jesterladyfic | Role Reversal: Chapter One

Chapter One: In Which I Monologue

My life the past few months had been unusual, which, for me, is to say it’d been rather normal. All the things that happened, just part and parcel of the whole Buffy experience. Demon slavers, zombies, vampires so old and ugly you have to drive a four by four through their heart to kill them, Mr. Hyde wannabes trying to impress their girlfriends, monsters from everywhere competing over who gets to kill me, candy that turned my mom into a Giles-making-out-with teenager and crazy, evil ex-Watchers. Like I said, completely normal.

Not to say it was all slaying and roses. Life had been hard for awhile. It started back when my arch enemy
walked up to me, said ‘hello, cutie,’ and offered to help me stop my boyfriend from destroying the world. And he did.
But in the process I lost my boyfriend; in fact, I had to kill him. It royally sucked. So I ran away. The real kicker
was that running away never works out and I had to come back.

That’s where the past few months came in. I had never felt so alone in my life, and, for my life, that’s saying a lot. I
had friends, good friends, my mom loved me, Snyder even let me back into school, but it just wasn’t enough.
Something inside me had been torn to shreds and I didn’t think it would ever be healed.

My friends tried to help, but they just didn’t understand. Despite the awkwardness we went through when I first came back, Willow and I had re-bonded over a bout of name-calling, but she was busy with her life. Studying magic, being with Oz and doing her homework, of course.

Xander and Cordelia, there’s a creepy thought, spent all their time making out in broom closets or in her snazzy car
she liked to talk about so much.

Giles, anxious to help and bless his British ever-loving heart, could do no more than offer me tea and make me train
harder.

Mom didn’t understand any of it; she didn’t even accept the fact that my life was real most of the time.

But guess what? Life sometimes hands you a break. Most of my complaints in life have to deal with being alone.
That’s what I was told being the Slayer was anyway. But because I apparently refuse to do things the normal way,
this got a bit screwed up and now there are two of us. Faith the Vampire Slayer, my new best friend. I needed her
so much; you have no idea what she meant to me or how much she helped me. She knew what it meant to be
alone, even without being the Slayer and we could share anything. We were going to go to Homecoming together
and she even totally busted my loser rebound boyfriend who dumped me right before the dance.

She was a bit on the wild side, no mistake. Xander’s mouth dropped open and Cordelia slapped him every time Faith
walked by. She ate that right up. She'd had a harder life than I have had. And she was always running away.
Except for one time, she didn’t. Faith had come to town running from a horrendously ugly vampire that could give the
Master a run for his money in the Miss America Gross and Scary Looking Pageant. Kakistos had killed her Watcher
and was bent on killing her too and she was scared. But she managed to kill him; she managed to face her fears.
You’ve no idea the kind of courage that gave me.

That wasn’t the only thing she was running from though. Apparently wooden stakes don’t just kill vampires, but
humans as well. Faith found that out the hard way.

It had always scared me how much power I wielded, but not her. Faith ran with the power, she gloried in the power,
and that’s where the trouble started. She hadn’t meant to kill anyone, but her impulsiveness caused her to anyway.
She did feel horrible about it. But, for some reason, while I would’ve been on my way to the police station to turn
myself in, she believed because she was a Slayer she had certain privileges. That she was better and the rules
didn’t apply to her.

All this had happened before she came to Sunnydale, so we both had thought the past was behind us and we sister
Slayers, the Chosen Two, could move through life unafraid of anything. But the past had only been lurking beneath
the surface, ready to devour Faith.

It had always been my belief that when you stake a vampire, if he’s only a fledgling that is, you just stake him. I
played around with the vamps sure, punning my little puns, but I wouldn’t stand there and punch one senseless for
the fun of it.

Faith liked the hunt, the kill, the power. She felt she had to work harder to prove herself against me. We were
friends, we were both Slayers, but I had been there first and these were my friends, not hers. Never mind the fact that we’d all accepted her immediately, that I had been closer to her than everyone, even Willow, Faith felt she had to run to catch up with me. And in some ways, she was right. I had been doing it longer, I did have a better handle on it, but that was no reason to turn traitor on me.

Yup, that’s what she did. It started when her new Watcher, whom she trusted, turned out to be evil and tried to kill
us all. We knew and Faith didn’t, she wouldn’t believe us, and Faith tried to help Miss Psycho until she turned on her. After that, Faith built up walls and didn’t trust anyone. She thought we’d been holding out on her the whole time about crazy Watcher Lady and hadn’t told her till the last possible second. So Faith switched sides on me.

See, the Mayor of Sunnydale turned out to be evil; I guess we all should’ve known. Kind of a duh moment really,
when we figured it out. He’d started hiring hit vampires to take out Faith and I when I caught him delivering a tribute of babies to a sewer monster, but when Faith took in her second human kill, she went to him. She’d killed his pet vampire, Mr. Trick, and wanted to replace him. He took her in and then my best friend, who helped me survive, turned officially to the evil side of the game and while she didn’t actively try to kill me, probably wouldn’t be adverse to it.

Why is it that whenever one of the good guys turns evil Spike shows up to even the balance or something by helping me out?