Originally Posted: Feb. 22nd, 2007
Length/Rating: 201 words, PG, Gen
AU: The Secret Lives of Superheroes
Pairing/Warnings: Faith/Xander
Summary: What it says on the tin.

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER is owned, trademark and copyright by Twentieth Century Fox, Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, and the WB Network. All rights reserved. No copyright infringement is intended nor implied.

Five days spent aimlessly wandering into the heartlands. Five days heading down highways, and byways, and old dirt roads leading nowhere, except that they never actually did.

Five days– five nights sleeping stretched out in seats that never quite reclined far enough for comfort. Listening to echoes of Faith’s nightmares and the muted tones of Ruth’s biblical lullabies.

Some things he could handle, the road, the seats, the second thoughts, but this– this.

On the sixth night, when her dreams took her back to the pit, back to where being the best hadn’t been even a shadow of good enough; he risked Ruth’s anger and Faith’s sometimes violent independence and slipped in beside her in the backseat.

And he wondered what it meant, that she didn’t wake, didn’t lash out in the midst of a nightmare all the more powerful for being real. Instead she quieted, still whimpering, but softly now, without the urgent notes, as if he’d muted it somehow; pulled the memories back from ‘now’ into the ‘then’ where they belonged.

After a while he slept, propped up against the door with Faith’s head cradled against his hip, and Ruth sang them soft low psalms that felt like home.