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Robin surprises her, on the bus, with the not dying. But it's not much of a surprise a month later when he leaves; that's the way things work, mostly. He tells her he doesn't quite know what to do with himself: the vamp that killed his mother is gone; the high school he ran is gone; he's still not recovered enough to go out on their nightly clean-up-the-leftovers-from-the-Hellmouth patrol. He says he doesn't know what good he's doing anybody.
She only realizes later that he was waiting for her to say he was doing her some good. But, honestly? Not really.
So she keeps patrolling, walking her section of the crater's perimeter, coming back to the house they rented in the next county over, crashing on one of the twenty-some cots they've set up.
And one morning she's managing to sleep in a little late, blankets pulled up over her head, when she hears Xander in the kitchen. He's never stopped being squirrelly around her, not that she blames him. "So, where's the Bad Slayer?" he's saying. "Unscheduled walkabout?"
"Not yet," Willow says.
She waits until they've gone, pulls down the blanket and goes to find Buffy and Giles, who are hunched around the computer going through the Council's accounts.
"So," she says, "what would you guys think if I took off for a while?" and she waits to see their expressions of surprise, anger, something.
But they look at her like they were expecting this. Still, after everything, they were expecting this.
Well, she'll damn well give it to them then.
"I'll need a car," she says. "And some traveling money."
***********************************
For a while she's enjoying being alone again. It's a nice change from 1) prison and 2) Miss Summers' School for Slayers. She drives east, pulls over for crappy roadside zoos and various World's Largest Ball of String exhibits. She scarfs down platefuls of grease at Shoney's and Stuckey's, stakes a vamp here and there, occasionally picks up a guy at a club and gives him a memorable evening.
Then, somewhere in Idaho, she gets some damn flu, and she seriously thinks she's gonna die. She's in a crap motel like usual; she tried a couple of swank ones at first, but they just made her nervous--she kept thinking she was gonna get kicked out. So she's in this Motel 6, and she's puking her guts out and hurts all over and she can tell she's spiking a mother of a fever, and all she can think of is, nobody knows where I am. If I die in this stupid ugly-ass motel, nobody's ever gonna find me.
So between stomach cramps she hauls herself over to the nightstand, drags out the complimentary postcard with the picture of the crappy motel. She thinks it's gonna be a long process, deciding who might give a fuck, but she surprises herself by almost immediately writing "Wes." She blinks at that for a minute, realizes she can't remember his last name to save her fucking life; it's got a dash in it, she thinks. She writes "Watcher-Man," giggles, fights the urge to throw up from giggling, adds, "Hyperion Hotel, LA, CA." Looks at the message space for a while and writes one word.
In the morning the fever has broken and she feels kinda stupid for getting so whacked out about it. But she mails the card, anyway.
**************************************
Numero Cinco drops a packet of forwarded mail on Wes' desk. He goes through it methodically, tossing catalogs and a CD with 11,000 free hours of AOL, and finds a postcard with an astoundingly ugly motel on the front. On the back is an address with an absurd nickname and a one-word message:
Pocatello.
The handwriting's rather familiar. He goes through his files, finds a packet of forms that Faith filled out, back when he thought he was rehabilitating her, after she'd killed that fellow. She'd answered question 63, "Why do you kill vampires?" with "Because it's the right thing to do!" and he remembers wondering how, exactly, she'd gotten an eye-roll across in writing.
The cursive matches up, and he has a sick rush of fear; she's gone mad or bad, again, and she's started a cross-country murder spree. She's going to send him taunting postcards from the site of each killing.
He spends an hour on the phone with Pocatello law enforcement, determining that no-one's gotten killed recently, that no-one of Faith's description has caused any trouble, or is still registered at the Motel 6. ("I believe you would describe her as 'hot,'" he explains, uncomfortably, to an amused sheriff.)
Over the next couple of weeks he receives a few more. She's managed to get the Hyperion's zip code, but she's sticking with his made-up name and a one-word message, a town name each time. He makes more calls, but she's always moved on, apparently blamelessly. He even--and he's embarrassed at himself for this--plots out the first few locales on a map, to see if they form a pentagram or something.
After a while he just relaxes, and actually begins to enjoy the occasional small surprise from the mail cart.
*******************************************
On the long solo drives, random, going wherever her finger landed on the map that morning, Faith has time to wonder why she's been mailing them to Wes. Why not, say, Angel? And she keeps coming back to Wes' face, to how he looked at her when he popped her full of Orpheus, knowing it would probably kill her.
He had enough respect for her to help her kill herself in a good cause. You gotta love that in a guy.
So she picks up postcards from concrete-dinosaur diorama museums, crappy goofy-golf establishments. Writes a town name, drops it in the mail.
And, after a few weeks, she finds herself at the Grand Canyon.
She cannot get over the fucking Grand Canyon. She does the mule ride down, oohs and ahs with everybody else. And back at the motel that night she can't just write "Grand Canyon" on the card, because it's got a picture of the Canyon, and DUH. And anyway she has to tell him something, because her head is full of all the colors and the way it goes on forever, the heat and the mules and just the...beauty. She has to get that across, and she wishes she could write poetry.
**********************************************
Wes has to laugh when he gets a gorgeous Grand Canyon postcard, and flips it over to read, "Holy SHIT, it's big!"
**********************************************
And once she's started putting down more than one word, it's like she can't stop. She starts raiding the motel nightstands for stationary, writing letters instead. And the letters get longer and longer. She starts with just stuff she thinks he'd actually be interested in--scattered vamp stakings and demon beheadings. Then she starts adding other stuff she's done--movies and roadside attractions. What she powered down at Stuckey's, how the waitress's beehive looked like it was made out of cotton candy. And after a while she notices that she's starting to do things because he might find them interesting--she actually goes to an art museum or two instead of just reptile exhibits, and once to a movie with actual subtitles. (Although she's not sure a kung-fu movie really counts as culture.)
Eventually, she's writing to Wes about almost everything. She hasn't even picked up a guy in two or three weeks, because she doesn't want to put that in a letter.
On days when nothing exciting has happened, she goes back further. She writes about her mom, a little. Her first watcher, and Kakistos. About jail.
It's weird, because she has no idea if he's even getting these. He could have moved. He could have gone back to England. He could be wincing every time he gets one, tossing it unread. He could be dead, even.
She hopes he's not dead.
One day when she's bored, driving--she's in one of those radio-stationless zones--she starts thinking about all the pages she's sent. A pile of 'em, by now. How long would it take, to read all that?
And it occurs to her that if he has been reading them, then this is the longest time that anyone has ever listened to her.
**********************************************
She buys a plane ticket for ten days from now, to give him time to get this last postcard. And this one just says, "LAX, 9/3, Flight 1413, 3:20 p.m."
She sells the car. Spends her last few days in an airport hotel, waiting, reading Ed McBain paperbacks. Gets on the plane.
She picks up her baggage at LAX, goes to the meet-your-people area. She's trying not to expect anything, but she can't help giving the crowd a quick scan, hoping stupidly for a sign that says, "Faith."
There isn't one, of course. He never got them. Or he's dead. Or maybe, you dumbass, he's still a little pissed off from that time you tried to torture him to death.
And then she sees him. He's grinning, and he is holding up a sign. But it's got an arrow, pointing at himself, and it says "Watcher-Man." And in his other hand, he's got flowers.
--END--