More of my Faith fic, The Long Road.
"Huh." There was something compelling about his stance, the way he watched her tailights trying to disappear. She stopped the cruiser, backing it up to where he waited.
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He was a big man, with one of those faces, the kind where gauging his age was as impossible as it would be for a nun. He had deep laughlines, but no other wrinkles, yet his hair was white, and so were his eyebrows. He looked like a boxer gone to seed, soft in the middle, with hands that would make fists like ham hocks.
"Thanks for stopping." He climbed into the passenger seat beside her. "Nothing but commercials out there."
"No problem." She turned the volume down slightly, not really minding. "Tenderness on the Block" wasn't one of her picks anyway. "Where you headed?"
"South." The answer, flip on the surface, seemed oddly flat. "Just south. You?"
"South, for a few days. Then back on up north, but not this road." She heard her own voice smooth out. A few days in LA. She wondered what she'd find there. Angel, still helping the helpless? Wes, the forbidden fruit she knew better than to try for? Cordelia was gone; so was Fred. Gunn had done something bad, really bad, old school-Faith bad; she didn't know what, but the word was, he'd left Angel in disgrace. The Council had been alive with whispers. Something about a deal with the devil...
"You have anything to eat?"
His voice, still flat and uninflected, jerked her attention back to him. "Bag of tortilla chips. It's in back. Hang on, I'll pull over."
"No, don't worry, I can reach it."
He twisted around in his seat, his upper body partially obscuring his left hand. His voice was suddenly moving, and her reflexes caught and locked. She jerked the truck to one side, cutting hard and sharp behind a semi with Oregon plates, spinning it safely off the road onto the shoulder. She accomplished all this with one hand; the other was clamped around his wrist, pinning his hand - invisible in the depths of her bag - hard in place.
He screamed, a short breathless squeal.
"I was giving you a ride south, dude." Her mouth was a cold thin line. "Shitty way to say thanks, isn't it? Trying to liberate my wallet?"
"You're one of them." Lit by the incandescent flashes of passing halogen headlights, his features were mobile stone. His voice was thin with pain; her pressure on his wrist was unrelenting. Ahead of them, towering darkness, rose the Tehachapi mountains, and the road called the Grapevine. "One of the Girls. Shit, I should have known, I should have -"
"I'm not one of the Girls." Oh, man. Everywhere she went, everywhere. Why was everyone so fucking scared of the new Slayers? "I'm more than that."
He understood what she meant before she realised she said it. "You're one of the Two. Oh, God. Please," he whispered. "Please don't kill me."
"Stop talking like that. What the fuck is wrong with you? I'm not going to kill you. Of course I'm not. I don't kill human beings, even shitheads who try to rob me." She ought to boot his ass out, she thought, put him right back out there, let him rot waiting for a ride. But if he got one, and he robbed the driver, it would be her fault, and the legend would grow, the Two, golden Buffy, pitch-dark Faith, Snow White and Rose Red…
"Goddamnit." She released his wrist, and swung the Cruiser back onto Interstate 5. "I'll take you into LA. But you try stealing something, and I might forget you're human. Clear?"
He nodded. Faith set the Cruiser up the long road to Los Angeles, where memories waited.
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