Explanatory Greed

Title: Explanatory Greed

Author: Harper

Fandom: BtVS

Summary: Faith ruminates.

Disclaimers: I don’t own her, though I’d certainly be willing to bid high.

A/N: Not been beta’d. Just a little fic, at that. If you’d like to feedback, I’ll be at Xfjnky2@yahoo.com.

Sadness.

Just that one word, over and over, like a broken record. She could feel it, from the nearly imperceptible weight pressing down on her shoulders, as if gravity had all of a sudden decided to double her share, to the droop of her eyelids, the muscles giving up the fight, surrendering to the darkness.

Did she have to have a reason? Did there have to be some explanation behind it all… the sadness? She wasn’t sure that there was one, other than the general sting of depression that seemed to rip through her on occasion, stealing all of her energy and her hope and her desire to even get up in the mornings and face a day full of emptiness. It took her dreams, pilfering away the bright reds and blues and greens that painted her nocturnal life, leaving in its wake the resounding silence of nothing. Couldn’t even find happiness in a lie, in the made-up world crafted for her night-time enjoyment.

She wanted things. She wanted to be in love. She saw it on TV and in the movies, read about it in books, heard it sung to her over the radio. Love, with the waves of warmth that came with it, with the intrinsic comfort of being more than one, more than alone. Only, love never lasted. She knew that, had seen that, had borne witness to the deterioration of emotions and feelings and facades masquerading as love. The intoxicating bliss of that first awareness, the heroin sweet high of togetherness, the razor sharp sting of loss, the stench and decay of ending… she’d seen it all. That’s what love was like in the real world, when the film didn’t fade to black and the credits didn’t start to roll, when Romeo and Juliet picked themselves up off the stage and tried to actually live with one another.

Still though, she wanted it. ‘Tis better to have loved and lost, or so the old saying went. She wasn’t sure if that was completely true, though she understood a part of it. It was intoxicating, that rush of endorphins and the fleeting brush of emotions, and once you felt it, you were hooked. In love with the idea of being in love, forgetting the detox and the tremors, the sweat and the pain and the ache of withdrawal because that feeling was beckoning, crooking its little finger and drawing people closer with the promise of things it ultimately wouldn’t deliver.

She thought that it would be more appropriate to say that it was better to feel something than to languish away in a land of nothingness. When life went by on an even keel, the days weren’t even worth counting. What distinguished Monday from Tuesday from Wednesday from Thursday and so on if the pin pricks of emotion weren’t launching themselves at the target otherwise known as the heart?

Seen in that light, she could understand those people… the cutters. The ones who took a shard of glass or a razor or a knife and etched their pain out in their flesh for the whole world to see. Leaving trails of thick viscous blood running in rivers down their forearms, the silk of their inner thighs, severing skin and nerves and muscle so that they could remember that they were alive, could remember what it was like to feel. And then, when the mottled and abused flesh managed to knit itself back together, there’d be the silvery-white reminders of what that was like, what it was to just exist in that airless rushing roaring world of nothing but feeling.

She didn’t cut. Even as she craved the euphoria of self-injurious behaviors, she was frightened, the bitter taste of fear laying heavy under her tongue at the merest possibility of inflicting pain by her own hand. Ironic, really, because she was fond of latching the curved icy steel of hooked barbs to herself, metaphorically speaking, of course, fond of sliding that biting metal under her flesh and hoisting herself up to swing, suspended there in her imaginary abyss of hurt.

That’s what she was. She was a closeted psuedo-practitioner of the art and/or science known as infibulation. To be lifted out of your corporeal form, to be strung up and battered about by the whims of those who inhabited whatever planes you traveled to when you left your body, that’s what she wanted. As it was now, she had only the invisible lash of her own mind, a poor flagellator at best because she carried no wounds, no scars.

What’s all that got to do with being in love? She couldn’t say. It wasn’t as if her mind ran on a linear tract, wasn’t as if she could explain why these things found themselves interconnected. Love equaled pain equaled her abject cowardice equaled her desire to be free equaled her inherent craving for someone to hurt her equaled the answer. An algebraic formula without answer, the variable elusive, the proof always missing a step.

She wanted a reason, a real reason. She wanted to know why things were the way they were, why she felt compelled to need to tear herself to shreds, why the innate desire to carve her pain into herself managed to taint everything else there was about her. She wanted to know why she couldn’t think outside of those boxes, why sex and power and pain were all intertwined in her consciousness.

She wanted the sadness to go away.

She wanted, no… needed the pain.

She wanted something, anything, but what she had.

She wanted to be in love.

THE END

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