![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Title: this is the world, which is round
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
seraphcelene
Email: seraphcelene at yahoo dot com
Rating: G
A/N: Post-NFA, ignoring all of comics canon. Title from Margaret Atwood's You Begin. Written for the![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
lynnevitational 2008.
Feedback: Yes, please.
Disclaimer: It all belongs to Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, et al. Dancy Flammarion belongs to Caitlin R. Kiernan. I'm just taking them out for a little exercise.
Summary: She is neither pink nor pale: three realities Dawn almost remembers.
Dedicated to lostakasha for the beta, the encouragement, and for putting up with my spastic nerves. Thank you!!
One. Happy Christmas (War is Over)
The house is quiet, absent of squealing girl voices squabbling over hot water and missing lip gloss. It's been months since Dawn's had to listen to those sorts of full house, lives intersecting sounds. Since Rome it's just been the two of them: Dawn curled tight against Buffy's back beneath the blankets, resisting the creeping edge of daylight slipping in around the part in the curtains and past her eyelids. The rest of Dawn is folded into the nooks and crannies of Buffy's body: knees tucked into the bend of Buffy's knees, chest pressed against Buffy's back. Dawn is taller and softer but the fit is snug and comfortably familiar.
Buffy pats Dawn's forearm where it drapes across the crease of her waist, soothing brush of her hand meaning to settle and comfort: I'm here. It's alright.
Buffy rolls over and Dawn shifts with her. Smoothly re-arranging her limbs, she is tucked in close, secured by arms across her shoulder and a leg over her hip. As close as they are, Dawn wants to be closer, longs to push past the anchor of limbs, the illusion of intimacy. In the front of her brain it's something about warmth and comfort; in that small part of herself that recalls infinity, it might be about wholeness and her dreams of eternity. She presses one knee up between Buffy's thighs until they lay flush, and straightens the other slowly, easing it against the length of one of Buffy's, creeping carefully into the icy expanse of sheet at the foot of the bed. She sighs against Buffy's throat, feels the moist heat of her breath flow back over her lips and settles more comfortably into the hollow their bodies have made in the center of the bed.
Buffy re-distributes the blankets, a mothering shuffle, a habit. She pulls them up over her shoulder and across Dawn's head, cocoons them in the shroud of cotton and goose down.
"We should get up," Buffy's talking lips scatter kisses across Dawn's forehead.
“Cold,” Dawn responds, shivering at the thought of light and snow and ice. She stretches against Buffy, her tightening arms pulling them ever closer together. Gently, she draws circles over a patch of skin at Buffy's waist exposed by the rise of her faded black t-shirt. Buffy sighs and presses a proper kiss onto Dawn's forehead, their tangled bodies sinking deeper into the mattress.
*
The feeling that she’s forgotten something very important nags Dawn as bits and pieces of her dreams float to the surface of her thoughts. What she recalls is more real than her real life at times. More real than the fall of hair against her waist or the smooth, almond shape of her eyes reflected in the mirror and she wonders which is really the dream: the key that became a girl or the girl who dreamed she was a key.
Sometimes Dawn thinks that she dreamed those few balmy, liberated months in Italy. Dancing in the piazzas late at night, eating gelato on the Spanish Steps and watching the tourists, having forgotten for a moment that she was still a tourist herself. She’s read about Italy and Rome and about people and apes and matter and antimatter. She's familiar with the idea of categories: slayers and scoobies, potentials and champions, the soulless and the souled. Haunted by dreams in which she is all-encompassing night, Dawn finds that she is too much of them all. Her mother would have said that Dawn is a square peg in a round hole.
One afternoon in Rome, Vittorio, with his beautiful chocolate eyes and dark hair, talked her into throwing three coins into the Trevi Fountain.
For luck, he said. It will ensure your return to Roma.
Dawn didn't think there was a charm strong enough to ground her, but she smiled anyway and pressed a kiss the flavor of limoncello into the corner of his mouth. Vittorio paused for the cold, icy kiss, savored the sweet tartness on her lips, and offered her three dull coins eagerly dug out of his pocket. He held her free hand and whispered the count into her ear --
Uno
Due
Tre
-- and she tossed the coins.
Dawn hasn't been back.
*
The creep of day is marked by the fall of light around the curtain, masked by snow and winter’s perpetual twilight. They no longer bother with keeping the time and when Dawn finally untangles herself from Buffy it could be mid-morning or early evening. She gasps at the biting cold as she swings her bare legs over the side of the bed.
We have got to get more rugs, she thinks, before dropping her toes to the hardwood and slowly easing the soles of her feet flat against the floor.
Her robe lies in an abandoned heap, cold from lying out all night. From the bed, Buffy's bright, empty eyes stare up at her and Dawn can see the march of gooseflesh beginning the climb across the mountain of her sister’s shoulder.
"You ruin everything," Buffy says in the brittle, lethargic voice that Dawn has come to hate.
"It's what I'm good at," Dawn hugs herself into the chilly terry cloth and ties the belt tight around her waist. "Everyone should be good at something."
Buffy rolls over and presents her back to Dawn, tugs the blankets up around her shoulders. "I love you," her empty voice says.
*
At the bottom of the stairs, Buffy calls for Dawn. Her irritation masks the anxiety distorting the sound of Dawn's name. It's a pissy, sistermother voice that never fails to grate against bruised and tender nerves. Buffy can't see that, hasn't seen it for years. She's scraped raw, thinned by always doing what's right. "Get your ass down here. I want to leave, like, ten minutes ago."
Staring out at the snow-veiled street Dawn ignores the call of her name and flips an unlit cigarette end over end across her fingers. If she squints, she can almost make out the individual snowflakes. Sometimes Dawn remembers that she isn't a girl at all. When she remembers that other self, the self not made up of flesh and blood and bone, not made from bits of someone else's memories, she can slow the world down to the measure of her heartbeat. When she remembers, thee present and future unfold in front of her like a flower beneath the sun, inexorable and strangely sudden. When she remembers, she can see in her mind's eye exactly which thread will unravel the universe, and perhaps that is something too dangerous to know.
Once she was large -- a monolithic supernova -- expansive, infiltrating, vibrating with magic and the truth of how the world began. Reality folded around her, bent like light so that she existed in many worlds all at once. Worshipped on an altar or kept in a box, she doesn’t recall, but she dreams of safety in a garden where she knew the meaning of everything. Then a dragon came to the garden, and there was heat and pain and the agony of being lost or stolen, she isn’t sure which, although the story that Giles had written down, later confirmed by Buffy, would indicate that what happened (whatever it was that happened) was all for the greater good. As the story goes, she was pressed down into the shape of a girl.
The ones who kept her and later gifted her, held tight to the glow of her and squeezed until she pulsed with life and secrets that even she wasn’t aware of, her own magic amplified by the blood they mixed in.
Laced through the memories they gave her of bubbling girl voices, Thanksgiving pie and the scent of her mother’s shampoo are memories of an Impressionist garden and dark, secret rooms sound-tracked by chanting and lit by the uneasy glow of candles. Sometimes she dreams that she isn't a girl at all, but something older and stronger, something that doesn't belong in the world walking and talking and cuddling in the dark. Those dreams are big as the universe and Dawn wears stars draped in her hair.
On the street below, a figure walks, dark against the snow.
Dawn isn't surprised. This was always meant to happen, the pattern of it pressed upon the spill of her blood through her veins, the timing measured in the tattoo of her heart.
She pushes the window open, props herself up with a hip against the snow dusted sill and lights the cigarette with the flick-click of a silver lighter she keeps tucked in her back pocket.
"Dawn," Buffy calls again. "Seriously!"
Dawn abandons the window, ignores the scarf and gloves laid out hopefully across the bed. She doesn't put out the cigarette, doesn't close the window.
At the bottom of the stairs, Buffy is shrugging into a coat the color of persimmons. "It's about time," she says, flipping her hair, long and grave-dark, over the collar. "You drag me awake at the butt crack of dawn with this whole Christmas shopping thing ... it's freezing." Buffy looks up as Dawn comes down the stairs, the cigarette held elegantly between her first two fingers. "God, Dawn! Could you please not smoke in the house?"
Dawn pauses two steps from the bottom of the staircase, tucks the cigarette between her lips and inhales. "You'd better get the door," she says on the exhalation, words and smoke tangled in a thin, careless stream.
The sound of the knocker falls unexpected and shattering into the quiet of the house, cutting into Buffy's bitter, distracted tirade.
Buffy looks up from her attack on the regiment of shiny gold buttons marching the length of her coat. Still, wary eyes watching Dawn, fingers frozen at her waist.
A second knock falls, jarring and intrusive between them. “Open it,” Dawn shrugs. Buffy's sweet, flexible mouth bends, purses with hesitation and suspicion, and finally she turns, flips the lock on the door and pulls it open.
Dawn's heart beats slow and measured, unhurried and unsurprised. Six months in L.A. dragging bodies from the rubble, seven years on a Hellmouth caught in the collision of reality and impossibility and they were still unprepared for the stunning shock of miracles and curses. Resurrection, death, the murder of angels and Buffy throwing herself into the arms of the man at the door.
Dawn watches them from the stairs, two steps from the bottom. "Hey Angel," she says.
Two. I believe the world it spins for you
She inhales deeply, sucks smoke into her lungs and holds it in her chest as she presses the cigarette's burning end into the glass ashtray beside the bed. Swirl in her chest that she imagines she can feel. Grinds the stubby fragment of cigarette into the glass and finally releases the smoke trapped in her chest in a smooth, straight shot. Buffy will smell the ash and the smoke when she wakes and shout at Dawn for smoking in bed, again. But right now Dawn doesn't care. And neither does Buffy, she thinks, considering and dismissing the boneless-Buffy-shaped lump curled beneath the blankets.
If she could sleep like that, in a careless sprawl of limbs, dreamless; if the half-empty bottle of Ambien on the nightstand would make a difference, she'd swallow the whole damn thing and give herself up to drowning euphoria. Buffy's hyper metabolism burns through the pills too fast, so she takes handfuls at a time, sleeping like the dead for hours and floating through days with a dreamy far away look in her eyes.
When Dawn sleeps she dreams of futures and alternative timelines. When she sleeps blissful and easeful rest eludes her even though the house is quiet, absent of squealing girl voices squabbling over hot water and missing lip gloss. It's been months since Dawn's had to listen to those sorts of full house, lives intersecting sounds. Since Rome it's just been the two of them. And then Giles followed some elusive trail of will and rumor and found them holed up in an old house abandoned by the Watcher's Council.
"We've been searching everywhere for you," he said when Buffy answered the door, her eyes glassy and heavy lidded, Dawn hard on her heels. The pair of them: Yin and yang, Sleeping Beauty and rambunctious Rose Red. It made a certain kind of sense.
They made you out of me ...
London in the winter is always colder than Dawn imagines that it will be and she gasps as she tosses back the covers and swings her legs over the side of the bed.
They can't seem to escape the cold, the ice and the snow. They chased storms for months after L.A. as surely as news of Yeti attacks in the Himalayas and of lake monsters in Siberia.
A new watcher and her small legion of local slayers crowed about the sky falling and Hell smashing its way through the city's asphalt foundation. One day and time seemed to freeze their breath held through the desperate flight to Phoenix where they picked up a rental car because the FAA was no longer clearing flights for landing at LAX; something about dragons in the sky. Then there were road blocks, National Guard, a steady stream of refugees and the eggplant color of the sky over Los Angeles.
They hiked across the empty 405 freeway, down the 110 into Downtown. The edges of the horizon line glared feverishly red and divided the heavens sharply from the Earth. Buildings like broken, jagged teeth punctuated the unnatural sky. The heat was unbearable.
For six months they stayed, dragging bodies from the rubble and restoring order to the fallen city. When they finally left, Buffy headed North and Dawn followed. The further North the better, as far away from the heat and the ash and that *sky* as they could get.
Now it's Christmas and this is where Giles has found them, pretzled together for warmth, hibernating in an empty house.
*
"There's a Yule celebration. It usually lasts for weeks, but I won't stay for the whole thing. I'll be back before Christmas." Giles doesn't really trust them by themselves, disconcerted by Buffy's unfocused eyes and the vague slur of her words.. "I'll just pay my respects to the coven. They helped find you, after all." There is something accusing in his voice, a kernel of disapproval and hurt that they had disappeared without a word to anyone, and the ever-present fear that they will do it again.
He makes plans for them to delay the possibility, ties them to London and the house with Christmas lights draped around the room, cheery white fairy lights on strings of green wire.
Everything is white, the tiny fairy lights for the tree and the banister, the ornaments, even Gabriel's tiny golden horn has a tiny white ribbon tied around it. Nothing is red or blue or purple, nothing that could remind them of blood or bruises or the colors at the edge of the sky over Los Angeles.
"You don't have to," Buffy says absently, untangling wire and glass bulbs.
"God, why is it so damned cold." Huddled in front of the crack and flare of the fire, Dawn runs her hands swiftly over her arms and day dreams about nesting in the blankets on the upstairs bed, cuddled back to belly with Buffy.
Buffy never looks up. "We've been in colder climates," she says.
"Yeah, but that was always in the wild somewhere. Somehow, it doesn't seem fair that it should be this cold in a city. We need more than a fireplace and a couple of radiators."
"We're further North," Giles reminds her. "Closer to the Artic."
"I know that," Dawn says like it's obvious. Clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth, irritated. "I'm, like, research girl. And it still doesn't seem fair."
"Just think of how much fun it will be to have a white Christmas." Buffy plugs the lights in one string at a time. She pulls the string through her hand slowly, studies the tiny bulbs, checking for any that might have burned out. "Like that one time when Mom and Dad took us to Big Bear. Remember how much fun we had?" Her voice is as cold as the snow that fell incessantly that Christmas. It doesn't remind Dawn of all the snow people they had made or of sledding down a nearby hill in the breaks between snowfall. Buffy's voice holds no trace of the lazily fanned snow angels or the snowball fights, the two of them against Hank and Joyce. "I think you were six."
Dawn tucks her chin into the thick, heavy cowl of her turtleneck sweater. "I was never six. Anyway, I've had enough snow to last me, like, forever," she says. "Fuck a white Christmas."
"Dawn, really." Giles, stacking boxes of frosted white ornaments in the corner tilts his head back in tired exasperation. His jaw clenches and he closes his eyes for just a moment before going back to stacking the boxes.
*
The sound of the knocker falls heavy and unexpected into the quiet of the house. Giles, with his hand on the door and a suitcase at his feet, says "bloody hell."
Buffy watches him from a spot halfway up the stairs. Small and almost forlorn, she sits wrapped in a cheery throw blanket covered in dancing snowmen Dawn bought at Marks and Spencers, sits with her elbows resting on her knees, chin propped on her fists. "It's probably the mailman," and she blinks, the slow, resistant drag of her eyelids as likely to remain closed as they are to reopen.
Leaning against the wall, Dawn presses one Ugg-shod foot against Buffy's hip and gently pushes. Nudges her just enough to jar her awake. She looks distracted and vaguely disgruntled, glassy eyed as Giles accepts a package from the man on the other side of the door.
"It's for you," he says, holding the brown paper-wrapped package out to her. When Buffy doesn't move Dawn takes the box. It's small and almost heavy, Buffy's name written in neat block letters on one side. She finds an unsecured seam in the brown paper wrapping, wedges a fingernail beneath it and peels it away.
The box itself is just as nondescript as the wrapping; there is nothing to indicate who sent it, or what it might contain. Dawn flips the hinged cardboard top open as she sinks down to sit beside Buffy on the stair. Sits pressed up against Buffy's side, stealing a tiny bit of warmth and giving Buffy a better view of the inside of the box.
Nestled in crumpled newspaper and scraps of bubble wrap, a small black porcelain jar gleams. Tucked beside it, between the crumpled paper and the side of the box, is a small cream colored card.
"There's a note," Dawn says, pulling the envelope free as Buffy takes the box from her lap.
"It's from Spike," Buffy says, her voice thick and breathless all at once.
Dawn's heart beats slow and measured, unhurried and unsurprised. This was always meant to happen, the pattern of it pressed upon the spill of her blood through her veins, the timing measured in the tattoo of her heart. Resurrection, death and the murder of angels. She can almost hear Spike's voice as she reads:
There were bloody dragons in the sky.
Buffy trembling and soft touches the jar and says, "Angel."
Three. Threshold
On the street below, a figure walks, dark against the snow.
Dawn isn't surprised. This was always meant to happen, the pattern of it pressed upon the spill of her blood through her veins, the timing measured in the tattoo of her heart.
She pushes the window open, props herself up with a hip against the snow dusted sill and lights a cigarette with the flick-click of a silver lighter she keeps tucked in her back pocket.
Once she was large -- a monolithic supernova -- expansive, infiltrating, vibrating with magic and the truth of how the world began. Reality folded around her, bent like light so that she existed in many worlds all at once. Worshiped on an altar or kept in a box, she doesn’t recall, but she dreams of safety in a garden where she knew the meaning of everything. Then a dragon came to the garden, and there was heat and pain and the agony of being lost or stolen, she isn’t sure which.
And she's dreamed this moment, the unraveling of the universe a thread in her mind's eye that's been pulled at exactly the wrong moment. Or perhaps the right one, she was never meant to be here.
Dawn abandons the window, ignores the scarf and gloves laid out hopefully across the bed. She doesn't put out the cigarette, doesn't close the window.
The house is quiet, absent of squealing girl voices squabbling over hot water and missing lip gloss. It's been years since Dawn's had to listen to those sorts of full house, lives intersecting sounds. When the knock comes, it falls heavy and sharp into the quiet of the house. A second knock, jarring and intrusive, follows closely behind, insistent, until she opens the door.
Dawn's dreamed this moment in a million different ways, a myriad of people on the opposite side of the door, shivering beneath the fall of new snow. She has dreamed the world’s end. Blood on her toes and the sunrise ripping reality at the seams. But endings are relative – sometimes the same as beginnings.
"How is this supposed to go?" she asks the girl on the threshold. Stares into the rabbit pink eyes and at the skin paler than Angel's or Spike's. Paler than Buffy's at the end when they buried the body in the woods. Buried her beneath a copse of oak trees, miles from home, Giles and Xander the only other witnesses. The air was thin and icy with winter. Dawn did not cry.
"You know how," the albino girl says. Blinks those rabbit eyes and takes a step closer. "You've always known."
Laced through the memories they gave her of bubbling girl voices, Thanksgiving pie and the scent of her mother’s shampoo are memories of a girl with porcelain skin to match her hair and eyes fire-lit with righteousness and God's vengeance. Dawn dreams the Apocalypse and the slow draw of the machete from beneath the girl's shirt. She doesn't move, only watches, wonders if the girl will take her fingers and keep them in a jar as a souvenir. Wonders if there will be fingers to take or if she will just disappear or dissolve, shatter into a girl shaped pile of ash waiting to be collected and discarded.
Sometimes she dreams that she isn't a girl at all, but something older and stronger, something that doesn't belong in the world walking and talking and cuddling in the dark. Those dreams are big as the universe and Dawn wears stars draped in her hair.
Author:
seraphceleneEmail: seraphcelene at yahoo dot com
Rating: G
A/N: Post-NFA, ignoring all of comics canon. Title from Margaret Atwood's You Begin. Written for the
lynnevitational 2008. Feedback: Yes, please.
Disclaimer: It all belongs to Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, et al. Dancy Flammarion belongs to Caitlin R. Kiernan. I'm just taking them out for a little exercise.
Summary: She is neither pink nor pale: three realities Dawn almost remembers.
Dedicated to lostakasha for the beta, the encouragement, and for putting up with my spastic nerves. Thank you!!
One. Happy Christmas (War is Over)
The house is quiet, absent of squealing girl voices squabbling over hot water and missing lip gloss. It's been months since Dawn's had to listen to those sorts of full house, lives intersecting sounds. Since Rome it's just been the two of them: Dawn curled tight against Buffy's back beneath the blankets, resisting the creeping edge of daylight slipping in around the part in the curtains and past her eyelids. The rest of Dawn is folded into the nooks and crannies of Buffy's body: knees tucked into the bend of Buffy's knees, chest pressed against Buffy's back. Dawn is taller and softer but the fit is snug and comfortably familiar.
Buffy pats Dawn's forearm where it drapes across the crease of her waist, soothing brush of her hand meaning to settle and comfort: I'm here. It's alright.
Buffy rolls over and Dawn shifts with her. Smoothly re-arranging her limbs, she is tucked in close, secured by arms across her shoulder and a leg over her hip. As close as they are, Dawn wants to be closer, longs to push past the anchor of limbs, the illusion of intimacy. In the front of her brain it's something about warmth and comfort; in that small part of herself that recalls infinity, it might be about wholeness and her dreams of eternity. She presses one knee up between Buffy's thighs until they lay flush, and straightens the other slowly, easing it against the length of one of Buffy's, creeping carefully into the icy expanse of sheet at the foot of the bed. She sighs against Buffy's throat, feels the moist heat of her breath flow back over her lips and settles more comfortably into the hollow their bodies have made in the center of the bed.
Buffy re-distributes the blankets, a mothering shuffle, a habit. She pulls them up over her shoulder and across Dawn's head, cocoons them in the shroud of cotton and goose down.
"We should get up," Buffy's talking lips scatter kisses across Dawn's forehead.
“Cold,” Dawn responds, shivering at the thought of light and snow and ice. She stretches against Buffy, her tightening arms pulling them ever closer together. Gently, she draws circles over a patch of skin at Buffy's waist exposed by the rise of her faded black t-shirt. Buffy sighs and presses a proper kiss onto Dawn's forehead, their tangled bodies sinking deeper into the mattress.
*
The feeling that she’s forgotten something very important nags Dawn as bits and pieces of her dreams float to the surface of her thoughts. What she recalls is more real than her real life at times. More real than the fall of hair against her waist or the smooth, almond shape of her eyes reflected in the mirror and she wonders which is really the dream: the key that became a girl or the girl who dreamed she was a key.
Sometimes Dawn thinks that she dreamed those few balmy, liberated months in Italy. Dancing in the piazzas late at night, eating gelato on the Spanish Steps and watching the tourists, having forgotten for a moment that she was still a tourist herself. She’s read about Italy and Rome and about people and apes and matter and antimatter. She's familiar with the idea of categories: slayers and scoobies, potentials and champions, the soulless and the souled. Haunted by dreams in which she is all-encompassing night, Dawn finds that she is too much of them all. Her mother would have said that Dawn is a square peg in a round hole.
One afternoon in Rome, Vittorio, with his beautiful chocolate eyes and dark hair, talked her into throwing three coins into the Trevi Fountain.
For luck, he said. It will ensure your return to Roma.
Dawn didn't think there was a charm strong enough to ground her, but she smiled anyway and pressed a kiss the flavor of limoncello into the corner of his mouth. Vittorio paused for the cold, icy kiss, savored the sweet tartness on her lips, and offered her three dull coins eagerly dug out of his pocket. He held her free hand and whispered the count into her ear --
Uno
Due
Tre
-- and she tossed the coins.
Dawn hasn't been back.
*
The creep of day is marked by the fall of light around the curtain, masked by snow and winter’s perpetual twilight. They no longer bother with keeping the time and when Dawn finally untangles herself from Buffy it could be mid-morning or early evening. She gasps at the biting cold as she swings her bare legs over the side of the bed.
We have got to get more rugs, she thinks, before dropping her toes to the hardwood and slowly easing the soles of her feet flat against the floor.
Her robe lies in an abandoned heap, cold from lying out all night. From the bed, Buffy's bright, empty eyes stare up at her and Dawn can see the march of gooseflesh beginning the climb across the mountain of her sister’s shoulder.
"You ruin everything," Buffy says in the brittle, lethargic voice that Dawn has come to hate.
"It's what I'm good at," Dawn hugs herself into the chilly terry cloth and ties the belt tight around her waist. "Everyone should be good at something."
Buffy rolls over and presents her back to Dawn, tugs the blankets up around her shoulders. "I love you," her empty voice says.
*
At the bottom of the stairs, Buffy calls for Dawn. Her irritation masks the anxiety distorting the sound of Dawn's name. It's a pissy, sistermother voice that never fails to grate against bruised and tender nerves. Buffy can't see that, hasn't seen it for years. She's scraped raw, thinned by always doing what's right. "Get your ass down here. I want to leave, like, ten minutes ago."
Staring out at the snow-veiled street Dawn ignores the call of her name and flips an unlit cigarette end over end across her fingers. If she squints, she can almost make out the individual snowflakes. Sometimes Dawn remembers that she isn't a girl at all. When she remembers that other self, the self not made up of flesh and blood and bone, not made from bits of someone else's memories, she can slow the world down to the measure of her heartbeat. When she remembers, thee present and future unfold in front of her like a flower beneath the sun, inexorable and strangely sudden. When she remembers, she can see in her mind's eye exactly which thread will unravel the universe, and perhaps that is something too dangerous to know.
Once she was large -- a monolithic supernova -- expansive, infiltrating, vibrating with magic and the truth of how the world began. Reality folded around her, bent like light so that she existed in many worlds all at once. Worshipped on an altar or kept in a box, she doesn’t recall, but she dreams of safety in a garden where she knew the meaning of everything. Then a dragon came to the garden, and there was heat and pain and the agony of being lost or stolen, she isn’t sure which, although the story that Giles had written down, later confirmed by Buffy, would indicate that what happened (whatever it was that happened) was all for the greater good. As the story goes, she was pressed down into the shape of a girl.
The ones who kept her and later gifted her, held tight to the glow of her and squeezed until she pulsed with life and secrets that even she wasn’t aware of, her own magic amplified by the blood they mixed in.
Laced through the memories they gave her of bubbling girl voices, Thanksgiving pie and the scent of her mother’s shampoo are memories of an Impressionist garden and dark, secret rooms sound-tracked by chanting and lit by the uneasy glow of candles. Sometimes she dreams that she isn't a girl at all, but something older and stronger, something that doesn't belong in the world walking and talking and cuddling in the dark. Those dreams are big as the universe and Dawn wears stars draped in her hair.
On the street below, a figure walks, dark against the snow.
Dawn isn't surprised. This was always meant to happen, the pattern of it pressed upon the spill of her blood through her veins, the timing measured in the tattoo of her heart.
She pushes the window open, props herself up with a hip against the snow dusted sill and lights the cigarette with the flick-click of a silver lighter she keeps tucked in her back pocket.
"Dawn," Buffy calls again. "Seriously!"
Dawn abandons the window, ignores the scarf and gloves laid out hopefully across the bed. She doesn't put out the cigarette, doesn't close the window.
At the bottom of the stairs, Buffy is shrugging into a coat the color of persimmons. "It's about time," she says, flipping her hair, long and grave-dark, over the collar. "You drag me awake at the butt crack of dawn with this whole Christmas shopping thing ... it's freezing." Buffy looks up as Dawn comes down the stairs, the cigarette held elegantly between her first two fingers. "God, Dawn! Could you please not smoke in the house?"
Dawn pauses two steps from the bottom of the staircase, tucks the cigarette between her lips and inhales. "You'd better get the door," she says on the exhalation, words and smoke tangled in a thin, careless stream.
The sound of the knocker falls unexpected and shattering into the quiet of the house, cutting into Buffy's bitter, distracted tirade.
Buffy looks up from her attack on the regiment of shiny gold buttons marching the length of her coat. Still, wary eyes watching Dawn, fingers frozen at her waist.
A second knock falls, jarring and intrusive between them. “Open it,” Dawn shrugs. Buffy's sweet, flexible mouth bends, purses with hesitation and suspicion, and finally she turns, flips the lock on the door and pulls it open.
Dawn's heart beats slow and measured, unhurried and unsurprised. Six months in L.A. dragging bodies from the rubble, seven years on a Hellmouth caught in the collision of reality and impossibility and they were still unprepared for the stunning shock of miracles and curses. Resurrection, death, the murder of angels and Buffy throwing herself into the arms of the man at the door.
Dawn watches them from the stairs, two steps from the bottom. "Hey Angel," she says.
Two. I believe the world it spins for you
She inhales deeply, sucks smoke into her lungs and holds it in her chest as she presses the cigarette's burning end into the glass ashtray beside the bed. Swirl in her chest that she imagines she can feel. Grinds the stubby fragment of cigarette into the glass and finally releases the smoke trapped in her chest in a smooth, straight shot. Buffy will smell the ash and the smoke when she wakes and shout at Dawn for smoking in bed, again. But right now Dawn doesn't care. And neither does Buffy, she thinks, considering and dismissing the boneless-Buffy-shaped lump curled beneath the blankets.
If she could sleep like that, in a careless sprawl of limbs, dreamless; if the half-empty bottle of Ambien on the nightstand would make a difference, she'd swallow the whole damn thing and give herself up to drowning euphoria. Buffy's hyper metabolism burns through the pills too fast, so she takes handfuls at a time, sleeping like the dead for hours and floating through days with a dreamy far away look in her eyes.
When Dawn sleeps she dreams of futures and alternative timelines. When she sleeps blissful and easeful rest eludes her even though the house is quiet, absent of squealing girl voices squabbling over hot water and missing lip gloss. It's been months since Dawn's had to listen to those sorts of full house, lives intersecting sounds. Since Rome it's just been the two of them. And then Giles followed some elusive trail of will and rumor and found them holed up in an old house abandoned by the Watcher's Council.
"We've been searching everywhere for you," he said when Buffy answered the door, her eyes glassy and heavy lidded, Dawn hard on her heels. The pair of them: Yin and yang, Sleeping Beauty and rambunctious Rose Red. It made a certain kind of sense.
They made you out of me ...
London in the winter is always colder than Dawn imagines that it will be and she gasps as she tosses back the covers and swings her legs over the side of the bed.
They can't seem to escape the cold, the ice and the snow. They chased storms for months after L.A. as surely as news of Yeti attacks in the Himalayas and of lake monsters in Siberia.
A new watcher and her small legion of local slayers crowed about the sky falling and Hell smashing its way through the city's asphalt foundation. One day and time seemed to freeze their breath held through the desperate flight to Phoenix where they picked up a rental car because the FAA was no longer clearing flights for landing at LAX; something about dragons in the sky. Then there were road blocks, National Guard, a steady stream of refugees and the eggplant color of the sky over Los Angeles.
They hiked across the empty 405 freeway, down the 110 into Downtown. The edges of the horizon line glared feverishly red and divided the heavens sharply from the Earth. Buildings like broken, jagged teeth punctuated the unnatural sky. The heat was unbearable.
For six months they stayed, dragging bodies from the rubble and restoring order to the fallen city. When they finally left, Buffy headed North and Dawn followed. The further North the better, as far away from the heat and the ash and that *sky* as they could get.
Now it's Christmas and this is where Giles has found them, pretzled together for warmth, hibernating in an empty house.
*
"There's a Yule celebration. It usually lasts for weeks, but I won't stay for the whole thing. I'll be back before Christmas." Giles doesn't really trust them by themselves, disconcerted by Buffy's unfocused eyes and the vague slur of her words.. "I'll just pay my respects to the coven. They helped find you, after all." There is something accusing in his voice, a kernel of disapproval and hurt that they had disappeared without a word to anyone, and the ever-present fear that they will do it again.
He makes plans for them to delay the possibility, ties them to London and the house with Christmas lights draped around the room, cheery white fairy lights on strings of green wire.
Everything is white, the tiny fairy lights for the tree and the banister, the ornaments, even Gabriel's tiny golden horn has a tiny white ribbon tied around it. Nothing is red or blue or purple, nothing that could remind them of blood or bruises or the colors at the edge of the sky over Los Angeles.
"You don't have to," Buffy says absently, untangling wire and glass bulbs.
"God, why is it so damned cold." Huddled in front of the crack and flare of the fire, Dawn runs her hands swiftly over her arms and day dreams about nesting in the blankets on the upstairs bed, cuddled back to belly with Buffy.
Buffy never looks up. "We've been in colder climates," she says.
"Yeah, but that was always in the wild somewhere. Somehow, it doesn't seem fair that it should be this cold in a city. We need more than a fireplace and a couple of radiators."
"We're further North," Giles reminds her. "Closer to the Artic."
"I know that," Dawn says like it's obvious. Clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth, irritated. "I'm, like, research girl. And it still doesn't seem fair."
"Just think of how much fun it will be to have a white Christmas." Buffy plugs the lights in one string at a time. She pulls the string through her hand slowly, studies the tiny bulbs, checking for any that might have burned out. "Like that one time when Mom and Dad took us to Big Bear. Remember how much fun we had?" Her voice is as cold as the snow that fell incessantly that Christmas. It doesn't remind Dawn of all the snow people they had made or of sledding down a nearby hill in the breaks between snowfall. Buffy's voice holds no trace of the lazily fanned snow angels or the snowball fights, the two of them against Hank and Joyce. "I think you were six."
Dawn tucks her chin into the thick, heavy cowl of her turtleneck sweater. "I was never six. Anyway, I've had enough snow to last me, like, forever," she says. "Fuck a white Christmas."
"Dawn, really." Giles, stacking boxes of frosted white ornaments in the corner tilts his head back in tired exasperation. His jaw clenches and he closes his eyes for just a moment before going back to stacking the boxes.
*
The sound of the knocker falls heavy and unexpected into the quiet of the house. Giles, with his hand on the door and a suitcase at his feet, says "bloody hell."
Buffy watches him from a spot halfway up the stairs. Small and almost forlorn, she sits wrapped in a cheery throw blanket covered in dancing snowmen Dawn bought at Marks and Spencers, sits with her elbows resting on her knees, chin propped on her fists. "It's probably the mailman," and she blinks, the slow, resistant drag of her eyelids as likely to remain closed as they are to reopen.
Leaning against the wall, Dawn presses one Ugg-shod foot against Buffy's hip and gently pushes. Nudges her just enough to jar her awake. She looks distracted and vaguely disgruntled, glassy eyed as Giles accepts a package from the man on the other side of the door.
"It's for you," he says, holding the brown paper-wrapped package out to her. When Buffy doesn't move Dawn takes the box. It's small and almost heavy, Buffy's name written in neat block letters on one side. She finds an unsecured seam in the brown paper wrapping, wedges a fingernail beneath it and peels it away.
The box itself is just as nondescript as the wrapping; there is nothing to indicate who sent it, or what it might contain. Dawn flips the hinged cardboard top open as she sinks down to sit beside Buffy on the stair. Sits pressed up against Buffy's side, stealing a tiny bit of warmth and giving Buffy a better view of the inside of the box.
Nestled in crumpled newspaper and scraps of bubble wrap, a small black porcelain jar gleams. Tucked beside it, between the crumpled paper and the side of the box, is a small cream colored card.
"There's a note," Dawn says, pulling the envelope free as Buffy takes the box from her lap.
"It's from Spike," Buffy says, her voice thick and breathless all at once.
Dawn's heart beats slow and measured, unhurried and unsurprised. This was always meant to happen, the pattern of it pressed upon the spill of her blood through her veins, the timing measured in the tattoo of her heart. Resurrection, death and the murder of angels. She can almost hear Spike's voice as she reads:
There were bloody dragons in the sky.
Buffy trembling and soft touches the jar and says, "Angel."
Three. Threshold
On the street below, a figure walks, dark against the snow.
Dawn isn't surprised. This was always meant to happen, the pattern of it pressed upon the spill of her blood through her veins, the timing measured in the tattoo of her heart.
She pushes the window open, props herself up with a hip against the snow dusted sill and lights a cigarette with the flick-click of a silver lighter she keeps tucked in her back pocket.
Once she was large -- a monolithic supernova -- expansive, infiltrating, vibrating with magic and the truth of how the world began. Reality folded around her, bent like light so that she existed in many worlds all at once. Worshiped on an altar or kept in a box, she doesn’t recall, but she dreams of safety in a garden where she knew the meaning of everything. Then a dragon came to the garden, and there was heat and pain and the agony of being lost or stolen, she isn’t sure which.
And she's dreamed this moment, the unraveling of the universe a thread in her mind's eye that's been pulled at exactly the wrong moment. Or perhaps the right one, she was never meant to be here.
Dawn abandons the window, ignores the scarf and gloves laid out hopefully across the bed. She doesn't put out the cigarette, doesn't close the window.
The house is quiet, absent of squealing girl voices squabbling over hot water and missing lip gloss. It's been years since Dawn's had to listen to those sorts of full house, lives intersecting sounds. When the knock comes, it falls heavy and sharp into the quiet of the house. A second knock, jarring and intrusive, follows closely behind, insistent, until she opens the door.
Dawn's dreamed this moment in a million different ways, a myriad of people on the opposite side of the door, shivering beneath the fall of new snow. She has dreamed the world’s end. Blood on her toes and the sunrise ripping reality at the seams. But endings are relative – sometimes the same as beginnings.
"How is this supposed to go?" she asks the girl on the threshold. Stares into the rabbit pink eyes and at the skin paler than Angel's or Spike's. Paler than Buffy's at the end when they buried the body in the woods. Buried her beneath a copse of oak trees, miles from home, Giles and Xander the only other witnesses. The air was thin and icy with winter. Dawn did not cry.
"You know how," the albino girl says. Blinks those rabbit eyes and takes a step closer. "You've always known."
Laced through the memories they gave her of bubbling girl voices, Thanksgiving pie and the scent of her mother’s shampoo are memories of a girl with porcelain skin to match her hair and eyes fire-lit with righteousness and God's vengeance. Dawn dreams the Apocalypse and the slow draw of the machete from beneath the girl's shirt. She doesn't move, only watches, wonders if the girl will take her fingers and keep them in a jar as a souvenir. Wonders if there will be fingers to take or if she will just disappear or dissolve, shatter into a girl shaped pile of ash waiting to be collected and discarded.
Sometimes she dreams that she isn't a girl at all, but something older and stronger, something that doesn't belong in the world walking and talking and cuddling in the dark. Those dreams are big as the universe and Dawn wears stars draped in her hair.
