Secret Green

By DutchBuffy

Dawn breathes in through her nose, out through her mouth. She tries to keep her eyes closed, but curiosity and boredom fight back and win. She peeks at Buffy from under her lashes. Buffy seems to be really into it, sitting like a tiny golden statue of Buddha, only not so much with the fat and the bald. She herself is way too distracted by all the breathing sounds round her, and also by the penetrating polyester smell rising from her new exercise pants. She totally gets that they don't have money for the real thing, even after her summer job, but she's gonna tell Buffy that she really draws the line at pants that smell of burned plastic.

Okay. She closes her eyes again. She's been doing the breathing, when is this going to start working? She concentrates on breathing and chanting Om, and to her great surprise she detects a faint warmth gathering in her feet. Cool. She thinks her eyes are still closed, but she can see the fire. It rises up through her legs, it's green, shouldn't it be red, and rests pulsing and throbbing at the end of her spine. It spreads around her hips in a circle. It feels awesome, like bathing in a lace-edged sea, where gazillions of little foam bubbles pop and tingle against her skin. The emerald ring looks so solid she could rest her hand on it. Root chakra, right? Only it shouldn’t be green, she thinks.

She counts the forty-eight beats and yes, the warmth and the tingling rise again. It takes longer and is much more intense than the first time, although the distance the fire travels is much less. It comes to rest at the apex of her legs, sexy and throbbing, with a pleasure almost at orgasm level. Still green, not a trace of orange, although she smells tangerines. Awesome. She's so slaying at this. She refrains heroically from peeking at Buffy. Buffy's hair is probably standing up on her head from already reaching the seventh chakra. She concentrates on her own process.

Forty eight beats, and there she goes. Solar plexus. Yellow, she thought, but her power is staying in the green spectrum, though you might call it chartreuse. In spite of the enormous feeling of power and wellbeing situated right there, at her body's center, she can feel a corner of her mind being spanned by threads of apprehension like a spider web. She's not the key anymore, right? She's an ordinary girl. These colors mean nothing.

Forty eight. Heart. Not pink and jade, just plain Dawn green, adorned with attar of roses. Pure green energy, she remembers Tara shouting crazily. Oh yeah. There is no doubt now. Her heart knows what it is, she guesses. She perseveres, though her mental knees are knocking together. She's older and stronger now; she wants to know who she is.

Forty eight breaths. Throat. Blue and aqua, only not. Perhaps a turquoise tinge to her base color, that's all. Mint.

Forty eight oms. Third eye. Indigo, eat your heart out, you are now spinach. Popeye the Sailor Man, toot toot.

Forty eight oms, crown chakra. Dawn can’t believe how natural the process feels, something only trained yogis are supposed to be able to do. She can see her own hands now, lying limply on her bakelite-smelling evil pants, fingers brushing the despised two stripes. She can sense her eyelashes lying peacefully on her cheeks, stirring gently with each breath like grass shivering in the wind. She turns her attention, although not her eyes, to the side.

Buffy is sitting there, frowning heavily in spite of seeming quite relaxed below the neck. Dawn can see the dull orange pulsing through her body, swirling through her veins but pooling at her sex.

In fact, she can see all the people in class. Some of them have transparent red chakras glowing, with some she can see something surging up their legs but never even reaching there. No one is sporting a green crown chakra so solid and shiny you could dance on your own reflection.

Buffy sighs. Poor Buffy. If she still had Spike to beat up, or fuck, maybe she wouldn’t be so unhappy. But Spike is long gone, and Buffy concentrates on pretending to be happy and acting out her promises to Dawn, like slaying together or going to yoga class together. Huh. Where would Spike be now? Even as she thinks that she's floating up through the roof and onward into the sky. She's not ready for this, not heaven just yet, please? But no, she remains below airplane flight paths or heavenly portals, and just hovers above Sunnydale like a green glowy gull taking the easy way up on a thermal.

All of Sunnydale is dotted with people, who she sees as dull purple blotches, with only a few exceptions glowing red or orange. Around Willy's bar it’s a riot of shocking pinks, blinding violets and chartreuses. Who knew demons looked like that on the inside? But there, somewhere lower down, there is someone sparky, sputtering like a faulty firecracker, now shooting red sparks into the air, then blue, then pink. She's there in the blink of an eye because she wants to be. Hey! It’s in the high school basement, right below where she's starting junior year next week. It takes a while to recognize the wild mop of dirty hair and the thin hands hiding the face as belonging to Spike. What made him go all sparkly, she wonders. She's feeling very magnanimous and forgiving up here, like God, and reaches out a green ghostly hand to put on his head. She still hates him because of Buffy and all, but she wants to comfort him, too.

Something's preventing her, though. Like a released elastic band she shoots up and spins spiraling back to the dojo, where Buffy is shaking her arms and looking into her face with concern.

"Dawn! Dawnie, snap out of it! Everybody's done, okay, wake up!"

Dawn sighs. Slowly she lets her snaky energy sink down through the seven chakras, but not completely. She rolls it up like a ball of string and hides it at the root of her spine. There she'll be able to get at it when she wants it.

She looks around and sees that everyone has gotten up already and is clustering around the teacher, jonesing for a little attention. Buffy looks at her with her frowning concerned face, which is not too different from Buffy's frowning angry or impatient face. Facial expression used to be your friend, Buffy. She may be smiling more, but Dawn wishes she really meant it.

"I'm fine," Dawn says hastily. "Really. I just had a great trance thing going there, I forgot all about the time."

The green string ball hums soothingly to her, deep inside its cage of flesh and blood and bone. She borrows a little serenity from it to make her face and mind calm and smooth like a pond, so she can appease Buffy. Buffy's forehead smooths out as well, as if Dawn had drawn her thumb over the little ridges of skin and muscle. Hey, she's gonna remember that. This way they won't ever need Botox. Buffy and she go to the dressing room, shower and change, not talking but with a hint of sisterly vibe hanging between them.

When they exit the building into the hot tarry evening air, the next class, all guys, brushes past them. Tae Kwan Do, Dawn guesses. That cute Justin she had math with is in the middle of the group. Talking busily to his cronies, but he smiles at her and gives a little wave with his hand. She coolly flips her hair, which had better still be shiny or it's gonna get it, and says hi.

Buffy, who never notices anything, hasn't noticed this either. Good. She and Janice are planning to sneak out tonight and go Bronzing, and it's a sure bet Justin will be there.

*

Dawn makes kissy mouth at the mirror. She likes the new color, and it goes really well with her apple colored T-shirt. It's astonishing how many green clothes she possesses. She's wearing an emerald string, and pistachio eyelids shine back at her, not even clashing with her dark blue eyes. She practices flipping her hair a few times, forward left, forward right. Janice says hair is an asset, and every girl should make the most of her assets.

She checks her watch. Way too early to climb out yet. She lies down on the bed, hands under her head and thinks of yoga practice. Before she even realizes she's doing it, she senses the pulsing of green energy, racing along her veins like faster than light spaceships, displacing space and matter before them. The second chakra gives her such a surge of pleasure that she wills the ascent of energy to halt there and slides her hand down her panties. She makes tiny movements with her middle finger, a habit born of shame, from doing this when she didn’t know what it was called yet, but just knew she didn’t want her mother to catch her at it. She thinks of Justin – not of broad hands with chipped nail polish, dealing her a hand of poker, of course not – and climaxes with a surge of guilt and come against the ceiling.

Huh? She looks down on the slender, not quite full grown girl on the bed, her face slack and her hand down her pants. She's getting out of her body awfully easily, she notices with a mixture of dismay and exhilaration. Who knows what she's capable of? Maybe she's more powerful than Willow or Buffy even. With a sigh she sinks down into the prison of her body, feeling its heaviness press down on the light and dancing parts of her.

It's time to leave. She climbs down the window, which is difficult and bad for her new pants and her manicure, and wonders if she could maybe float if she practiced with her new-found energies.

Somehow the evening is different. Normally Dawn and Janice have to slog to the Bronze on foot, tonight a girl they know offers them a lift in her Dad's car. Dawn doesn’t bump into anything, breaks no nails, doesn’t get the heel of those shoes Buffy doesn’t know about caught in the pavement. She's starting to feel like a different person, a smoother, prettier, more popular Dawn. She flips her hair, and a stray beam from the Bronze lighting catches it as it ripples in slow motion and turns in into a thousand differently-colored shiny strands. Dawn's almost in awe of her own hair, and Janice gapes.

Things speed up after that. She dances likes she's never danced before, her hips sway looser and wider than they ever have, she thrusts out her breasts and everyone stares and lusts after her. It’s power, it’s heady, this should never stop. Janice is so jealous; it drips off her, so visible in the slant of her body as she turns away slightly from Dawn. Bartenders give her drinks without carding her and Justin drools and longs for her, she can see it in his eyes as he stands at the edge of the dance floor. She knows just how to entice him over. Her eyelids go lazily up down like window shades, giving him a secret signal, and there he comes. He hovers uncertainly in front of her, but when she stretches out a languid arm he comes willingly and slides his hot boy body against hers.

So this is how it feels. She totally gets the Buffy and Spike sex now, it’s infinitely better than touching herself. They gyrate and smoosh against each other to the beat of the music, and it makes them long for another beat, one they could generate themselves. Without transition they're in the alley behind the Bronze, Justin's hands desperately trying to get into her tight clothes, leaving fiery trails on her skin that only she can see. There is no need to wait, she can sense her energy slowly pulsating around her hips like a Hawaiian skirt, and she needs Justin inside her right now. She shimmies out of her jeans like they're made of jelly, helps Justin undo his buttons and slides him inside her like she's done this dozens of times before. She sees Justin's eyes cross and feels his knees buckle, but she hold them both up easily with two extra green arms that she shapes with a thought.

It’s so hot, feeling him thrust uncertainly, not quite knowing what to do, and then there's pain. A little sharp flare of it, that passes quickly into a burning that isn’t completely unpleasant, in fact, it’s hot. She burns, she sees her green energy skirt flare out to cover the whole alley, the walls of the Bronze are trembling, is this real or is it just what that ancient writer they made her read in English class wrote, about the earth moving? She closes her material eyes, although she still perceives everything and ripples on and on and on. Justin and the world shake along with her. Justin pauses for a moment, scrunching up his face and moving his lips as if reciting logarithmic tables.

Dawn giggles, and when she sees that her giggle rips a hole in the sky there's suddenly a very cold place in her mind that observes while her body gibbers out of control. It grabs together all the things that happened this evening and puts them in logical order. She's the Key. She knew that. What happened last time when someone spilled her blood? She pushes a reluctant Justin out of her, thrusts her hand between her legs and sees redness on her fingers. Of course it's about blood again. She remembers the last time her blood opened up a portal in the walls of the world. This is the blood of her virginity, first blood. How much more powerful that must be! Every movement she makes tears the fabric of reality, holes appear everywhere, and Justin's leg sinks into one of them. She looks around wildly, her hair whips at the world and tears it into ribbons with a million tiny shrieks. She's the Key. She did this. She's going to destroy the world. Her mouth opens, and a car explodes into nothingness. Her hands go up in a reflex to cover her mouth, but they take the high street along with them. Overhead, she sees stars winking out, and new terrible cigarette burns form on the green-tinged sky as she screams.

The new Dawn becomes very still and cold and stops time to think for a moment. Then she deliberately shoves an arm deep into the trembling heaving guts of the world and opens up a portal to somewhere else. She gathers all the disturbances she's created together and thrusts them through that opening, leaving her own world a little pale and shaky but whole. She begins to close the portal, but it won't. There's something stuck in the door, it's the thrumming green snake that ends in her navel. She gets it now. The choice is between staying here and going with it into that other world, taking a chance on what she is there. She might even remember who she truly is. Or should she cut it off and become less, in the familiar world that feels as if she's known it forever instead of two years?

She doesn’t hesitate for long. Here means Buffy, Spike, memories of her Mom. She's wants to know how the tale will end. Her hand is a scythe and slashes down on the cord that shivers with power and longing and she closes the door forever.

She comes to herself, in the narrow confines of ordinary Dawn-ness, in the alley where she almost ended the world. Justin is crouched on the floor, crying and hugging himself. Dawn half remembers what just happened, but shoves the thought aside to kneel down next to Justin.

"Hey, it’s okay," she says. "We're fine."

Justin looks up into her face, confused. "What? What was that? You were…" He gets up and backs off.

"Hey," he says tightly, hand groping for the support of the alley wall. "That was, um, great. I'll call you."

He's off, almost running in his eagerness to get away from her. Dawn can't feel a lot of regret, that probably went with her into that other world. She'll have to get back inside, to Janice, be Just Dawn again, clumsy, not too popular girl. Really, that will be so much harder than saving the world.

~Fin~