****

"...nobody's watching me," Xander's saying and Dawn's throat is hurting more and more. She needs to sniff, needs to keep the snot from leaking out her nose like the tears are threatening to leak out her eyes, but she doesn't dare.

She swallows and tastes salt and mint.

The first time Dawn kissed Kit - back up, that's not accurate.

The first time Kit kissed Dawn, Dawn felt like she was going to fly apart. She tried to curl her fingers into the wall, she was so sure she was about to fall and shatter. But cement blocks are pretty unforgiving for mere mortals and all she managed to do was rip a couple cuticles.

The pain joined the fly-away, icicles falling and falling and breaking apart in the slowest motion possible feeling. It sent red bubbles like those in old-fashioned Christmas tree bulbs up her arms and into her head, joining the white-silver-blue shock and shake.

Kit tasted like bubblegum and Dr. Pepper.

Dawn wondered if she tasted like metal. Maybe wood; medieval keys were probably made out of wood, like everything else. She hadn't wondered when Justin kissed her, maybe, she thinks now, because she didn't like him half as much as she likes Kit.

She misses Kit. She moved away right before Christmas, and it's been a while, and she wants to know how she's doing.

Whenever Kit kissed her, first time, last time, every time in between, Dawn thought of Tara. She's always missing Tara.

Not cool, but she's thinking about Kit right now because she's having one those *spells*. Gripped by something the counselor - not Buffy, the real one they sent her to after Mom died - would call 'grief'.

Girls suffer from spells all the time in old books, Dickens and Louisa May Alcott, and Dawn doesn't think there's a better word to describe how she feels when she misses Tara like this. 'Grief' is a stupid word, spelled funny, and it's charcoal-colored. Too abstract. Nothing like what it feels like.

She doesn't know what Tara tasted like.

She imagines pancake batter, blueberries still warm from the sun, and Tom's of Maine toothpaste.

Dawn switched over to Tara's toothpaste the night after Giles left with Willow. She rationed it out all through the summer but by the middle of August, it was gone. The tube was empty and curled.

She put it in the box she keeps under her bed, with the picture of Mom, Buffy's graduation tassel, a postcard from Oz in Prague, and the copy of Dickinson's poems that Willow gave her for her tenth birthday.

Tara's toothpaste is the only real memory Dawn has in that box. The only one she's sure of, the only one that doesn't depend on magic and mojo and bullshit. The only one that didn't appear out of nowhere like her.

Xander kisses her head and he starts to leave.

Dawn's turning his words over and over, imagining each word is a piece of rock, a pebble in the gardens at Versailles or something. Holding each one in the palm of her hand, running the pad of her thumb over the surface. Licking them like she used to at the ocean: If you can hear the sea in shells, you should be able to taste it on the sand and rocks.

No one mentions Tara. But Xander's whole spotlight thing, the lack of power, the watching and taking care: That's Tara. Not Dawn.

She wants to ask Xander, wants to know if he thinks about her, if he remembers her. He remembers *Oz*, he must think about Tara.

But he's gone now and she's opening the books again. Licking her lips, tasting blueberries and mint.

Dawn remembers.