(Buffy’s POV)

 

Marlboro cigarettes and Jack Daniels’ whiskey first and last thing and it’s my morphine. She’s the one that taught me that combination. She taught me how to fly. But she’s not my chaser now.

 

After the battle against the First, we all went our separate ways. Giles, Will, and Xander got lost in setting up the new Council as Dawn went to Italy to return to school. Meanwhile, I got lost in the world, recruiting the new Slayers, struggling against the depression threatening to suck me under again. But then, I still don’t know why exactly, Faith ended up joining me in my travels.

 

She taught me how to keep the dark at bay. She wanted to help me put an end to it at first, but I wasn’t ready to confront the past, mine or ours. So, instead, she taught me to live, to laugh, to love, to cry, to feel the lava flowing through me as we hunted. Faith taught me to just breathe.

 

And now she’s gone. It was supposed to have been our last recruiting mission before we settled down at the new Council headquarters in Cleveland. But our intel had gaps in it and we walked into a trap. Then I walked out alone with the taste of Faith’s blood and tears on my lips and the blood of two different Slayers staining every inch of me, clothes, skin, and weapons.

 

It’s her name on the tip of my tongue with every breath I take. Inhale, Faith, exhale, Faith, inhale, Faith, exhale—oh, God, Faith. Sometimes the longing for her becomes so overwhelming that I have to give in and go find a substitute. The taste of whiskey and the smell of nicotine make me ache inside; inside my heart, inside my mind, inside my soul, inside my pussy.

 

None of them make that ache go away. The men are too tall, their voices too deep, bodies too hard, too weak. The women are too small, their voices too high, bodies too soft, too frail. They don’t make my body heat up, make my body hum, the way Faith did. It’s the taste of whiskey on their lips and the smell of nicotine clinging to their skin that keeps drawing me back to the bars.

 

Patrols are split in two for me. The days when I have to escort a group of the younger Slayers, I’m cold and hard and precise in every direction I issue and every kill I make. It isn’t until I’m alone that I allow myself to feel the lava in my blood and I exalt in every kill. Anything else would be a betrayal to the woman I’ve called my sister-in-arms, my enemy, my heart, my soul.

 

Dawn think it’s unhealthy, the way I’m living. She thinks I should cry more; but she doesn’t see me when I wake up reaching for Faith, or when I go to bed so cold at night. She doesn’t see me when I have to leave a crowded room because it becomes too much. She doesn’t see me when I can’t go on patrol because I can feel Faith all around me and it’s too much of a distraction.

 

My friends think it’s unhealthy, the way I hang onto her memory. They don’t get what she meant to me, that she wasn’t just a lover. They don’t realize that when I got lost, Faith was the one who came and found me. They think I should have grieved for her all ready and then moved on.

 

They don’t realize that that’s exactly what I’m doing. Every cigarette I smoke, every drop of alcohol I drink, every tear I shed, every demon I kill, it’s all in her name. And I’m waiting to move on. Until then, it’s Marlboro cigarettes and Jack Daniels’ whiskey first and last thing.

 

 

The End