Buffy: Far From Innocent (Patreon)

“We’re very happy to have you with us, Faith,” Mrs. Draper said. She stood beside her husband. They both smiled at her. “We know there’s no replacing your real parents, but we’ll do everything we can to give you the same stability and happiness they would want you to have.”

“That’s right,” her husband agreed. “We know it must still hurt to remember what happened. Not just to your parents, but living on your own. It all must have been so horrible.”

“Living without a parents’ love… we’ll try to love you just as much as your mother and father did.” Betty’s head bobbed. “We’ve always wanted a daughter. And you’re such a pretty girl too. It’ll be wonderful to have you with us.”

“Thanks, Betty,” Faith said.

“You can call me Mom, if you want. And my husband Dad, just like you really were our child.”

“All right, Betty,” Faith replied.

She went over to the stairs and headed upstairs to check out her room.

A new family. What bullshit. She felt like she already had a family—Giles and Buffy and all her little friends—but it wasn’t the kind of family you’d want. It was noisy and intrusive and incestuous. Which was why she was here. All of them deciding for her that she couldn’t hack it on her own, that she needed two aging dipshits like Don and Betty to validate her.

Total horseshit. She could manage on her own, had been as long as she could remember, but because Buffy couldn’t see herself going it alone—so of course, Faith had to be judged as an extension of Buffy and not her own person, let alone better than her. It was all such a clusterfuck.

“Oh, Faith?” Don called from the foot of the stairs.

Faith knew to keep her head down. Make the best of a bad situation. Let them think whatever they wanted—she could wait until push came to shove to shove.

She leaned against the railing of the upstairs landing. “Yeah?”

“My wife and I are aging well, but we’re still pretty old-fashioned.”

Faith nodded.

“We believe that if a child misbehaves, it’s in her interest, not ours, that she be disciplined. I just want to make it clear to you that there’s more to this place than a ceiling and four walls. My wife, God bless her, she just sees that pretty face and thinks all you need are three square meals a day. Maybe a lesson in how to run the laundry machine. But if you think you can do whatever you want and just use this place for free room and board… you can expect to be disciplined. It’s for your own good, but you will be punished for breaking the rules. Is that understood?”

“Yes,” Faith said. Guys like him liked being told yes.

“I’m glad to hear that,” he said, a beaming smile on his face. “We’ve been foster parents before and we’ve always found that a strict household benefits children in the long run. Not that we expect to have many problems with you. You seem like a smart girl. You can realize that if what’s best for you is to follow the rules, then you follow the rules.”

“Yes,” Faith said again. She went to her bedroom and turned the radio on full blast.

Were there any of them—a single one of them—that wasn’t fucked up? No. Not Xander, not Willow, not nobody. But instead of working on their shit, they zeroed in on her.

Faith’s erratic. She’s unreliable. She can’t be trusted. Like she had a monopoly on any of that. Angel was a fucking vampire and he was in the club! They just couldn’t take how she expressed herself. She didn’t kowtow, she didn’t bend the knee, she didn’t play their dumbass reindeer games. And so they got to judge her. Because she was a real outsider and they were just posers.

Hell, they were all freaks, but only they were losers. She was a survivor. Faith could survive in the shit that came their way, rise above it, and that scared them. They thought she had to be dangerous if she was too badass to knuckle under. That she was crazy if she wasn’t like them.

Fucking hypocrites. Like she wasn’t good enough to fuck. Xander, Willow, even Buffy, they’d all thought about it. Where were all their high-minded morals when her ass was shaking on the dance floor and they had a front-row seat? She wasn’t such a risk then, now was she? She’d bet even Giles would like a taste, he was just too repressed to admit it.

Maybe that was her problem. Faith had had some fun with Xander, but what did Buffy care? He was nothing to her but another voice in the peanut gallery. Now if she gave Giles a blowjob, that would really fuck with B. Get her thinking outside the box instead of deciding that what Faith needed was two parents, a dog, and a white-picket fence.

It was all fucking projection. Buffy thought that all would make her happy—it wouldn’t—so of course, if she could just arrange it for Faith… God, it must piss B the fuck off that Faith could get by without all the shit she needed.

Faith laid in bed and stewed, let her music pound the walls she’d been imprisoned in. She itched for a fight… hungry and horny like she was about to go slaying. But no, Faith, I’ve got that covered. Take some time to get situated. We’ll be waiting once things are settled with your foster parents.

Couldn’t take being outshined, any of ‘em. Had to ship Faith off to the Siberian suburbs. Like she could forget she was the fucking Slayer if they stopped her from having fun for a while—took away her job for a while. Fucking repressed prude motherfuckers thought she had an off-switch for being a badass. Maybe Buffy could hijab up and be an all-American cheerleader, but Faith loved leather too much to give anything else a shot.

She was spoiling for a fight. Faith wished one of the Scoobies were here so she could give them just a taste of what she was feeling. She wished one of her would-be ‘rents would hammer the door and tell her to turn her shit down. She was ready to go scream for scream with them, telling them where they could stick their rules.

Why weren’t they trying to discipline her? Don had told her all about how he was just waiting to break off a switch, just for her. After that whole speech about her own good, now she got to turn the entire zip code into a Metallica concert?

Faith turned the boombox down. Maybe they were high. Too blissed out on heroin to give a shit whether she played Nine Inch Nails or the theme song to Bewitched. That’d fit what she knew of the foster system and Sunnydale. You didn’t have twenty miles of graveyards in your city unless the bureaucracy was well and truly shit.

Or maybe some vampire, some werewolf, something had come here and decided to take the Slayer out while she was in the middle of picking out an underwear drawer.

She switched the radio off entirely and ran out the door into the upstairs hallway. She didn’t hear anything except bad memories. Faith wasn’t stupid; she knew that’s what it was. Kakistos fucking with her from even further beyond the grave than he’d started at.

She closed her eyes, heard her heartbeat hammering away, and tried to stretch her ears past that, past her dead goddamn Watcher, to sense what was actually going the fuck on.

She heard Don’s voice. He was in the master bedroom. What was he doing in the bedroom in the middle of the day?

Someone answered Don. It sounded like Betty. Faith’s curiosity was aroused. They wanted privacy? To talk about her? She flipped over the upstairs railing, landed in a crouch on the first floor, and made a beeline for the bedroom door. Boldly she knelt down to see through the keyhole.

The sight that met Faith’s eyes made them widen as they hadn’t in a long time. Don was lying on the bed, completely naked. Betty was on top of him, nude herself. She was perched on his chest, knees bracketing his broad shoulders and calves going underneath his arms. It was a position that offered her pussy right to his mouth and Don took full advantage of that opportunity.

“You’re really getting me warmed up now, daddy,” Betty said, her precise, chilly voice now tremulous—shuddering where Betty’s gorgeous body was as still as the statue she resembled, in all her delicate proportions. “Just a little more sugar… yesss…”

Don’s head moved forward… his chin flat on his sternum… and Betty’s hips began to sway in a sucking, writhing motion. Undulating with her enjoyment of the act far more than what her husband was doing.