Fredficathon
Mar. 15th, 2004 04:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
doyleTitle: Satellite Trails
Author: Doyle
Pairing: Fred/Faith
Rating: PG-13
Notes: For the Fredficathon for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
shadowlongknife: the request was Fred/Faith, after Orpheus, and Fred dumbing down some aspect of science to Faith. The fact that I had to do an essay on this particular aspect of Physics last week is pure coincidence, really. This goes AU some time around Damage.
A couple of things happened all at once: Fred, halfway through her third date with Knox, right about the time when she should have been pondering whether to obey the time honoured rules and invite him into her apartment afterwards, found herself instead fixated on their waitress. More accurately, at the waitress's - Fred mentally flailed around for the best word - ample cleavage.
Knox leaned across the table and said, "I think you're all mapled out."
Fred tore her eyes from the enticing curves of Hello-My-Name-Is-Patty and looked down at her drowning pancakes, realizing at that moment that maybe her halfhearted attempts to convince herself that the reason she felt no spark with Knox was because she was, on some deep subconscious level, in love with Wesley, might be juuuust a little off base.
At much the same time, Fred found out later, a Slayer was sauntering into the Wolfram & Hart lobby and loudly declaring that, damn, if this was the kind of HQ that came with going evil, she should've abandoned the New Watchers' Council months ago.
At work the next morning, after a sleepless night and a blushing hour with Google (it turned out there was no site called www.twentysomethingrecentlysexuallyconfusedphysicist.com, which Fred felt was a galactic oversight on someone's part) she was falling asleep over the latest lab results when Angel walked in to introduce their newest employee.
"Faith's going to be working with us for a while," he said, sounding as though Harmony had accidentally tipped half a quart of lemon juice into his morning blood.
"Double agent," Faith said, hoisting herself smoothly onto a bench. "Workin' for the man, reporting back to Slayer Inc. Gotta keep an eye on Angel, make sure he's not going Anakin Skywalk…" She grimaced. "Sorry. Been working with Andrew."
"Oh, I thought he was sweet," Fred said, then noticed how Angel's scowl had gone Marianas Trench deep and read the subtext. Andrew had reported back, and now they had a Slayer watchdog.
Like a good scientist, Fred carefully and dispassionately looked at the pros and cons of that. It would upset Angel, but a Slayer on the team had to be a major new asset in the corporate battle against evil, right? And if the Watchers or whoever Andrew worked for had to send somebody, it was good it was somebody Angel knew, right? Anyone? Bueller? Then her treacherous new girl-lechery side added that her new workmate looked to have a penchant for tousled hair, half-open shirts and skintight leather pants, and that they could use some more eye-candy around the office.
Golly, she thought, blushing again, I just called another girl eye-candy.
Faith picked up a glass sphere from the desk, tossing it in her palm. "How you been, Fred?"
Fred took the bauble from her, hoping there wasn't a Slayer sense that could detect nerve endings going tingly from fingertip contact. "It's worth half a million dollars," she apologized. "And I've been fine. Good, even." She glanced at Angel and felt guilty for even entertaining naughty thoughts when her boss - her friend - was worried and cranky. She quickly added, "Since we took over the firm we've really done some great work with the resources here."
Faith slid smoothly off the bench. "Yeah, Wes and Gunn already gave me the talk." She smiled. "Listen, I'm not here to screw you, Fred."
The language center of Fred's brain, against all natural laws, shrank to the size of a photon and quantum-tunnelled its way out into the wide world, leaving her unable to speak.
"You guys got a bunch of people with their panties twisted," Faith went on. "Angel went through the whole helping the helpless large-scale thing, and, hey, I believe him. Just gotta stick around for a couple of weeks, report back to Giles and B, tell them they're on crack." She grinned. "Plus I have this tiny problem with my record Gunn says he can make with like Jimmy Hoffa."
"Gunn," Fred said, latching onto the name like a life preserver. Kind, strong Charles, who she'd really thought she was in love with. "He's a lawyer now."
Faith gave her an odd look.
"We need to go, let Fred get back to work," Angel said, earning what little of Fred's undying gratitude he didn't already have.
"See you," Faith said as she turned, dropping right back into conversation with Angel about fighting the forces of evil with the mighty power of the IRS (Spike, Fred guessed, had been telling tales).
Fred watched them leave the lab, her gaze drawn to a spot slightly lower than Faith's back. There was a kind of pendulum motion to the sway of her hips that just enticed Fred's eyes to follow it. Maybe that was a thing lots of girls did, because she hadn't devoted eons to the study of the female posterior in motion. Fred had never had many female friends, now that she thought about it. Not any, really, since grade school. She'd spent high school smoking weed in her buddy Trey's basement with her three best guy friends, and her crowd at college had been fellow Physics geeks - all of them male - and then Pylea… She skipped past that particular chapter of her memory. Then Angel rescued her, and Cordelia had been the first real girlfriend she'd had in years, and if she prodded at her memory there might have been a day when her pen had rolled under the desk and she had taken a slightly longer-than-was-straight look at Cordy's legs. And then there was Willow…
The half-million-dollar Thrace Generator rolled gently off the desk and less-gently shattered on the floor. Fred, too caught up in wondering if there was at least a www.suddenlysapphic.com, didn't notice.
**
The first person she told, to her own surprise, was Harmony. That should have been a sure-fire way to get the news out to the whole office, but instead of rushing away to gossip, Harmony squealed and hugged her and said a lot of things about lesbian chic and The L Word and about how she and Willow were practically sisters in high school.
Harmony was the one who compiled a list of the most popular lesbian clubs in LA, and who took Fred clothes shopping in a mall that opened after dark especially for them, and who did the figurative and literal handholding the first time they went out. Fred picked a table in the darkest part of the club and pulled the hem of her skirt down every ten seconds, ignoring Harmony's comments that she wore shorter things at work, anyway.
The second time out, Knox came with them as Harmony's man-beard because she claimed she was, "So sick of all these gay straight girls hitting on me," and Fred had a few more drinks and let her friends pull her onto the dancefloor.
After a month of Friday night visits she kissed a brunette a few years her junior, a postgraduate student who was almost finished her PhD in archaeology. Excited and proud, she babbled out her new status as a girl-kissed back at the table. Knox ordered a round of celebratory drinks. Harmony just looked puzzled and asked why anybody would want to study arks.
It was later the same night that she bumped into Faith.
She was drying her hands in the bathroom when she heard the drawling, "Hey," and for a startled microsecond was sure it was a soundalike. Then she looked up at the wall-length mirror and saw Faith reflected behind her, wearing even more eyeliner than was usual and an outfit that had surely been painted on by some artist too lucky to be allowed to live.
"Hi," she stammered, rattled by the clash of her working world and her Friday night one. She saw Faith at meetings, where she'd taken over Spike's role as dispenser of snark ever since he'd gone off to work on his own, and on the rare occasion when Faith would come to the lab for something, but that hardly counted as extended contact. They'd exchanged maybe forty words since the first day in the lab.
Fred might have admitted to some thoughts in a certain Slayer's direction, maybe a stray glance cast her way in Angel's office, a bias towards dancing with girls who had dark hair and eyes. None of that mattered. She'd consigned her crush on Faith to the same mental category as Wesley's feelings for her - never to be reciprocated, and therefore better for all concerned if they were never acknowledged.
That would have been easier if it wasn't for Faith getting closer to her now, wriggling right across the personal bubble and backing Fred up against the mirror.
"Saw you dancing," Faith said, her eyes doing a slow, filthy crawl down Fred's body. "Looked pretty good for a tech girl."
"I didn't know you came here."
Faith shrugged. "I get around." Her tongue moved across her bottom lip, just the tip visible.
Fred wondered if the mirror was two-way, and if some sleazy guys were getting a secret floor-show. "Faith," she said, and was almost literally saved by the bell. Bells, plural.
"Fuck," Faith said, stepping back and going for her cellphone. "Yeah, Gunn?" she said into the phone as Fred answered her own with, "Wesley?"
They both listened, Faith looking pissed off, Fred feeling relieved enough to kiss Wes, if that wouldn't be mean and heartless and liable to cause mixed signals.
"Should never've said I'd carry one of these," Faith said, snapping the phone shut. "Gotta raincheck on the sexual harassing."
Fred lowered her voice, mindful of anyone in the bathroom or behind secret peepshow mirrors who shouldn't know about a demon attack out by Mount Wilson. "Shonteroth nest? I know. Wesley says to meet up with you." She quirked a smile and a shrug that she hoped conveyed ‘go team us!’
Faith raised her eyebrows. "Tagging along? You can run in that skirt?"
That was just a pot calling a kettle something bad. "You can fight in those pants?" Actually, she probably could, and she had a point about the skirt veering towards the sexy yet restrictive side. "I have pants in my car."
Faith tugged lightly at her sleeve, that tongue making a repeat appearance. "I call stripping rights?"
Maybe they could fit in some sexual harassment on the way.
**
The Shonteroth turned out to be a foot and a half tall and such wimpy fighters that Fred could have taken out most of them herself. Apart from the few she accidentally stood on, though, she left the fighting to Faith, preferring to work navigation and lighting. Flashlight in one hand and GPS receiver in the other, she raced after Faith, glancing down at the map on the display screen and yelling directions. She was grateful that she'd had a pair of sneakers in the car along with her old jeans, because she had a feeling running through a dark forest in high heels could only lead to broken ankles. As it was, she tripped once, but broke her fall on a panicking half-dozen Shonteroth who made a satisfyingly squishy noise when she landed on them, so that was okay.
The demons' real danger lay in their Queen who, Wesley relayed via phone, would grow to the size of a house and emit sonic shocks wave that could destroy half of LA. In about six months. But with their rate of reproduction it was better to wipe out the clan as soon as possible, he said, since they were liable to double in number every day until they ran out of food. At that point he and Fred got off the subject and into a discussion of how the descendants of a greenfly, if they all survived and bred and assuming infinite food supplies, would fill a sphere the size of the solar system within a year.
Faith rolled her eyes at the mathy nerdishness and cut the Queen cleanly in half with her axe. The large, maggot-like body oozed and deflated.
"Oh, Faith killed her," Fred said brightly. "We'll be back in… burn the body? Okay, sure. We have to burn the body," she told Faith, clicking the phone off and tucking it back into her bag.
They looked down at the gelatinous mass.
"You ever a Girl Scout?" Faith asked.
**
It was kind of romantic, in the odd way that her whole life was that little bit skewed from normal. A moonlit night, a walk in the woods with a pretty girl, hundreds of tiny demon corpses scattered like breadcrumbs along their path…
They followed the bodies back to the clearing where they'd parked Fred's car and retrieved matches and a can of gas from the trunk. Along with the fact that she could actually afford a nice car, Fred was grateful that Wolfram & Hart owned the LAPD, and that all the senior staff's registrations were guaranteed not to be pulled over. The chains and the swords and the weapons of minor destruction would be kind of hard to explain to a startled traffic cop.
Fred thought about why they'd been sent to do this. Even if Wes and Gunn were busy running the firm, what with Angel being sick and all, and if Spike wouldn't help them out, they had a bunch of teams to do this kind of thing. Whole departments.
But Faith, as much as she complained about being called on in her downtime, had a gleam in her eyes and even more of a swagger in her strut than normal. It was a trust thing, Fred realized. Sending Faith to do this by herself with just Fred for backup was Gunn and Wesley’s way of showing her she was part of the team. That was sweet and thoughtful and made Fred love her guys.
On the other hand, maybe they were trying to throw the two of them together, which was also sweet but said something for the guys’ view of romance. Dinner, dancing and a movie? No, violence and slaughter and demon guts…
“This is nice,” Fred said, once the Queen was merrily blazing. “We should have s’mores.”
“Hell, yeah. Getting my slay on works up an appetite.”
Fred had decided on the silent drive up here that Faith’s come-ons in the club had been a joke. She’d been nothing but professional – as professional as Faith got – since slinging herself into Fred’s car, and the closest they’d come to touching was when they went for the radio at the same moment. That was okay. Workplace flirtations were a bad, awful idea, especially with somebody who was still technically part of an organization who thought the new Wolfram & Hart was evil.
That was fine and rational, apart from the part of her brain that stubbornly fixated itself on, “ooh, pretty!”
Faith’s skin looked bronze in the firelight. She stretched her arms above her head, one hand gripping the opposite wrist, her top riding up her smooth stomach.
Fred pretended to be very interested in her GPS handset. The little map onscreen was comforting. It was totally lacking in a big arrow labeled ‘Slowly Going Crazy, Again, Yaaargh!’ pointing at her position.
When she next glanced up, Faith had wandered over to her side of the fire. She didn’t have that look she’d had in the club, the predator-about-to-strike expression that was scary and sexy as all get out. She just looked relaxed, comfortable, having a good time.
Strangely, that was just as sexy.
“Is that us?” she asked, nodding at the map.
“Uh-huh. Well, me, anyway. Since I’m the one with the receiver.” Fred awkwardly pushed it into her hands. “See? Now it’s you.” She grinned.
Faith smiled back, one eyebrow going up in amusement. “How’s it know where we are?”
“Oh, it’s all to do with triangulation,” Fred said. “See, the handset measures the time for a pulse to come from one of the NAVSTAR satellites – they’re about thirty thousand miles above the Earth – and then it knows we’re on a sphere of a certain diameter.” She grew more animated as she warmed to her topic, holding out her hands to demonstrate the satellite and the point on the surface. “Technically you only need to combine the information from three satellites to exactly pinpoint a position, but with relativity and everything the receivers use four.” She laughed, struck by something incredibly funny. “So I guess it’s more like quadrangulation.”
They couldn’t quite hear the chirping of crickets, but the effect was much the same.
“Magic map,” Faith said.
“Sure,” she quickly agreed.
Faith tilted her head back, looking up at the sky. Fred had never thought of the neck as a very exciting part of the body, except presumably for vampires. She was going to have to rethink that, or at least accept she was turning into a total pervert.
“So these satellites,” Faith said, “can you see them?”
“Sometimes,” she said, looking nowhere near the sky. “Maybe not in LA, though. It’s all smoggy and light-polluted.” The stars were brighter back home. Her daddy had taught her the names, and made up the ones he didn’t know. In Pylea, she’d spent months looking for familiar constellations. She’d thought, one time, that she’d found the Big Dipper, and stayed out on the hills till sunrise watching it.
“Faith?” she asked. “Do you know the constellation names?”
Faith shook her head, smirking. “Nah. This is why I don’t go for smart girls. Try to educate you.” Fred poked her in the side. Faith grinned and caught her hand. “Hey,” she said, pulling her in, “never said you couldn’t try.”
She kissed harder than the girl in the bar; her hands went places where a total stranger, unless she was lacking of social conventions regarding personal boundaries, wouldn’t go for. Fred found that her hands knew where to go, even if she was clueless and flying loop the loops in her mind. Faith pressed against her, leaving hard little kisses along her jawline and neck, and Fred tilted her head back to let her; and just for a second, in the sky, she thought she saw satellite trails.
Author: Doyle
Pairing: Fred/Faith
Rating: PG-13
Notes: For the Fredficathon for
shadowlongknife: the request was Fred/Faith, after Orpheus, and Fred dumbing down some aspect of science to Faith. The fact that I had to do an essay on this particular aspect of Physics last week is pure coincidence, really. This goes AU some time around Damage.A couple of things happened all at once: Fred, halfway through her third date with Knox, right about the time when she should have been pondering whether to obey the time honoured rules and invite him into her apartment afterwards, found herself instead fixated on their waitress. More accurately, at the waitress's - Fred mentally flailed around for the best word - ample cleavage.
Knox leaned across the table and said, "I think you're all mapled out."
Fred tore her eyes from the enticing curves of Hello-My-Name-Is-Patty and looked down at her drowning pancakes, realizing at that moment that maybe her halfhearted attempts to convince herself that the reason she felt no spark with Knox was because she was, on some deep subconscious level, in love with Wesley, might be juuuust a little off base.
At much the same time, Fred found out later, a Slayer was sauntering into the Wolfram & Hart lobby and loudly declaring that, damn, if this was the kind of HQ that came with going evil, she should've abandoned the New Watchers' Council months ago.
At work the next morning, after a sleepless night and a blushing hour with Google (it turned out there was no site called www.twentysomethingrecentlysexuallyconfusedphysicist.com, which Fred felt was a galactic oversight on someone's part) she was falling asleep over the latest lab results when Angel walked in to introduce their newest employee.
"Faith's going to be working with us for a while," he said, sounding as though Harmony had accidentally tipped half a quart of lemon juice into his morning blood.
"Double agent," Faith said, hoisting herself smoothly onto a bench. "Workin' for the man, reporting back to Slayer Inc. Gotta keep an eye on Angel, make sure he's not going Anakin Skywalk…" She grimaced. "Sorry. Been working with Andrew."
"Oh, I thought he was sweet," Fred said, then noticed how Angel's scowl had gone Marianas Trench deep and read the subtext. Andrew had reported back, and now they had a Slayer watchdog.
Like a good scientist, Fred carefully and dispassionately looked at the pros and cons of that. It would upset Angel, but a Slayer on the team had to be a major new asset in the corporate battle against evil, right? And if the Watchers or whoever Andrew worked for had to send somebody, it was good it was somebody Angel knew, right? Anyone? Bueller? Then her treacherous new girl-lechery side added that her new workmate looked to have a penchant for tousled hair, half-open shirts and skintight leather pants, and that they could use some more eye-candy around the office.
Golly, she thought, blushing again, I just called another girl eye-candy.
Faith picked up a glass sphere from the desk, tossing it in her palm. "How you been, Fred?"
Fred took the bauble from her, hoping there wasn't a Slayer sense that could detect nerve endings going tingly from fingertip contact. "It's worth half a million dollars," she apologized. "And I've been fine. Good, even." She glanced at Angel and felt guilty for even entertaining naughty thoughts when her boss - her friend - was worried and cranky. She quickly added, "Since we took over the firm we've really done some great work with the resources here."
Faith slid smoothly off the bench. "Yeah, Wes and Gunn already gave me the talk." She smiled. "Listen, I'm not here to screw you, Fred."
The language center of Fred's brain, against all natural laws, shrank to the size of a photon and quantum-tunnelled its way out into the wide world, leaving her unable to speak.
"You guys got a bunch of people with their panties twisted," Faith went on. "Angel went through the whole helping the helpless large-scale thing, and, hey, I believe him. Just gotta stick around for a couple of weeks, report back to Giles and B, tell them they're on crack." She grinned. "Plus I have this tiny problem with my record Gunn says he can make with like Jimmy Hoffa."
"Gunn," Fred said, latching onto the name like a life preserver. Kind, strong Charles, who she'd really thought she was in love with. "He's a lawyer now."
Faith gave her an odd look.
"We need to go, let Fred get back to work," Angel said, earning what little of Fred's undying gratitude he didn't already have.
"See you," Faith said as she turned, dropping right back into conversation with Angel about fighting the forces of evil with the mighty power of the IRS (Spike, Fred guessed, had been telling tales).
Fred watched them leave the lab, her gaze drawn to a spot slightly lower than Faith's back. There was a kind of pendulum motion to the sway of her hips that just enticed Fred's eyes to follow it. Maybe that was a thing lots of girls did, because she hadn't devoted eons to the study of the female posterior in motion. Fred had never had many female friends, now that she thought about it. Not any, really, since grade school. She'd spent high school smoking weed in her buddy Trey's basement with her three best guy friends, and her crowd at college had been fellow Physics geeks - all of them male - and then Pylea… She skipped past that particular chapter of her memory. Then Angel rescued her, and Cordelia had been the first real girlfriend she'd had in years, and if she prodded at her memory there might have been a day when her pen had rolled under the desk and she had taken a slightly longer-than-was-straight look at Cordy's legs. And then there was Willow…
The half-million-dollar Thrace Generator rolled gently off the desk and less-gently shattered on the floor. Fred, too caught up in wondering if there was at least a www.suddenlysapphic.com, didn't notice.
**
The first person she told, to her own surprise, was Harmony. That should have been a sure-fire way to get the news out to the whole office, but instead of rushing away to gossip, Harmony squealed and hugged her and said a lot of things about lesbian chic and The L Word and about how she and Willow were practically sisters in high school.
Harmony was the one who compiled a list of the most popular lesbian clubs in LA, and who took Fred clothes shopping in a mall that opened after dark especially for them, and who did the figurative and literal handholding the first time they went out. Fred picked a table in the darkest part of the club and pulled the hem of her skirt down every ten seconds, ignoring Harmony's comments that she wore shorter things at work, anyway.
The second time out, Knox came with them as Harmony's man-beard because she claimed she was, "So sick of all these gay straight girls hitting on me," and Fred had a few more drinks and let her friends pull her onto the dancefloor.
After a month of Friday night visits she kissed a brunette a few years her junior, a postgraduate student who was almost finished her PhD in archaeology. Excited and proud, she babbled out her new status as a girl-kissed back at the table. Knox ordered a round of celebratory drinks. Harmony just looked puzzled and asked why anybody would want to study arks.
It was later the same night that she bumped into Faith.
She was drying her hands in the bathroom when she heard the drawling, "Hey," and for a startled microsecond was sure it was a soundalike. Then she looked up at the wall-length mirror and saw Faith reflected behind her, wearing even more eyeliner than was usual and an outfit that had surely been painted on by some artist too lucky to be allowed to live.
"Hi," she stammered, rattled by the clash of her working world and her Friday night one. She saw Faith at meetings, where she'd taken over Spike's role as dispenser of snark ever since he'd gone off to work on his own, and on the rare occasion when Faith would come to the lab for something, but that hardly counted as extended contact. They'd exchanged maybe forty words since the first day in the lab.
Fred might have admitted to some thoughts in a certain Slayer's direction, maybe a stray glance cast her way in Angel's office, a bias towards dancing with girls who had dark hair and eyes. None of that mattered. She'd consigned her crush on Faith to the same mental category as Wesley's feelings for her - never to be reciprocated, and therefore better for all concerned if they were never acknowledged.
That would have been easier if it wasn't for Faith getting closer to her now, wriggling right across the personal bubble and backing Fred up against the mirror.
"Saw you dancing," Faith said, her eyes doing a slow, filthy crawl down Fred's body. "Looked pretty good for a tech girl."
"I didn't know you came here."
Faith shrugged. "I get around." Her tongue moved across her bottom lip, just the tip visible.
Fred wondered if the mirror was two-way, and if some sleazy guys were getting a secret floor-show. "Faith," she said, and was almost literally saved by the bell. Bells, plural.
"Fuck," Faith said, stepping back and going for her cellphone. "Yeah, Gunn?" she said into the phone as Fred answered her own with, "Wesley?"
They both listened, Faith looking pissed off, Fred feeling relieved enough to kiss Wes, if that wouldn't be mean and heartless and liable to cause mixed signals.
"Should never've said I'd carry one of these," Faith said, snapping the phone shut. "Gotta raincheck on the sexual harassing."
Fred lowered her voice, mindful of anyone in the bathroom or behind secret peepshow mirrors who shouldn't know about a demon attack out by Mount Wilson. "Shonteroth nest? I know. Wesley says to meet up with you." She quirked a smile and a shrug that she hoped conveyed ‘go team us!’
Faith raised her eyebrows. "Tagging along? You can run in that skirt?"
That was just a pot calling a kettle something bad. "You can fight in those pants?" Actually, she probably could, and she had a point about the skirt veering towards the sexy yet restrictive side. "I have pants in my car."
Faith tugged lightly at her sleeve, that tongue making a repeat appearance. "I call stripping rights?"
Maybe they could fit in some sexual harassment on the way.
**
The Shonteroth turned out to be a foot and a half tall and such wimpy fighters that Fred could have taken out most of them herself. Apart from the few she accidentally stood on, though, she left the fighting to Faith, preferring to work navigation and lighting. Flashlight in one hand and GPS receiver in the other, she raced after Faith, glancing down at the map on the display screen and yelling directions. She was grateful that she'd had a pair of sneakers in the car along with her old jeans, because she had a feeling running through a dark forest in high heels could only lead to broken ankles. As it was, she tripped once, but broke her fall on a panicking half-dozen Shonteroth who made a satisfyingly squishy noise when she landed on them, so that was okay.
The demons' real danger lay in their Queen who, Wesley relayed via phone, would grow to the size of a house and emit sonic shocks wave that could destroy half of LA. In about six months. But with their rate of reproduction it was better to wipe out the clan as soon as possible, he said, since they were liable to double in number every day until they ran out of food. At that point he and Fred got off the subject and into a discussion of how the descendants of a greenfly, if they all survived and bred and assuming infinite food supplies, would fill a sphere the size of the solar system within a year.
Faith rolled her eyes at the mathy nerdishness and cut the Queen cleanly in half with her axe. The large, maggot-like body oozed and deflated.
"Oh, Faith killed her," Fred said brightly. "We'll be back in… burn the body? Okay, sure. We have to burn the body," she told Faith, clicking the phone off and tucking it back into her bag.
They looked down at the gelatinous mass.
"You ever a Girl Scout?" Faith asked.
**
It was kind of romantic, in the odd way that her whole life was that little bit skewed from normal. A moonlit night, a walk in the woods with a pretty girl, hundreds of tiny demon corpses scattered like breadcrumbs along their path…
They followed the bodies back to the clearing where they'd parked Fred's car and retrieved matches and a can of gas from the trunk. Along with the fact that she could actually afford a nice car, Fred was grateful that Wolfram & Hart owned the LAPD, and that all the senior staff's registrations were guaranteed not to be pulled over. The chains and the swords and the weapons of minor destruction would be kind of hard to explain to a startled traffic cop.
Fred thought about why they'd been sent to do this. Even if Wes and Gunn were busy running the firm, what with Angel being sick and all, and if Spike wouldn't help them out, they had a bunch of teams to do this kind of thing. Whole departments.
But Faith, as much as she complained about being called on in her downtime, had a gleam in her eyes and even more of a swagger in her strut than normal. It was a trust thing, Fred realized. Sending Faith to do this by herself with just Fred for backup was Gunn and Wesley’s way of showing her she was part of the team. That was sweet and thoughtful and made Fred love her guys.
On the other hand, maybe they were trying to throw the two of them together, which was also sweet but said something for the guys’ view of romance. Dinner, dancing and a movie? No, violence and slaughter and demon guts…
“This is nice,” Fred said, once the Queen was merrily blazing. “We should have s’mores.”
“Hell, yeah. Getting my slay on works up an appetite.”
Fred had decided on the silent drive up here that Faith’s come-ons in the club had been a joke. She’d been nothing but professional – as professional as Faith got – since slinging herself into Fred’s car, and the closest they’d come to touching was when they went for the radio at the same moment. That was okay. Workplace flirtations were a bad, awful idea, especially with somebody who was still technically part of an organization who thought the new Wolfram & Hart was evil.
That was fine and rational, apart from the part of her brain that stubbornly fixated itself on, “ooh, pretty!”
Faith’s skin looked bronze in the firelight. She stretched her arms above her head, one hand gripping the opposite wrist, her top riding up her smooth stomach.
Fred pretended to be very interested in her GPS handset. The little map onscreen was comforting. It was totally lacking in a big arrow labeled ‘Slowly Going Crazy, Again, Yaaargh!’ pointing at her position.
When she next glanced up, Faith had wandered over to her side of the fire. She didn’t have that look she’d had in the club, the predator-about-to-strike expression that was scary and sexy as all get out. She just looked relaxed, comfortable, having a good time.
Strangely, that was just as sexy.
“Is that us?” she asked, nodding at the map.
“Uh-huh. Well, me, anyway. Since I’m the one with the receiver.” Fred awkwardly pushed it into her hands. “See? Now it’s you.” She grinned.
Faith smiled back, one eyebrow going up in amusement. “How’s it know where we are?”
“Oh, it’s all to do with triangulation,” Fred said. “See, the handset measures the time for a pulse to come from one of the NAVSTAR satellites – they’re about thirty thousand miles above the Earth – and then it knows we’re on a sphere of a certain diameter.” She grew more animated as she warmed to her topic, holding out her hands to demonstrate the satellite and the point on the surface. “Technically you only need to combine the information from three satellites to exactly pinpoint a position, but with relativity and everything the receivers use four.” She laughed, struck by something incredibly funny. “So I guess it’s more like quadrangulation.”
They couldn’t quite hear the chirping of crickets, but the effect was much the same.
“Magic map,” Faith said.
“Sure,” she quickly agreed.
Faith tilted her head back, looking up at the sky. Fred had never thought of the neck as a very exciting part of the body, except presumably for vampires. She was going to have to rethink that, or at least accept she was turning into a total pervert.
“So these satellites,” Faith said, “can you see them?”
“Sometimes,” she said, looking nowhere near the sky. “Maybe not in LA, though. It’s all smoggy and light-polluted.” The stars were brighter back home. Her daddy had taught her the names, and made up the ones he didn’t know. In Pylea, she’d spent months looking for familiar constellations. She’d thought, one time, that she’d found the Big Dipper, and stayed out on the hills till sunrise watching it.
“Faith?” she asked. “Do you know the constellation names?”
Faith shook her head, smirking. “Nah. This is why I don’t go for smart girls. Try to educate you.” Fred poked her in the side. Faith grinned and caught her hand. “Hey,” she said, pulling her in, “never said you couldn’t try.”
She kissed harder than the girl in the bar; her hands went places where a total stranger, unless she was lacking of social conventions regarding personal boundaries, wouldn’t go for. Fred found that her hands knew where to go, even if she was clueless and flying loop the loops in her mind. Faith pressed against her, leaving hard little kisses along her jawline and neck, and Fred tilted her head back to let her; and just for a second, in the sky, she thought she saw satellite trails.
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no subject
on 2004-03-16 04:35 am (UTC)no subject
on 2004-03-16 04:53 am (UTC)