|
|
A Little Word with Two Vowels
by Mary Borsellino
(Crisis of Faith)
EMAIL: thebitterone@hotmail.com or fagette@hotmail.com
SUMMARY: Faith is thinking about stuff.
SPOILER WARNING: Angel and BtVS up to present and the 'Crisis of Faith' series. Won’t make sense unless you read them.
WEBSITE: http://crisisoffaith.cjb.net
RATING: PG
DISCLAIMER: As far as I know and my mother assures me, I am in no way Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Kuzui, Sandollar, Greenwolf Productions, 20th Century Fox, the WB Network, or anyone else with copyright over Sunnydale and all its denizens. This is not meant as an infringement on their turf.
NOTES: I really am very bad at saying ‘that’s all folks’, aren’t I? So I’m just not going to say if this is the last one or not or whatever. I don’t know. Thankyou from the bottom of my heart for all the feedback that Crisis of Faith got.
If anybody can name every single song used in the Crisis of Faith stories I’ll give them some sort of prize.
~~~~
Faith is such a little word. Five letters, two of which are vowels. It is used to mean so many things. To lose it is to lose willpower, because without faith there is no reason to do anything. We believe in causes because life is simply a state of being. More then existence is needed to force our eyes open every morning. Willpower is simply having a faith so deep it offers sense and meaning in chaos.
Faith and chaos seem to be terms that naturally fit together. When there is order, there is no need for faith. Trust is often equated with faith, but they are not the same thing at all. Trust is when you fall back and you ask your friend to catch you, being fairly sure that they will. Faith is when you don’t have to ask, you know they’ll break your fall.
Faith, as a word, seems to contain a purity that even ideas like goodness or truth don’t. Faith is the action of belief. Faith is the sensation of total, absolute trust, in our clumsy language that throws the ideas together as synonyms.
Faith is also a name, and when used as such, it can hold within five little letters not only the concept of purity of belief, but every shade of emotion and experience that a body and mind can.
As she looked in the little mirror, Faith stared back. The two vowels and three consonants contained a hell of a lot in that mirror. Purity wasn’t a word that came to mind. But there was something in her eyes. This face in the glass had faith in something.
Brown hair that she thought she might darken with cheap dye that would smudge her pillow and make her face look harder. Lips, mouthing along to a song on the radio. Eyes with little makeup, she’d given up on making the bruised look work and refused wholeheartedly to even contemplate the pornstar-sheen of pale pink glosses and blue shadows. The only paint on her face was a little clear shine on her lips, that had always been the easiest way to make her look like a teenager.
Technically, she was one still, but was feeling less like it every day. The word woman no longer scraped against her personal identity with no hope of fitting. She might actually be a woman, eventually.
She was Faith. The little word could easily contain everything she was, so she needed no second one. What would she take for it, anyway? The name of people who had made childhood a place of fear and pain for her? The name of a man who had loved her, cared for her, and then turned into a big snake and eaten a bunch of people? The name of the man currently in the town proper, buying a local paper and something for dinner? She was simply Faith, for now. Another name would join that when there was reason for it.
They had stopped in a small town on the way to anywhere. The town was called Potential, which had governed their choice to rest here for the day. The motel was on the outskirts. Faith was currently examining herself, on the edge of Potential. She liked that.
She’d promised Angel that she’d call him. He was staying in Sunnydale for a little while, and she was honestly planning to make good her promise. No matter what they decided to do, she owed him that much. Faith knew he harboured hopes that they’d come back to LA and work with him. It was an interesting future to contemplate. Atoning and fighting and all that. Hug and cry and learn and grow and possibly kill some demons while you’re at it.
It wasn’t going to happen. Faith was fairly sure of that. Aside from the part where Lindsey hated Angel almost beyond articulation, she just honestly didn’t think she had it in her to fight the good fight. Her and Lindsey both walked a fine, sometimes nonexistant line between right and wrong. A state of being sometimes justified with ‘I’m only human’ by characters in movies. Neither Faith nor Lindsey could claim that defence.
It was pretty late at night, so she had the radio on low. She’d stayed in enough motels to know what level of volume would be tolerated. It was a country and western station, playing old songs about old loves. Faith had a soft spot for songs like that. Her Daddy had played them when she was little, dancing her around the living room. Even with all the other stuff, the bad stuff, that had happened, Faith still smiled a little at that memory.
Sick of looking at herself in the mirror, Faith flopped down onto the bed, her chunky black boots kicking endboard and making a thudding sound. She hoped it hadn’t been too loud.
Her suitcase was at the end of her bed, where she always kept important things. She’d never had a suitcase before. It was kinda neat. Fitted everything she had in the world, with space for more.
She glanced over at the radio as she heard her name, then smiled. Lots of sad songs had faith in them somewhere, because when the blackness gets ahold of your soul, faith’s the first thing to get damaged. It’s the last thing to go before you give yourself over to that despair, that evil, but it’s the first thing to take a knock. Faith is a fragile thing. Faith is the strongest thing in the world.
This was a nice song. Faith lay back, pillowing her head with her hands, and closed her eyes, remembering the feel of threadbare grey carpet under her childish feet, her father spinning her around the room. “Now I'll keep on believing, any way that I can...” Songs like this were always so lost. But that was a nice line. You have to keep on having faith, even if you find it in the weirdest places.
Faith wondered if she’d ever stop being just Faith and become Faith with another name after it. She fitted perfectly into just the one name, but sometimes felt that it would still be better to own a second. She was half of Faith-and-Lindsey. She had no intention of marrying him, now or at any point she could visualise. He’d get bored of her soon anyway. But until then... shouldn’t her name reflect who she was? “Faith McDonald” she whispered, trying the lilt on her tongue. She could buy a farm, e-i-e-i-o.
Damn it, she was not going to be somebody’s other half. Nobody was going to have power over her to the point where she made them part of her name. Her name was hers alone, the best name in the whole world. She was Faith. Five little letters, two of which were vowels.
She was having fun, but this wasn’t going to last. Slayers died young. How had Buffy once put it? The life expectancy of a zit. Lindsey was going to stay exactly the same forever. That didn’t lay a very good foundation for anything.
Ai is the Japanese word for love, or at least that’s what somebody had told Faith once. A truck driver, a woman with greying hair, beefy arms and sunglasses that were throwbacks to the worst kind of seventies fashion. Faith had been running away from home one summer, she’d been ten maybe, and this woman had picked her up. Driven her all day, telling her things like what the Japanese word for love was, and how to make a fire without any dry wood. Faith had climbed down out of the comfortable little cabin at a rest stop and called her parents from the diner area, homesick for a place that she wouldn’t have to climb down from at the end of the day. She’d gotten in a load of trouble, Mom had made her little firecracker turn black and blue, and her Daddy... but after it was over, and her back was healing up and all, he’d danced her around the living room, one of his old records on the player, women with peroxided hair and men with cowboy hats telling Faith all about a lover that left and a million other heartaches. And when the bruises and cuts had faded and Faith could almost forget them, she still remembered that Ai was the Japanese word for love.
She’d write her name – at ten the school was still pretending they gave a damn if she could read or write, later on they couldn’t give a damn, it was a good thing she’d learnt while they were bothering to teach – and the letters would all look so important. F, A, I, T, H. Faith. Her name. Five letters, two of which were vowels. They’d learnt about vowels at school, but Faith kept getting confused and writing Y down as an extra one. The teacher had, at first, been nice, teaching her with a smile. Later, more annoyed at this stupid girl’s inability to understand, the smiles weren’t there as she snapped at Faith that Y wasn’t a vowel. It didn’t matter when Faith wrote her own name anyway. F, A, I, T, H. Sometimes she’d capitalise it, F-a-i-t-h. And sometimes she’d write it fAIth, the Japanese word for love smack dab in the middle of her name. She had all the love of the world inside her, and her name proved it.
Faith smiled as she lay on the hotel room bed. She’d forgotten that, the love thing. It had been one of her best kept secrets when she was little, but dreams fade most of the time. All the love in the world. Huh. Kids say the stupidest things. Probably didn’t even mean love anyway, probably meant rhubarb or some crap like that. Did they have rhubarb in Japan? Faith had no idea.
She was exhausted. Now that she was actually listening to her body instead of treating it like a slave to her whims, Faith was realising that sleep could be a nice thing. Dreams could be something more then nightmares.
Her Daddy had a shed out back, sometimes he let Faith come down there with him if she was a good girl and sat quietly on the little stool in the corner. He kept his toys in there, big hunting knives and small, sleek knives and deadly carving knives. Sometimes she’d be allowed to touch one. Sometimes he made her touch them. Sometimes he wrote things on her with them, tracing the tip of the blade lightly across her young skin. When he was angry, those words would be written in red. Faith liked the way they looked, even if he always picked mean words to write.
She’d liked the shed, watching her Daddy polish his toys. She wished she had some of her own, but she’d take what she could get. But the best thing was when Daddy put on his country records and danced with her. Even Mom would sometimes join in, when Faith was really little.
She wondered what memories Lindsey had of his childhood, so like hers, so unlike that of anybody else she’d been around recently. Did he miss his parents or his siblings? Faith wasn’t sure if she missed her family at all. There were some memories she liked, but she had memories of a lot of different places, names, faces that she liked. Didn’t mean she missed them, or wished them back.
Sitting up in bed, Faith began drawing in her notebook, which she’d left next to the bedside lamp when she’d gone into the bathroom to look at herself in the mirror. Words, faces, things from her life. Imagining futures for them. She imagined enough different presents, utterly unlike the real one. What harm could thinking of one little future do? How many times had she asked someone what would have happened, if things had been different? If she hadn’t danced around the living room to old country records when she was young, would she be here now?
They could go live in New York, in a little apartment that would catch the morning warmth but not the sun. The bed would smell like clean linen and happiness, there was a smell that Faith didn’t know how else to describe. That’s what their whole home would smell like. She’d get a job doing.. hm.. something or other. Maybe even continue a little vampire killing in her spare time. Lindsey could be a lawyer, it was the only thing Faith could imagine him spending his life on. Unlife. Whatever. She’d get a puppy, that had been something she’d wanted her entire life. They could call it Rover or something stupid like that.
Faith stifled a yawn, scratching a birthmark on her shoulder. Giving the dog a cute name had been the final straw, really. It was too perfect, now she’d jinxed it ever happening. That was something her aunt Debra had taught her – never wish for anything or you jinx it. No apartment in New York for Faith and Lindsey. She’d stop imagining before she eliminated all possibility of happiness.
Her eyelids were heavy, the slow songs on the radio lulling her back into the exhausted complacency of bedtime as a little girl. She wasn’t a little girl anymore, almost a woman now even in her own head where people never grow up all the way. She’d sleep and pretend that her future was going to turn out perfectly.
Her light doze was broken when Lindsey came back from town. He put the things he’d bought down quietly, turning off the overhead light. Faith smiled at him sleepily.
“Hey there.”
“I didn’t want to wake you.” he said apologetically.
“It’s ok.” Faith pulled the cover up around her. She’d fallen asleep in her shoes, again. Force of habit, when she was travelling on her own she always slept ready to leave at a moment’s notice. “I like waking up to see you.”
“Go back to sleep, love. I’ll still be here next time you open your eyes.”
“Promise?” Faith asked, closing her eyes dutifully. She sometimes puzzled over whether Lindsey used a little of that vampire hypnosis stuff on her when she wouldn’t rest or eat or some other silly thing. Maybe she was just more mindful of things he said then she usually was of advice.
“You know it.” A lawyer’s promise. That struck Faith as a little like crocodile tears, was that the saying? She was too sleepy to remember. Some sayings she knew though. Honour among thieves. Like her and Lindsey. She liked that one.
“Night, Lind.” It was almost dawn, but that didn’t have the same ring to it.
“Night, love.”
Faith fell asleep thinking about that word. Love. Four little letters, two of which were vowels. It can mean so many things. Jinx only had one vowel, so that meant love was stronger. She liked that.
|
