Title: Hate

Author: Harper

Email: Xfjnky2@yahoo.com

Rating: I'll slap a NC-17 on it, just to be safe.

Summary: Kind of Faith's thoughts about Cordelia after what we can only imagine was a not so pleasant parting. Perhaps in response to the Cordelia/Angel subtext (can it be called that since it'd be girl/vampire love?) on the show. Don't know if there was more this Monday because I tried to record but someone in my study group, who will remain nameless, apparently sat on the channel changer and had me tape 55 minutes of a blue screen telling me that I don't get Showtime. Or, maybe its the precedent to the whole Mayor fiasco. Up to you...

A/N: This is short and angry because I'm angry and... well, not exactly short. Perhaps more of average height, though that's beside the point. This is un-beta'd and really just throws all rules of good grammar out the window. Its more of a mood than anything else, and sometimes those don't translate too well to words, which is what I'm offering in my defense. I would say enjoy, though I'm not sure that its an enjoyable piece, so what I will say is... Well, that'll teach me to start a sentence that I don't know the ending to, won't it. Anyway, this doesn't have anything to do with anything that I've ever written previously, so don't think that my happy happy joy joy Faith and Cordelia have been in any way harmed. If you'd like to send feedback, I'd love to receive it. You can reach me at Xfjnky2@yahoo.com.

I never knew it was possible to hate someone so much that it was always there, that raw churning that eats away at my guts and fills my head with thoughts of how stupid I've been until I can't take it anymore, and I look for something, anything, that'll make it stop. Only, I never can make it stop, because everywhere I look, I see you. Maybe it was a TV show that we watched together, or a song that I listened to because you liked it even though I didn't. I listen to it now though, and remember you sitting in the car beside me, singing along with it to the top of your lungs and I wonder just when everything went wrong.

Its amazing the way things can fall apart. One minute they're perfect, or if not perfect, they were at least good enough that I didn't take time to worry about the nagging little things that ate away at the foundation of what we had, until one day it collapsed down on top of me. Together one minute and the next I see you mocking me, always out of reach, always so cool and calm and collected, like you don't even deign to think about me anymore. Like what we had wasn't important enough for you to feel one glimmer of pain. No, nothing there but those cold eyes watching and laughing and knowing, somehow, that I'm not over you even though I pretend to be, which just gives you more to laugh about.

I hate to even see you now, flaunting it, flaunting the fact that you've moved on, that there's someone new hanging from your elbow. Cute and blonde and vacuous, or maybe with dark hair and eyes and I want to see a resemblance, want to think "Hey, if he were a girl then he'd look like me" so that I can be haughty and smug in the knowledge that you aren't as over me as you think you are, but then I notice that's not true. The new boy, the new appendage, doesn't look anything like me. He's nothing more than another link in an ever-growing chain of self-delusion, but I can't feel sorry for him.

I want to say something, anything, just to let you, aka 'the heartless bitch', know that I'm not affected by the sight of you, that I could care less about the apparently less than minimal impact that I've made in your life, but if you didn't care enough to miss me when I left, then why would you bother to care about a little display of "see how over you I am".

So what does that make me? Pathetic… probably. No need to cry over someone who's not worth the tears, no matter how much I delude myself into thinking that you are. Always quick with reassuring words to others, comforting them after break-ups with promises that they weren't in the wrong, that their now ex never deserved them anyway when its nothing but a big, fat lie. How can I tell someone not to love an ass when I do, when I still pine away after so much time has passed that its mortifyingly embarrassing to even admit to myself that I still lay in bed at night with thoughts of you swirling through my brain, knowing I'd take you back in an instant if you even once bothered to ask. You don't ask, don't even bother to talk to me.

Liar. That's what I am. Lying to myself and lying to everyone else, except they don't know I'm lying because I never told them, too ashamed over my broken heart and the causes for it. Only now I like that, like the fact that its my secret pain and I can hold it close to my breast like a martyr, daring the world to look at me like I'm the same old uncomplicated girl when I know I'm not. Really look at me, I want to shout, but no one hears me because the words are silent, refusing to pass through uncooperative lips. I've got hidden depths that you can't even comprehend, and you're a fool to take me at face value, I tell you with my eyes. You can't know my pain, can't even fathom it, except sometimes I think that you lessen the value of that. If only you were worthy of all the attention I can't help but give you, then it would make this so much better. Its easier, after all, to pine away after someone who deserves it, someone who didn't screw me over and leave me behind like yesterday's trash when it got a little too uncomfortable.

Not that you didn't lie too, the words spilling past your lips like honey even though they were rotten underneath. Promises made that couldn't be kept, that never had any intention of ever being kept, and I believed them because I so desperately wanted to believe them, which made me even more pathetic. A fool too, to have fallen in love with a lie, with a carefully constructed façade that had no real substance to back it up. Makes me want to reevaluate myself, if I could be so easily tricked, so easily fooled. Not as worldly, not as smart as I would have liked to think, just another naïve fuck conned by the best of them.

A naïve fuck. How appropriate that I think that. Fucking. That's what we did. Not making love, not even having sex, just fucking. Skin and teeth and tongues and fluids and the sloppy wet sounds of my fingers thrusting into you, possessing you, marking you the only way I could. No words of love between us, just the harsh pant of breath and the whine of voices pleading for more, harder, faster until it's the hiss of air through teeth and the rough bite of nails across tender skin and the out of control racing of hearts that signal an end to the fucking, which means that its time to get up, to pull on damp panties and wrinkled jeans and leave because fucking you doesn't entitle me to half of a bed.

Now I wonder if my fingers have been replaced by a cock, if you look up to see sharp planes and broad shoulders, your feet wrapping around lean hips and digging into tight buttocks as your hips thrust together. Traitor, I think and then turn bitter. Fuck anyone you want to now, but I'll always be your first. That's right, I was the first person to ever fuck you, and no matter how hard you try to forget it you can't make it not true. You can try and wash me away, can impale yourself on as many cocks as you can lure into your bed, but that'll never erase the fact that my fingers were there first, that if you'd had a virgin's blood it would have covered my flesh, that my tongue tasted you before anyone else ever even got close. No matter how many come after, I own that part of you and you can't ever get it back. Which, of course, leaves me only with that and the sweet knowledge that every time you cum you'll think about how I made you beg, how you'd plead and cry and promise me anything because that pleasure was mine, and only mine, to give you. How at that moment you belonged to me, my possession, my toy… mine to do with as I pleased because that was as you wished it. Not because I wished it, though I complied, though I played my part to the fullest. An act for supposed mutual satisfaction and benefit, which is maybe what let me tell you no when you left me and then came back, begging for more. Because you wanted it, wanted me, wanted what I could give you, and when I wouldn't you tried to show me that you could get the same from others. Can you? I bet you can't.

Its love twisted into hate, resentment that love was ever there in the first place, and it refuses to go away. Its firmly entrenched now, as much a part of me as anything else, and I hate that the hate is there, because its just another part of me that you own, and you don't deserve any more of me than you've already got. Now you're not even here for me to hate anymore, which leaves nothing but emptiness that is, if possible, even worse. So its nothing but me and hate and emptiness, all swirling together, mixing, entwining, becoming one, and people talk and whisper and wonder why I'm so fucked up. Tell them for me, won't you, love...

The End