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Chapter 1: Compressed

Author's Notes: So, this is my first time posting anything EVER. I welcome obscene quantities of feedback and constructive criticism.

The first time they kiss, it feels at once new and strangely familiar. As if a door was opening they had both been staring at, maybe inching towards, for a disturbingly long time. As if mouths and tongues and tentative fingertips and the taste of cheap beer and red wine were the equivalent of some lame-ass metaphorical key.

When Buffy walks into the kitchen, Faith is sipping a cold beer, feet propped casually on the table, gazing out the window into the gently sloping LA sun. LA sunsets are more vibrant than Sunnydale's, maybe because of the rampant pollution, maybe because of the energy rising off of the city like heat. Buffy likes seeing them as well. Likes imagining what the sunsets are like for the other newly woken slayers out there. Gives her a feeling, maybe an important, fragile illusion, of connection between her and those other girls.

She comes into the kitchen and sees Faith nonchalantly glance her way. Expecting her. It hasn't exactly been comfortable between them since Sunnydale imploded. They occupy a state somewhere between enmity, cautious acceptance, periodical stomach clenching for no apparent reason, and battle-induced camaraderie. Friendship seems like such a foreign, un-fittable, almost mundane concept for them.

"You ready to be the fearless leader of a bunch of juiced-up girls who can't tell the diff between a crossbow and a hair straightener?" Faith asks, languidly raising the bottle to her lips.

"Don't think my readiness is going to be taken into consideration," Buffy says, and walks over to sit across the table. She eyes Faith's combat boots, which have a suspicious substance on them.

"Relax, B. They're clean," Faith says in response. Buffy arches an eyebrow skeptically at her. "Well, okay, they're actually covered in Gralak demon's blood, but it's supposed to be antiseptic or some shit like that."

"That why it's glowing like a radioactive Christmas tree?" Buffy gives her a look, maintaining the eyebrow.

Faith shrugs apathetically. "I'll wipe it off later."

The deep red from the sunset is slanting across the kitchen, making the perspiration from the beer bottle almost glitter. Faith's fingers are lazily circling the top of the bottle, and Buffy can hear the periodical squeak from the contact, bouncing inside the glass. Faith's eyes look brighter too.

Buffy becomes aware of the other slayer gazing intently at her, almost appraisingly, and she feels a warm prickling of self-consciousness. Back when Faith was a dangerous splash of indiscriminate energy, when everything she did had some deep, underlying frenetic pace, this sort of staring would have been uncharacteristic. Now, with this new calmer, quieter version of Faith, it's slightly more character-friendly.

Buffy keeps thinking of the term "compressed" when she looks at Faith, and she wonders if that's the right word, and if whatever Faith's allegedly "compressing" will someday explode. She thinks of that physics law (high school seems almost anachronistic), conservation of energy or something like that, and is convinced that all of Faith's vibrancy couldn't have just disappeared and is being muffled somewhere.

Buffy hears the chair scrape as she gets up, avoiding Faith's gaze, and opens the fridge door. She snorts at the selection. Beer, $4-a-bottle red wine, milk, salami, cheese, chocolate pudding, anchovies, and ketchup.

"You know, with these ingredients, I could probably make Dawn a kick-ass sandwich," Buffy says, leaning against the fridge door.

Faith finishes her beer with a satisfied smack and grins. "Your sis has the most fucked up eating habits I've ever seen, B."

"Complete lack of argument here," Buffy responds, and grabs the beer, red wine, and a glass from the cupboard. She carries all of it over to the table, dumping the beer in front of Faith, who nods appreciatively at her. Buffy grimaces at the first taste of the wine, but inhales it anyway.

An hour later, and Buffy's on her third glass of wine and Faith's on her fourth beer, and they're laughing loudly at the image of Angel in a suit delegating paper work to a bunch of evil lawyers.

"God, that poor son of a bitch," Faith says, shaking her head and releasing a deep, throaty laugh.

Buffy, whose legs are stretched out on the chair in front of her, lets out a few stray giggles and gulps some more wine.

"What exactly are the motivational tools he's using? Twinkies, hugs, disembowelment? Oh, God," Buffy says, putting a hand to her mouth and covering her grin, "love the guy, but he's a little lacking in the technological department. He's gonna try to decapitate the fax machine. I can see it."

Her head feels pleasantly furry. The alcohol is making it seem comfortable, packaging up those memories that tighten the air between them and putting them in a neat, little box in the corner.

The warm rush from the laughter recedes, and Buffy feels this moment of precarious fragility, like saying the wrong thing will shatter something intangible. She suddenly desperately wants to keep it.

"So," Buffy starts, and is surprised to feel herself flush a little. "I gotta say, I've wanted to ask you about something for a while."

Faith's eyes peer over the top of her bottle, and there's a wariness underneath that familiar lazy confidence. Buffy leans forward, keeping her face carefully neutral, and holds Faith's gaze for several moments as the other slayer puts her beer down.

"How was Xander in bed?" she asks abruptly, and Faith lets out a half-snort, half-strangled laugh that echoes loudly in the kitchen. Buffy watches the small lines around her eyes begin to smooth out, sees her shoulder muscles loosen, and it makes her strangely happy.

"Jesus, B," she says, trying to cover her recent anxiety. "He was - he was pretty friggin' horrendous, honestly." Buffy laughs loudly and Faith gives her a lop-sided smile that makes her stomach flutter bizarrely. "But, cut him some slack. First time and all that other boring virginity shit."

"You are a shameless cherry-popper," Buffy says, grinning. She can't remember the last time she was able to smile so effortlessly.

"What the hell are whole cherries useful for, anyway?" Faith asks, smirking widely. "Especially when you can lose ‘em to a hot piece of ass like me. Anyways," she nods and raises her bottle in a mock toast, "I don't trust the newbies enough to be on top, so I got some control over the whole situation."

Buffy feels a tingling warmth cover her like an electric blanket, and drinks some more wine to hide her blush. She looks surreptitiously at Faith's mouth and sees her tongue dart out to moisten obscenely full lips, and is suddenly exceptionally curious as to how much she's had to drink. It feels odd to be here, laughing with her ex-arch-enemy over the sexual prowess of her best friend, but it feels even odder because it's easy. Buffy thinks that nothing with Faith has ever been easy, that there was always this pane of thick, distorting glass between her and the rest of the world, and trying to find her felt like scrabbling against it with ineffectual fingernails. Ironically, things seem more lucid now with the alcohol.

"I think it's time for Buffy to put the crappy wine down," Buffy says, shaking her head slowly. "I know Giles wanted to talk to me tomorrow about future slayer HQ's, and I don't think he works well with the smell of stale alcohol."

Buffy grabs her glass with slightly shaking hands and walks over to the sink.

"Yeah, probably a good call." Faith nods and gets up as well. "Wouldn't wanna be hung-over and accidentally allow the kid to get chomped into pieces during our training sessions."

"Kid?" Buffy asks without turning around.

"Tucker's brother," Faith answers, and she walks over to drop her bottle in the trash next to the sink.

Buffy turns around, smiling, to tell Faith the kid's name is Andrew, that he gets slightly resentful when identified through his brother, and stops because Faith is all of a sudden far too close. She can see her eyes, bright with the alcohol and conversation, can see a stray hair that Faith failed to tuck behind her ears, can see an emotion moving sinuously beneath the surface. She can smell the beer and something pleasantly dark and earthy, and cigarettes. She can hear her own breathing, heavy and painfully loud in the suddenly deafening silence. Except it's not silent, because there's a dangerous humming, an arcing electricity in the air.

Faith stops too and looks at her, and something in her eyes and something in the entire atmosphere of the room shifts. Buffy flashes back to the days of slick sweat and dancing, of pounding hearts and brushing hands, of the danger inherent in contact. She flashes back to the days when Faith was a wild, jagged burst, when vulnerability leaked through her like air gets through holes in a screen door. Her vulnerability is compressed now (if that's the right word), almost muffled, but it leaks out in a more controlled way. Almost as if she's learned when to use it, learned that it's occasionally necessary and not just useless space. Buffy can see it now. In her eyes, in how the bottle clinks loudly when she puts it on the counter because her hand is trembling.

Faith steps forward and they're inches apart. The first time they kiss Buffy's heart is slamming wildly against her rib cage and something shaky and vibrant is coursing through her. Faith's mouth feels warm and inviting and absolutely sublime on hers, and when she slides her tongue in Buffy makes a small whimpering noise that she's instantly ashamed of. Her head is spinning with the wine and the taste of Faith's mouth and how the other slayer's hands are now resting on her hips, fingertips brushing the strip of exposed skin between pants and shirt.

The first time they kiss it's a slow-build, sliding through each other's mouths, heat curling at the pit of Buffy's stomach and spreading through a wave of prickles across her skin. When Faith steps back, Buffy opens her eyes and sees vulnerability, sees a glimpse of that vibrant energy and knew it was under there somewhere, and sees an uncertain question. She grabs the back of Faith's neck, pushes their mouths together again and answers.