repaying the favor if she could've helped. But her lack of understanding led to a massive error in judgment, and it was becoming more and more clear to Faith this was a friendship she wouldn't get back.
Then again, if Faith said yes, would Connor believe her? No -- nor should he, considering the trust was gone. Faith could tell him until she was literally blue in the face how she would still be friends with Connor even without the connection to Angel, but she knew Connor well enough to know that once he made up his mind about something, changing that was almost impossible.
"Think what you want," she said with another shrug. "I came here to apologize and maybe see if one day you could forgive me. I didn't come here to go over your daddy issues. The answer to your question is yes, even if you don't believe it."
Faith left out the story of how she wouldn't have been around to be Connor's friend in the first place if not for Angel, mostly because she didn't feel like turning this into a full-blown argument. There were a lot of things Faith had to answer for -- breaking Connor's trust among them -- but her affection for the person who pretty much saved her life wasn't one of those things.
"All my friends came to see me when I got gutted," she said. "You comin' to see me meant the most, and it's cause of something you mentioned. We have a history, and last I checked, that was a good thing."
His mouth did a twisty sort of thing that was neither a frown nor a smile, and he said, "I think I'm allowed to ask. I know he's a big deal to you. He's a big deal to me, too. But he also gets in the way a lot of the time, even when he's not physically present. When somebody throws a shadow that wide, its hard to get out from under it."
He let go of the doorjamb, scratched the side of his neck. "I felt like I did it to her," he confessed. "That I should have known I'd get implicated because I always do, even though I never laid a hand on her and never would have. Things were precarious enough without the scales getting tipped so much against me."
The Destroyer let out a tired sigh, relaxing his grip. But he didn't move. "I don't know, I guess I don't know what to say right now," he admitted. "I'm not really mad anymore. It's more like I'm disappointed. In you, in myself for not realizing that you still have that hair-trigger thing going on. In myself again for not warning Jessica, because maybe I should have realized. This has been a hard couple of weeks, Faith. It was almost like I was in jail with you."
Her shoulders relaxed, and this time, Faith's sigh was one of tired resignation. Her second go-round in prison hadn't been nearly as bad as the first one, partly because of the time spent behind bars and partly because she already knew by and large what to expect. But Faith would've been lying if she said her own version of Oz, Volume 2 was one rockin' little party.
"Don't wish that on anyone," she muttered. "The food sucks, and I had to sit through a physical exam from an Army doc who wanted to make me her one-way trip to a promotion."
Besides, Faith spent enough of her life doing penance for the things she did; she didn't have the time or the patience to seek redemption for things she didn't do. It seemed like an awful waste of energy to bother with things like that. She forced herself to look at Connor, feeling something within her eyes that she couldn't quite identify.
"Sometimes even I don't know I've still got the hair trigger," she admitted. "Go long enough without a fuck-up, you think you got it under control."
"Yeah, I get that." He was thinking of the box factory, although that might not really qualify as a fuck-up. However much damage he could inflict in a place like that, it was against a willing opponent, someone who knew the stakes. A controlled outlet for his hostility, a pressure valve. Maybe Faith could use one of those too.
"So what's next?" He still hadn't invited her in; they weren't that close to being reconciled yet. "What's on the to-do list now that you're free again?"
"I dunno," she said truthfully, leaning against the doorway. "Maybe go around, tell everyone I'm free again. I still owe Jessica an apology."
She pointed at the fading bruise on her face, smirking a little. "Let my little 'Welcome Home' gifts from Grace heal up more."
He let himself smile, a ghostly thing that flitted across his face and disappeared like a fading sunbeam in late afternoon. And it felt almost too much like letting her off the hook to say it, but he had to tell her. He cleared his throat, looked down at the floor, raised his eyes again.
"She's done with me. Jessica. If it ever even got started, it was over the second I told her my parents were vampires. So I don't want you thinking you can 'fix' anything. You can apologize if you want, and I think it'll be good for you, but it's not going to fix what's really wrong. Are you hearing me? Because I know we don't always communicate that well, and maybe part of that's on me, but I want you to listen to me now. Please. All right?"
Faith nodded. "I beat on her face. I was wrong for that," she said. "I'm sorry for that, and she deserves to hear it."
The Slayer averted her gaze again, scratching her left arm. This hadn't been the disastrous shouting match she expected, but it wasn't all sunshine and puppy dogs, either. If Faith and Connor were ever going to be friends again, that was a long way off. Was this a good first step in that direction? She didn't know, and she wasn't sure if either or them knew at this point. Not to mention, there was no telling how long it would take.
"I'm sorry things went south with her. Seriously, man."
Connor smiled again, but this time it was sad. "Rhiannon said it was gonna be okay," he told Faith with a shrug. "I guess I have to trust in that, one day at the time. Nobody ever said life was supposed to be easy."
He let the silence hang between them, fishing for something else to say. "If you ever feel that hair-trigger slipping its leash, maybe you should try stepping into the ring. I know what you think of a place like that, but it's not what you think. It's helped me, kept my head on right ever since this has been going on. Might help you, too."
Well, if it helped Connor, then maybe it was worth at least a peek. Faith still wasn't sure how she felt about that sort of thing, but maybe Connor wasn't wrong; if her hair-trigger went off once after this long, there was no telling when it would happen again. Maybe the Slayer could use the outlet. She wasn't going to say yes right here and now, but she wasn't going to outright refuse, either.
"I'll keep it in mind," she said sincerely. "I'm ... glad you're doin' better. Hope we can run into each other again."
"Yeah, me too. Glad you're out of jail. Don't go tripping over anymore vampires too soon. It looks like that last one caught you a good lick or two. You oughta watch out for that."
It seemed like there was nothing left to say for the time being, and Connor took a step backwards into the apartment. He did feel better towards Faith, if not great, and it was a positive sign that she was admitting the things she'd done wrong. All wasn't forgiven, at least not yet, but it was a step in the right direction. He just wished he knew what came next.
"Take care of yourself, okay?"