skip the light fandango

Title: Gods and Monsters (Parts 1-3)
Author: Maren
Rating: Adult
Pairing: Faith/Cordelia
Summary: Post-NFA. Faith's getting careless and going crazy.
Author's Notes: Written for booster17 in the Buffyverse Femslash Ficathon run by cadence_k. My apologies to both of them for this being months late. Thanks to southernbangel and cornerofmadness for their help with hashing out story ideas and beta-duty.




Mexico City

Faith’s in Mexico City the first time she sees her.

She’s running swiftly through a sprawling cemetery on Dia de los Muertos, trying to catch a demon before it manages to complete the spell that will raise the cemetery’s dead as flesh-eating zombies. The crowd is pressing in on her from all sides, dancing and weaving around in uninhibited revelry and completely oblivious to the fact that in a few minutes they could be zombie-chow for the very dead they are currently celebrating.

Faith can’t make out much from the blurs of color that streak by her as she runs, her body jostling roughly against the brightly dressed celebrants with their grinning death-masks. Her body is moving on some unconscious level, her footsteps sure as she dodges the people and hurdles anything immobile in her path. Times like these, when she’s working on pure adrenaline and Slayer senses, Faith thinks she could probably close her eyes and move just as easily. Only problem is that she’d lose sight of her prey.

A couple of steps later her body betrays her and Faith’s glad she didn’t close her eyes. A drunken reveler crashes into her and her rhythm is thrown, the effortless grace of just moments before disintegrating in a second’s time. It’s not the first time it’s happened—lately Faith hasn’t been completely on her game and she’s sporting the cuts and bruises to prove it. The blow makes her take off just a second too slow, and instead of clearing the headstone in front of her, she catches the toe of her back foot on the marble and tumbles forward. She tries to tuck her body, but there isn’t enough time and Faith’s head slams into the ground even as she tries to land most of her weight on her shoulder.

Her vision swims as she rolls to her knees, her surroundings blurring into masses of indescript light and color in the butter-soft darkness of the night.

Just breathe and you’ll be cool Faith automatically tells herself. Problem is, she doesn’t have time to rest until her vision clears and the world stops spinning. Putting one hand on her knee for balance, she tries to push herself up but the vertigo makes her stumble.

Suck it up and move! More urgent, because she’s losing time and ground she can’t afford to lose and if she doesn’t get up the people-shaped images moving on the edge of her vision are going to end up demon food. The thought is enough to make Faith take a deep breath, her eyes closing as she fights the nausea that threatens to make her gag the breath right back out. For a brief second Faith thinks she’s going to lose her lunch, but then she remembers she didn’t have time to eat lunch and she hates to dry heave— rough rasps that make her think her stomach lining’s gonna come out her mouth with the force of the contractions—so she pushes the feeling away.

This time she stands a little slower, keeps her eyes closed until her head stops spinning from the movement, and takes little shallow breaths. This isn’t her first concussion and damn if they never come when she can take a break and nurse ‘em. Instead, Faith cracks open her eyes and watches as the world in front of her kaleidoscopes before settling into a blurry haze. Everything has a halo around it, but hell, it’s better than seeing three of everything so Faith starts scanning the crowd. Precious seconds tick by as she searches for signs of the demon.

It’s gone.

Shit.

Faith rises on tiptoe, trying for a better vantage point but height isn’t one of the slayer advantages and even teetering unsteadily on the balls of her feet, she still can’t see a damn thing. Her head is still spinning too much to risk climbing on top of the tombstone she tripped over. Faith’s almost ready to pick a path at random and start running when she sees her.

The woman who is suddenly right in front of her stands out in the crowd, not because she’s drunk or obnoxious or brightly dressed but because she’s not any of these things. Dressed in black pants and a black t-shirt, she’s the lone still figure in the writhing mass around them. She’s tall, taller than Faith anyway, and she has a mass of brunette hair framing the white and black skull mask that covers her face. There is something familiar about her, something that niggles at Faith in the middle of her chest, almost an itch and she reaches up to absently scratch it as her eyes latch onto the woman.

Somewhere, in the back of her mind, Faith is aware that she doesn’t have time to ogle the woman in front of her but she can’t seem to tear her eyes away and the woman is staring right back—at least Faith thinks she is, although it’s hard to tell through the mask.

Then she’s lifting an arm, long and graceful, fingers tipped in the only color she’s wearing and she’s pointing somewhere off to Faith’s left. Streaks of soft-white light follow the movement, the halo or aura, or whateverthefuck Faith’s screwed-up vision is creating, trailing the movement like a wake. Faith’s eyes follow the light, follow the arm, follow the fingers with their blood-red nails. . .

And there it is. The demon, farther away than Faith thought it would be but still within her reach if she gets her ass in gear and moves.

“Thanks,” Faith mumbles, and she doesn’t turn her head back to the stark whiteness of the skull mask even though it’s pulling at her. She wants to reach out, touch that pointing arm, pull away the mask and see what’s underneath but she’s mostly past the days of indulging her own needs while neglecting the good of the whole damn world. Eye on the prize, Faith takes off again, gaining speed and clarity as she dodges through the cemetery.

Kill demons, make sure zombies don’t rise, fight through the pain—all in a night’s work for Faith. No time for socializing, even if the itch reaches deeper south than her chest.

***

It’s early in the morning and the city streets are already teaming with activity. Faith’s sitting in the back of a cab, more afraid for her life now than she was just hours ago. Her clothes are stiffening with the foul smelling blood of the demon and all she wants is to make it back to her hotel alive and well enough to take a shower and crash. No way in hell does she want to die in the back of a cab smelling like shit and looking even worse.

Faith knows there are dark circles under her eyes that have nothing to do with the inevitable smudge of her heavy black eyeliner. She can’t remember the last time she got a full night’s sleep. Scratch that. She remembers, she just doesn’t like to think about it.

The fact is she hasn’t gotten more than a couple hours of sleep at a time since Angel pulled that shit in L.A. and she is so damned tired. It doesn’t matter that there are dozens of slayers spread around the world now, because they still aren’t enough to do more than put out the biggest fires, take down the biggest bads. Everyone is spread thin and they can barely manage to do more than hold back mass chaos by the skin of their teeth. Even the dumb asses of the world are catching on and there’s not a damn thing they can do about it.

The cab finally screeches to a halt in front of her hotel and Faith lets out a small sigh of relief. Leaning forward, she shoves a wad of bills at the cabbie. She sees his eyes dance over the large green stain that decorates the front of her previously-white t-shirt and he shakes his head and waves the money off.

“No te voy a cobrar."

“Gracias.” Faith crams the cash back into the pocket of her jeans and slides out of the cab. She has to admit that there are a few benefits to the masses being semi-aware that there are super-hero girls out there who fight the good fight. Not many, but compared to the days when she and B were big bad secrets, a little notoriety isn’t half bad.

She glances at her watch as she steps out of the cab and walks toward the run-down hotel she’s called home for the last 30-some hours. She hasn’t even had a chance to check out the bed, see if it’s as lumpy as the last one she had. Fact is, her body feels so numb and dead she probably won’t even notice if there’s a mattress over the box springs but as Faith notes the time, she’s glad that she has about 2 hours to find out. Two hours and 15 minutes, to be exact, and then she has to check out and move on.

Always more moving on to do these days.

Her hotel isn’t in the best condition anymore, but the bones of the place make it look like it might have been pretty nice in its hey day. Now it’s little better than a flea bag. The reconstituted Council can’t afford much better, not with all of the hotels and flights and rental cars and bus tickets they have to finance to move their cache of slayers around the world. Faith doesn’t really care—it’s just as nice as anything she’s had before and a helluva lot better than a 9x9 cell.

Faith is reaching the old revolving door of her hotel, hand pressed against the dusty glass, when she sees her the second time.

In the rush of the fight and the exhaustion of the aftermath, Faith had forgotten her. But here she is again, just on the other side of the dirty glass door in the lobby of the hotel and even though she’s in different clothes and the mask is gone, Faith knows it’s her.

She’s dressed in a black wraparound dress that falls in graceful body-skimming lines to just above her knee and she’s wearing the highest pair of black heels that Faith’s seen this side of the hooker parades in the seedier sections of L.A. They force the muscles in her calves to flex and Faith imagines that the ass under that classy black dress looks just as high and tight. Her shiny brunette hair is swept back into a loose ponytail and she has a pair of large black sunglasses already perched on her nose, hiding her eyes. She doesn’t look like she belongs in this place—too clean, too beautiful, definitely too expensive.

That nagging sense of familiarity is back and Faith tries to see through the fog of the dirt, her exhaustion, and the lingering remnants of the concussion to see who it is, to figure out where she knows this woman from. She pushes against the revolving door just as the woman presses from the other side and there they are, trapped in the small space just inches apart.

Time slows to a near stop, the sounds from the noisy crowded street dying to nothing as Faith becomes aware of the thump-thump of her heart pulsing in her ear. The woman turns her head to look at Faith through the smudged glass door and she’s sure that their gazes are locked together even without being able to see the woman’s eyes. And she sees her features, the cut of her cheekbones, the line of her jaw, the fullness of her lips, the bronzed tone of her skin, the high arch of her eyebrows over the glasses and Faith feels her world begin to spin. The woman is a dead-ringer for Cordelia Chase.

A dead-ringer for the very dead Cordelia Chase.

Faith shakes her head and closes her eyes, breaking off contact with the woman. She’s just tired, that’s all. There’s no fucking way that she’s inches away from Cordelia’s twin or her ghost in goddamn Mexico City. No way.

Time speeds back to normal, the sounds of her heartbeat lost in the cacophony of sensory input, and she’s standing on the lobby-side of the revolving glass door. Faith looks over her shoulder for one last glimpse of not-Cordy to find that the woman on the sidewalk is still watching her through the black sunglasses, completely illuminated by the early-morning light. Faith can’t look away, just stands there and stares back, squinting to pick out details through the dirty panes of glass between them and she’s almost convinced herself that she was just seeing things that aren’t there, that this woman isn’t the same one from last night and that she sure as hell doesn’t look like high and mighty Cordy.

Then the woman smiles at her, wide and brilliant, and Faith can’t pretend anymore. No one has a smile like Cordelia and Faith is seeing a ghost in broad daylight on a busy city street. A ghost who is turning away and disappearing into a waiting cab.

Fuck me.

***



Oaxaca


She’s in Oaxaca, fighting a bunch of people possessed by jaguars, when Cordelia makes a reappearance. Some asshole Zapotec sorcerer and his cult of human jaguars have been making large deposits to Cosijo, the rain god, in the form of human sacrifice and Faith is drowning in the fruits of their labor. If the mother load of rain that’s been pouring from the sky for days is any indication, Cosijo is pretty pleased with the sacrifice.

Faith is soaked to the bone. The ground beneath her boots is muddy and slick, alternately sucking at her feet as she tries to move and threatening to slip them out from under her when she actually manages it. There are four jag-people circling her in a low crouch, hands outfitted with gloves that sport long, curved fingertips made of shining steel that Faith knows from first-hand experience are damn sharp. The shallow gash in her side is a nuisance more than anything, but it reminds her that these people, whom she should be able to knock out of the way in 5-seconds flat, are more than human now and definitely things to be reckoned with.

When Xander called and told her where she was headed next, he said the exorcism should be easy. “Just take out the sorcerer and the possession will end”, he said, “easy as pie”.

Easy as pie Faith mimics under her breath, keeping one wary eye on the circling predators while the other searches for her true prey. The sorcerer is standing 30 yards away, watching the action with an almost gleeful expression that Faith can’t wait to wipe off his face. Problem is, she has to get through the claws before she can do it and things aren’t looking so good in that department. Things look worse a moment later when one of the jags attacks, body crouching low to the ground, then flying towards her with inhuman speed and grace, claws extended. Faith tries to get out of its path, but the sucking mud makes her a step too late and even as she is thrusting her sword up into the jaguar-person’s chest, it is swiping those steel claws at her face. One of them catches her just above the left eye, slicing through thin facial muscle and eyebrow, just barely missing the eye itself as she whips back her head. The sudden force of the movement throws her off balance and she completely loses her footing, landing hard on her back in the thick mud of the ground.

The scream of a wounded jaguar spills from the throat of the possessed human. Gritting her teeth against the pain, Faith flips herself onto her feet in a low crouch and draws the extra knife she has sheathed inside her boot in one fast, fluid motion. She can’t see worth shit, not with the pounding sheets of rain and the blood pouring from the deep cut above her eye. Staying low to the ground, protecting the most vulnerable parts of her body from the slashing pseudo-claws of her attackers, Faith glances from side to side and tries to prepare for the onslaught.

She’s surprised to see that the three jag-people who don’t have swords sticking through their chests and out their backs are ignoring her for the moment as they crowd around the wounded one, sniffing and howling as they watch him die. Faith catches a glimpse of brilliant color out of the corner of one eye and turns toward it, and what she sees surprises her even more.

Cordelia is standing just to her left with a huge, bright pink umbrella. She has on matching pink rubber shoes and, somehow, she’s completely dry. The sight of a ghost standing in the middle of nowhere, dry in the midst of a torrential downpour that no umbrella should have the power to deter, is so ridiculous that Faith might laugh if she wasn’t in the middle of yet another fight for her life. Instead she swipes at the liquids clouding her vision, hissing at the resulting pain that shoots through her face, and divides her attention between the howling jag-people circling their fallen comrade to her right and the vision on her left.

Faith is briefly caught in indecision, unsure whether talking to her hallucinations would make her crazier or whether she’s too far gone to measure degrees of insanity. I’ll go for curtain # 2, Monty.

“Are you haunting me, Cordy?”

“More important things to worry about right now, don’t you think?” Cordy retorts, one eyebrow raised in annoyance. “Jesus, Faith, are you completely mentally challenged? I realize you’re all Redemption Girl now, but how about you take a page from your own book and end this before they end you. Remember poisoning Angel? If you can’t get close enough to beat him, then beat him from a distance.”

The reminder of what she did to Angel is like a punch in the gut, until she remembers that she’s pissed at him and what he’s done to all of them. Faith remembers the theater rooftop, safe distance from harm, taking aim and hitting her target. She looks away from the apparition with renewed focus and finds the sorcerer standing exactly where he was before, seemingly unconcerned with his dying pet.

It occurs to Faith that she probably shouldn’t be taking advice from a walking, talking ghost, especially not after what happened in Sunnydale, but at the moment it seems like damned good advice and she figures she’ll worry about the consequences if she lives to see them. The jaguar-people are rallying around her again and from what she can see through the rain and the blood, they’re pissed. Got one try, then I’m toast,she prepares herself, squinting as she trains her one good eye on the sorcerer who is still smiling at her as though he has nothing to fear. She grips the hilt of the knife firmly between her fingers, staying in the crouched position as she sights the line of her throw the best she can, and then she’s throwing the knife with a quick, forceful flick of her wrist.

The knife slips a little just as it leaves her fingertips, the wet hilt sliding off her thumb a nanosecond before she wants it to, and Faith prepares herself for the attack she knows is to come now that she’s unarmed. Her attention is back on the jag-people before she can see where the knife landed, sure that her slip sent the knife wide of its target.

The attack doesn’t come. A bright blue light flashes through the clearing, almost like lightening but sharper somehow, and the jag-people are suddenly just people now. Wet, clumsy, confused people. They look at the body with her sword stuck deep in its chest and then back at her with angry, frightened eyes. Then they are running, suddenly clumsy in the mud where they were unaffected before, three people going in three different directions and Faith has no intention of following any of them. Without the power of the sorcerer they aren’t a threat anymore—still bad human beings but not her problem. She has no doubt the villagers, who have been sick with fear for weeks as their neighbors disappeared one by one, will take care of them.

Flicking the rain and blood from her swollen eye, she glances at the sorcerer to find him sprawled on his back, her knife wedged in the center of his forehead. Faith grunts, shoulders shrugging with a tired lift and fall. When she turns back to search for her bitchy benefactor, Cordelia is gone.

Later that night, when she’s clean and bandaged and sitting in the old bus that will take her part of the way to her next assignment, Faith dreams of Cordelia. In her dreams they are both wet, dripping with moisture that no umbrella could ever repel. When she wakes up just a few hours later, Faith is hot and swollen and even more tired than she was before.



Cartagena

Faith’s in Cartagena to do some recon, and compared to what most of her days have held for the past year, this assignment should have been easy. Just a quick trip to Convento de la Popa to grab a medallion Giles needs to bind a demon in Spain, and then she gets almost a whole day to chill before she has to move on.

The jungle closes in around her as she hikes back down the steep hill, careful to watch where she’s stepping in the dim light of the rising sun as it barely makes its way through the thick canopy of vegetation overhead. The last thing she needs is to trip on the underbrush that tugs at her boots—she has enough bumps and bruises from actual vampires and demons without getting beaten up by inanimate objects. Faith would have liked to have taken a cab or a bus like any other tourist visiting the monastery, but the monk was a little jumpy and he insisted they make the exchange in secret in the middle of the night.

“If the bad guys figure out you’re there, well, you know the drill. This one is black ops” Xander said when he called with the assignment, so here she is, hiking through the Columbian jungle with some kind of magical Spanish gold medallion stuffed in the back pocket of her jeans.

She likes the recon jobs, even though if she gets sent on one, it usually means it’s too dangerous for the newbies. Still, compared to the rest of the crap she spends her life doing, recon is like vacation. Almost. Of course if it were a real vacation, she’d book a hotel room with a big soft bed and refuse to get out of it for at least a week. ‘Cept maybe to grab some takeout pizza, with pepperoni and extra cheese. Or better yet, to grab the cute pizza delivery boy who could bring it right to her door…

It’s probably the daydreaming that distracts her enough that she doesn’t see the two Vibora demons until it’s too late. They swing out of the trees overhead, long and thin like the snakes they mutated from, yellow eyes with sharp ridges over them that almost look like the kind of long eyelashes a girl might kill for.

If they don’t kill a girl first.

Faith has just enough time to pull her knife before they’re on her, lashing out with forked tongues with a slick quickness that she can barely out-maneuver. Then one of them is striking, fangs extended and glistening with something thick and wet. She sidesteps just in time and grabs the extended neck of the Vibora, slicing through the thick musculature with a hard swipe of her knife. The blade gets stuck in the tissue and Faith wrenches hard, knowing even as she feels it come loose, it’s too late.

The second Vibora is striking, hard and fast and right at her neck. A flash of recognition, knowledge that she can’t stop this, rushes through Faith a split-second before she twists her body back and to the side, cocking the knife for one last thrust. There’s some fundamental part of her, so deeply ingrained that it’s manifested in reflex, that refuses to go down with fangs in her throat.

Fangs pierce her chest instead, sinking into the fleshy globe of her right breast just as Faith brings her arm down hard, shoving the knife through the eye of the Vibora and deep into its brain.

Take that, asshole. It’s the last coherent thought she has before the venom kicks in.

***

Hurts.

Something tugging at her chest, then she’s bare to the humid night air. Small hands probing her. Hot, so hot, the hands or maybe it’s her. Fingers pressing over her chest and it goddamn hurts and the heat won’t stop, spreading, spreading, spreading…

Wants to push it all away, hands or hurt, doesn’t matter which but how to move? Forget. Forget it.

Something hot and wet now, but as it moves over her it’s followed by coolness. Cool. Feels good, feels so good, feels….

Fuck!.

That hot wetness clamped over the upper swell of her breast, sucking and pulling, hurts like a motherfucker and when she remembers how to move she’ll kill whatever is feeding off her, she’ll rip it’s head off, she’ll. . .she’ll…

Hurts less now, pain but something else, something. . . nice. Pleasure. Cool air on heated flesh and she feels her nipples pucker, tighten, throb. The drawing pressure stops, raises, hesitates…

Slick wetness, featherlight trail from the point of pain to the point of pleasure, nipple strains, wants, wants, wants. . .

Fuck yes.

Wants this, warm suckling, light pulling, tongue flicking and that hot hand on the hot skin of her other bare breast.

Remembers, remembers how to moan but it comes out as a whimper, softer than what she means and the tongue stops, unsure, starts to pull away.

Remembers, remembers how to move. Hand buried in soft soft strands of hair, silky and thick between her fingers, pulling back, back arching. Offering. Willing sacrifice.

Lips, full and gentle, soft kisses on soft breasts, harder kisses on harder nipples, low moan, low moans joined and she doesn’t want this to stop.

Don’t stop.

Stops. Reluctant but insistent, lips pulling back so that cool air kisses her hot skin. Ragged breathing, hers? Hers? She wants to know, doesn’t care, just wants more, wants to. . . wants to sleep.

Soft fingers, probing, less heat, less hurt.

“I got most of the venom. You’ll be ok now.” A husky whisper in her ear and even through the remaining delirium, Faith knows that voice. Somehow knew it all along, somehow, somehow…

“Cordy,” she croaks, reaching up with her free hand but she’s tired, so tired and her arm drops as she passes out.

***
Faith wakes up in her hotel bed, groggy and sore from head to toe, but she’s alive. Pretty sure that’s a miracle.

The thought wakes her up, makes her sit up and look down at her chest. There are two angry red fang marks on her right breast, surrounded by a ring of bruised flesh in the shape of a mouth.

Faith knows a hicky when she sees one.

Raising her fingers to press on around the wound, she hisses at the pain that shoots through her. But it’s already less than it should be and Faith knows from years of watching her body heal wounds that would kill other people that this one will be gone in a few days. She’s more worried about the mark, and the hazy memories she has about how it came to exist. She remembers lying there, immobile, and she remembers those hands and that mouth.

She remembers Cordelia.

What the hell is going on?

These continued run-ins with a dead woman are freaking her out. Faith knows she hasn’t been at her best over these last several months, that her thinking isn’t always as clear as it should be. Her body frequently bears the evidence that her head isn’t always fully in the game. And now there’s a ghost who conveniently shows up to save her ass when she’s in the deepest of shit, a ghost who talks and kisses and moans and feels real under Faith’s fingertips.

God, I’m cracking up, certifiable loony bin material…

No. She’s not going crazy. She’s just confused, imagining things because she’s exhausted and sick from the venom. And before—well, there was the concussion and then the blood and rain clouding her vision while that sorcerer was throwing who knows what kind of spells at her. If she could just get a break and a full night’s sleep now and then, everything would be fine. No more I-see-dead-people-ing it. No more erotic encounters of the Ghost kind.

The doubt, the niggling thought that she was almost back to normal at the hotel in Mexico City, that this hicky is very real in the harsh light of day, festers in her mind. Faith pushes it down, concentrating instead on getting her things together for the plane that she’ll have to run to catch.

For once she’s glad that there isn’t time to think about anything other than the next assignment.



Parts 4-5: Belize & Havana