Nusac

Chapter 22
Faith’s POV

Okay so it’s been six maybe seven weeks since my whole ‘sexual healing’ experience. As I’ve come to refer to it. It helped I’m not going to lie and say it didn’t. I just thought all this magic stuff would have me running around almost immediately. Not so. I could walk… sort of. I needed to have someone to hold onto so my knee didn’t buckle. It was damned painful whenever it did that. Anyway I got really frustrated and made myself like a leather brace for it basically just this tube of leather that I lace around my knee. I even made a small strip of steel and a compartment for it so that I couldn’t move it. It kept popping out and I thought my shoulder was bad this was absolute agony. The brace helped with that… sometimes.

Anyway Namine grounded me until she thought I was well enough to go hunt the forces of darkness… light? Might have to work on that nickname. Back on topic though she grounded me. Not even my own mother ever grounded me and I did a hell of a lot of… less than legal stuff when she was still alive. I almost always got caught but she was either to drunk or to high to actually ground me. Thing is Nam grounds me and I stay put. What the fuck is up with that? I haven’t even been to the village in these six or seven weeks. I’m only allowed to play in my furnace because if I hadn’t I think I would have sent her crazy. I was bored and I vocalised that fact… a lot.

Pike… how do you explain the guy? He’s a geek stuck in a world with no computers. That’s gotta suck. He doesn’t like it here and we all know it but to his credit he hasn’t complained about it too much. Every so often he’ll say something like. ‘I don’t know, I’ll just check online.’ Yeah right where you gonna plug your modem in exactly? The laptop he’s got with him is pretty redundant. It’s mostly plastic and it’s run out of battery. So it just sits there in his bag by my old bed. Which just in case you’re wondering is where he’s sleeping.

He’s picking up the language pretty quick a lot quicker than I did. I would be jealous but I’m fucking fed up of having to translate all the time. So the quicker he learns the better is all I can say.

Nam has been pestering me to teach her some English. No idea why she’s just strange like that. It’s like she wants to know everything there is to know. Which is a big ambition I would aim much lower… but whatever floats your boat and all that. So I’m using some of the book that Pike brought with him. Which would be great if I understood all of the words myself. I’m a high school drop out and I have never been more ashamed of it than when Nam asked me what an English word meant and I had never heard of it. Reading was never my strong point. I was a climbing trees, getting caught by the police smashing windows kind of girl.

So yeah there was a point to all of my rambling. I’m allowed out now. Well not to kill stuff, which I’m absolutely itching to do again. I can just come to the village. Get myself some other human interaction. There’s only so much I can talk to these two about. Nam has her magic which even though I can do this charging thing now I have no clue about. It’s so complicated. Everything seems to have a trigger, so you have to find the trigger in order to perform the spell. It’s nothing like that Red used to do. With the chanting and the circles of sand. Nam keeps trying to explain ‘combat magic.’ I keep asking her what she means but she just keeps telling me that it depends on the person. Which doesn’t help any. Luckily she hasn’t made me do too much other magic related stuff since I broke my knee. It’s kind of just like idle talk at the moment.

The village. I have a point to get to. I have a heap of swords to sell. I got bored so I made weapons. You can judge me all you like doesn’t make it any less fun for me.

The three of us reach the village and have to decide how exactly I’m going to get down. I could take the strip of angled metal out of my knee brace but when I hit the ground that is going hurt like fuck. Or I could leave it in there but then we have the problem of being able to move my knee in such a way to throw it over the horse’s rear and the piles of sharp weaponry. Hmmm not sure how I’m going to handle this one. It had to be my right knee didn’t it. If it were my left this wouldn’t be a problem. I’d be using that one to steady myself in the stirrup and I wouldn’t need to do either of the two above solutions.

I can hear you asking me ‘Why not just get off the other side.’ Have you ever ridden a horse? You get used to getting on from one side. Means going the other way you don’t feel as balanced. Then when you don’t feel balanced you put yourself off. Then I land on my ass in the mud. I can either be embarrassed or I can just be stuck up here forever. Sorry Aeris looks like your going to be stuck with me for a while.

Nam looks up at me from tying her horse up. “Get down Faith.”

“I’m fine up here thank you…” She looks at me raising her eyebrow. I’m not sure she knows what the problem is but she gets pissed when I don’t tell her the problem in the first place. “In fact I like the view.”

I see her roll her eyes and she comes up right next to me holding onto my reins. “What’s wrong?” She whispers. She knows I don’t like showing any type of weakness not even to her. She respects that… to a point.

I lean down and make it look to the rest of the world that I’m just stroking my horse’s neck. “I don’t think I can get down. I can’t get my knee to work.”

“Get off the other side.” I’ve explained the problem with this already. “I wont let you fall.” She assures. I’m not sure if I prefer the falling on my but or having to be helped. I have a really bad problem with having to accept help for something I should be able to do on my own.

“Will you two hurry up? I wanna go and explore.” Trust Pike to say that. I would have done a lot less stuff on my own over the past few weeks if he hadn’t been around. Nam I think I could just about deal with. She’s seen me in a pretty bad way quite a few times. Actually that’s not the problem. Not really. See Pike is a friend of Buffy’s after she was called. Which means he sort of knows what a slayer is capable of so I have to at least match that. I’m sick of being the second rate slayer I have to be at least on par with B.

I look down at the ground. It’s quite far. What can I say? I stole a tall horse. Okay so getting off the other side it is then. I swing my left leg over the horse’s back and it immediately feels weird. I swivel on the ball of my right foot and feel something give. My knee pops and I almost crumple to the floor. The only thing that keeps me standing is my grip on the saddle. I bite the back of my hand to keep myself from crying out and then take a few deep shaky breaths.

Then I go ahead and tense the muscles in my thigh just to test out my knee. It hasn’t dislocated which is of the good. It’s just throbbing at bit. I pull out the metal part of my brace and put it in a compartment of my saddle. Why did I do that? Well I’ve found that if I move it about when I walk eventually the pain eases as it gets used to the exercises. Hurts like hell for a little while but I think it might help my overall movement in the long run.

I pull my foot up to my butt satisfied when I hear my knee joint crack. May sound gross but it relives some of the pressure and at least I know my knee cap is in the right place. My shoulders stretch out as I prepare to take the swords off the horses back when I stopped by a hand on my forearm. Nam looks at me and is the voice of reason as always. “Leave it for a little while. Give your knee some time to recover.” I think she understands about the whole Pike thing even if we’ve never talked bout it. I’ve talked about B. I think that she gets how jealous I am of her and the need to be better.

However she is right. I don’t think I’ve known a time when she is wrong especially when it has anything to do with any part of my body. I nod at her and we follow Pike deeper into the village. Honestly he’s like a kid being taken to Disney Land he’s so exited. I can hardly blame him. I can remember what I was like all those months ago when I first came here. I would like to think I controlled myself better than he is right now.

He keeps asking questions about everything. Everyone we pass he asks if one of us knows them. Every shiny item on a stall that catches his eye he wants to know what it’s used for. I have to admit that with most of it I didn’t even know what the hell it was for but they looked fun to make. Looked like they had lots of fiddly bits that I could tweak and perfect for hours. I really need to get my mind out of the furnace at some point.

Eventually he turns on us walking backwards in front of us. He looks confused as to how we are acting. He knows were an item. Hell when we came back from the lake before, the first thing he said to me was ‘You got laid.’ It’s like I’m an open book to these people. “Honest to god you two are the most homophobic lesbians I’ve every seen.” Yeah, where my first word was Eat his first was Lesbians. He bugged me for hours for me to tell him when we got back. I tried really hard to teach him some other words but he just kept pushing so I told him. Which was a big mistake because he spent the next half an hour chanting ‘Lesbians’ in Latin at the top of his voice punching the air. It was funny for a while ten seconds. Then it just got annoying.

“What would you know of it?” He does have a point. Nam and me have a very complex and at the same time simple relationship. We live together, we sleep together, we talk and we joke but we’re not very close. Like right now we’re walking a good foot apart from each other. It’s not ‘cause we’re in public, everybody knows, everyone that matters anyway. No one in this world could give a rat’s ass. We just don’t do the PDA thing. I don’t know why it’s never come up. “We’re the only lesbians you know.”

“Not true. LA was full of them.” He smiles at me and I take a quick glance over to Namine who is sending him the death glare for mentioning an ‘Earth place’. He got the same rundown I did when I first came here. Unfortunately he doesn’t seam to know why he’s in trouble. “What?” I have to laugh and shake my head. He is so dead. He decides to stop talking and turn around and has to step around someone.

I step to the side to let him pass walking around him.

Nam however takes a totally different approach to the obstacle in our way. She has stopped dead in her tracks and looks terrified. “Hello Namine.” He says with a sneer in his voice.