Implicit Rules

Rating: PG
Characters: Faith, suggested Angel/Faith and Buffy/Faith
Disclaimer: Joss Whedon's character, I'm just using them for a while.
Notes:: challenge, "Implicit rules"

It's not like someone, like a Watcher or a friend, was going to try to stop her. Refrain her, take her by the arms and say 'Stop doing it!'. That's not going to happen. There's no Watcher, and maybe she needed it sometime in the past, but not anymore. Now she's a big girl.

Like fire. There are things you know you shouldn't do. You know you can't put your hand through a flame without burning, and you know it hurts. Therefore, you don't do it. Maybe no one ever told you it burnt, but once you feel it, you learn it forever.

So that's what people call implicit rules. Don't burn your house. Don't run with scissors. Written nowhere, there must be some big poster saying 'Don't fall in love with the enemy'. Or 'Don't fall in love with your ex-girlfriend's ex-boyfriend', even if it sounds like a fucking Sixteen advice (excepting all that stuff with your ex-girlfriend putting you into a comma, but everybody knows teens are complicated). Maybe she should print it and put it on the ceiling, but then they would stop being 'implicit'.

Implicit could mean they are easily ignored, and forgotten. Yes, that's what happened, sure. She forgot for a while that she shouldn't do it. And just did it.

"What's the matter?" Angel asks, and some of the others turn around to take a brief look at her.

"I ignored all those posters"

No one understands Faith, of course. That's just another of the implicit rules.