JEWEL TONES – DIAMOND
(Five Faiths That Never Were, Part 1)


She still loves the hunt. Loves the way bruises flower beneath the skin in a rainbow of pain and color. She relishes the sound of weapons sliding into flesh, puncturing, piercing, and parting the way with a shower of warm crimson or dark ash. Most of all, perhaps, she loves the bloom of pain beneath her own skin; fireworks, thin copper wire, explosions of agony—any shade across the spectrum will do. She adores them all. They make her hiss, they make her bleed and writhe. When she fights and arcs like a sailfish, defiant beneath the moonlight, that's when she can feel the beat of her heart, the song in her blood.

That's how she knows she's still alive.

If once her heart were a fire, it is a cinder now, blackened ash curled round the edges of a hollow place that whispers with ghosts and speaks of fate. Buffy, Xander, Angel, they all haunt the hallways of her mind now, bitter memories tainted with the distance of time. They cannot touch her anymore, their golden smiles and kind hands. She is the last of them, for ten years running, and she is the best.

Her body is whip thin with muscle, face gaunt and shadowed with horrors of the past that only hint at the reality of what she has faced. Slayer hands still move and strike, Slayer legs still run and kick. A touch slower than she used to be, but still the most effective killing machine the Council has ever witnessed.

Almost thirty, and her time is almost up. She prays for it to end soon.

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Wesley had thought he'd known better, had thought that with her help they could catch Angelus and turn him back into Angel. Wesley had been wrong. Now they are all dead and only she and Angelus remain; two eternal adversaries caught in a never-ending hunt. Had Wesley known the madness they would unleash upon the world when they brought Angelus out? Had they imagined this world, where the sun never shines and vampires and beasts rule the earth like the dinosaurs before them?

Fools.

But she had been just as much a fool. She had followed Wesley's plan, and when that didn't work she'd made one of her own. Nothing had worked. Nothing had even seemed to make a dent. It had taken her days to escape Angelus' hold, and in that time she'd watched as he'd killed them, every last one. He'd made sure that she'd watched, had done it especially for her entertainment, in fact. And he hadn't just killed them, oh no. That would have been mercy. He had toyed with them, cut into them just a little at a time, made them suffer and cry and beg before they finally died.

Angelus loves the beauty of blood and bruises, too.

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Feet pound against the dew-slick grass and the stake in her hand feels good, ragged splinters digging deep into flesh. Pain has become the definition of her world. It no longer hurts her from the inside, oh no. She walled away her dreams and heartaches years ago, scattering them like dust into a tiny box and dumping them into the deepest well she could find. In her mind there are only icebergs, and her heart is a frozen diamond of rivers, life stilled forever by the cold of her soul. But the stinging pain in her hand, the stitch in her side, these things are vivid and alive with color. They have texture and significance. And soon they will shape a world where she is, for just an instant, again a girl with purpose in her life. For just that split-second, they will give her meaning.

There was a time when she might've questioned if that was enough. Now she simply knows that it's all she's got.

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The ones he'd turned… she'd had to see to them herself. Cordelia, Buffy, Dawn. Always the women. Her own hand had made each killing strike, and as the light went out forever in each of their eyes, her own light had died in turn until there was nothing left.

Her world had narrowed then to the tiniest of points, beginning a long, fixed course that would certainly lead her to the end of her life.

Angelus is the only fuel that feeds this killing machine.

And he is close now, very close.

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Her feet lead her to the entrance of an abandoned warehouse, and there she hesitates.

His voice calls to her mockingly from the darkness within, floating on the night air like a deadly caress. Will she play for him tonight? Will she bleed for him tonight?

"Faithy."

He is the only one who's ever called her that, and she longs to cut his tongue from his throat for daring it.

Another moment, and she glances up at the moon with only a passing thought for if she will ever see it again. Then she lifts her feet and passes from beneath its gaze.

Inside the warehouse, nothing moves. The shadows are deep and even with Slayer eyes she can hardly make out the contour of the room she stands in. She waits, lets her eyes adjust to the filtered moonlight, then moves on.

"Should've given up this game years ago, Faithy," his voice calls mockingly from the darkness. Close or far, she can't tell, the way it echoes. "You're not gettin' any younger, you know."

She doesn't speak. She gave up playing these games long ago. Her face still bears the scar from one of their oldest encounters, and she has never forgotten the carelessness that led her to it. Besides, she knows how much it maddens him when his prey won't play along with his little head games.

She moves deeper within, stepping up to an old industrial ladder. Somehow, she senses that he will be above. It would be just like him, to climb among the eaves and watch over his prey as they grow increasingly nervous, laughing to himself as they blunder about in the dark. She knows him. Far too well, sometimes.

She climbs the ladder, and now she can feel it; her heart beginning to speed up a little, blood like fire pumping through her veins in slow resolution.

Somehow she knows that he will be up there, waiting for her. Wanting to grab her when she's most vulnerable. She tucks her stake as she nears the top, and grabs the rails on either side of the ladder. With one quick motion she pulls her legs up, spins herself out and up, pushing off with her hands. As she reaches the apex of her flip, her feet connect with something solid, and she hears a gratifying grunt of pain as Angelus falls back. Her motion carries her through and she lands on her feet, upright on the next level. But just barely. For a second she teeters and nearly falls backward anyway, but then she regains her equilibrium and steadies, grabbing the stake from the small of her back and advancing away from the one story drop.

"Nice move," Angelus says, rising and dusting himself off. "Didn't think you still had a flip like that in you. But then, you always were full of surprises, weren't you?"

She still doesn't speak, eyes fixated on the outline of his silhouette. Limned and backlit in moonlight as he is, he would make an impressive picture for anyone who chanced to see him. For Faith, it simply makes him an easier target.

He laughs when she doesn't respond, and his laughter is still bone-chilling. A finger of ice runs down her spine and the hairs on the back of her neck prick up in response. It's her body's natural response to a sound that is the complete lack of sanity, but it doesn't reach any deeper than her skin. After all, she's been hearing that laughter in her head for the last ten years. It's the chuckle of a madman, a cold-blooded killer, and if she lives forever she doesn't think she could ever forget what it sounds like.

"Come on, Faithy. I'm doing everything I can to make this easy for you, but you've got to show me a little effort, here."

She lunges, and he dodges out of the moonlight, dust puffing up in his wake. She turns, eyes roving the darkness, seeking him.

He titters again from the shadows. "Yep. You're getting slow. I almost hate to have to put you out of your misery," he says with a sigh. Then his voice darkens with something that sounds like knowledge. "But then again, that is why you came here, isn't it?"

"I came here to kill you," she says at last, and her voice is rough with years of little use. It sounds less like scotch and cigarettes than time and rusty nails.

"Oh come on, Faithy. What's it been? A decade since you got out of jail? How many fights? How many scars? How many nights of wondering if this one's gonna be your last? Aren't you tired of it yet?"

She hesitates, the words slipping through her mental armor with more ease than she would have believed. She can almost sense him edge forward eagerly as he sees the hole in her defenses—and suddenly she realizes how to use it to her advantage.

"Tell me the truth, Faithy. Aren't you ready for me to do what I should've done to you ten years ago?"

She slowly lets her arm fall, stake resting against her hip, confidence slipping from her posture.

And he moves closer, ever closer. "See, it's easy, isn't it? Giving in to what you want? That's the one thing you were always good at before, Faithy. Then you had to go and get all heroic. And you were never any good at that."

He inches closer and she bows her head, watching him from beneath the curtain of her hair.

"You should have let me kill you then, but that's okay. We'll take care of that right now, won't we?"

He lunges at her from the darkness, inhumanly strong hands gripping her arms and pinning them at her sides. And she doesn't move, doesn't fight, only looks up at him, and grins.

"Guess we will."

His fangs plunge into her throat like piercing fire and she never knew that it would feel like this, this slow draining of life, everything seeping away around the edges.

The stake falls from her hand and clatters to the floor, a lost, empty sound.

Angelus feeds, and as the world loses sharp edges and hard angles, she smiles, the moonlight glimmering like diamonds in her eyes.

Pushing forward with all the strength in her legs, she shoves him into the splintered timber that juts from a rotten support beam, spearing him like a fish. The wood thrusts through her right shoulder and she grunts with the sudden pain of it, but she doesn't close her eyes.

This. Yes, this is the moment she's lived for for the last ten years, and she wouldn't miss it for the world.

His eyes are wide with shock as he pulls back, the trickster still astonished that the final trick has been played on him. A thin line of blood runs from the corner of his mouth, a glistening ruby trail that distorts in a grimace.

"You bi--" he begins, and then his lips darken, turning black as night. Instantly, hairline fractures run through them and break apart as he disintegrates. A single drop of blood shimmers in the air after he vanishes, and it takes an eternity to fall, making a perfect circle of crimson as it strikes her breast.

All that's left of him, and it belongs to her.

There isn't much blood left to seep from her shoulder, and the pain is a distant, echoing feeling that fades down the dim hallway of consciousness. Darkness comes like the end of the world, and she knows it is for the final time. She goes willingly into its embrace, and when it claims her, there is no regret for the past, no thought for heaven or friends perhaps seen again. She feels nothing but release.

Dark eyes glitter like hard candy, empty doors beneath cold moonlight, and there is no smile on her face even now. Her head falls against her breast and she breathes her last, hard lines and hard truths of the world left behind.

And somewhere across the ocean, a new Slayer is called.