Guess what! I'm writing S4!Faith. I'm not exactly sure what happened. I blame Laura Shapiro's vid. Also, Hoa Nguyen's poem "Out". It feels weird to start with a title and have to write from there-- I mean *have* to, the phrase was gnawing at me-- because I usually would rather chew off my own arm than think of a title for my story.
[SO FIRST-DRAFTY IT HURTS]
[after she scrambles up over the wall on campus]
Legs pounding, feet hitting nice and solid against the pavement and Faith can remember a time when she wasn't this fast. She can conjure up the ache of drawing breath after a hard [run], or what it felt like to twist an ankle and fall while running, but only if she really concentrates on it. And who wants to do a thing like that? Right now her muscles are working, she's moving smooth and strong, she can feel the little twist in her back as she turns a corner onto the next street. Spent eight months in a coma and she wakes up all ready to go, not even the ghost of stiffness or a single crick in her neck. Slayer powers, gotta love them.
Yeah, she used to be weak. But then she turned eleven and when she woke up on her birthday and stood up and stretched it was like hello, good morning, world sliding from black and white into technicolor. And sure, fine, she was like Dorthory out of Kansas, every year she got stronger and when she was sixteen she threw her mother across the room and broke one of her ribs, though she hadn't even been trying, and then a year later there was that crazy woman with the accent who kept telling her what to do. Then Kakistos, and Sunnydale, and she had almost been happy there, almost been getting into the whole white-hat scene-- living in a cheap motel room and watching B moon over her big, broody, lump-of-soul-and-undead muscle boyfriend until Faith was itching so hard to dust him that sometimes she felt her fingers creeping around her stake before she was even aware of it. But jealousy and ugly rooms were nothing she hadn't learned to live with, and sometimes, fighting next to B or blowing off Wesley or sitting in the library with the gang researching the next harbringer of doom, Faith felt something unfamiliar, something warm and tight in her chest, and maybe it was happiness. But that was all before a man in a dark alley bleeding from his chest, and it all ended up with B's sweet face set grim and pale as she stabbed her with her own knife on the roof of some goddamn building. And then the sleep. And then the months and months of dreams.
Oh, she was going to kill B.
[more later]