Song of Herself
By Doyle
On Dawn’s seventeenth birthday, the world doesn’t end. Not even a narrowly
averted apocalypse. Vampires don’t crash the party, not a single demon leaps out
of the cake, Sweet doesn’t blast into town to reclaim his
one-year-closer-to-legal fiancée and she doesn’t end the evening by losing her
virginity to her immortal, brooding vampire lover.
Instead there’s cake
and gifts and a totally normal party that’s just perfect for a totally normal
girl.
In bed that night, in the rented house in Cleveland, she feels
weirdly disappointed.
**
Xander still sees things. He’s not the
only one.
Someday Dawn’s going to be a Watcher, and she starts
practising that summer in Cleveland. It’s a grown-up version of her little kid
Harriet the Spy games when she’d sneak around following Buffy and Angel. So,
without being told, she knows that Vi loves being a Slayer and Rona doesn’t. She
knows that Kennedy loves Willow more than the other way around. She knows that
Xander misses Anya far, far more than he ever hints at.
It makes her sad
to realize that that maybe there’s no such thing as the Scooby Gang any more,
because with Andrew and Principal Wood and Kennedy and everybody else the group
is frickin’ huge. No way they’d all fit into the Mystery Machine, unless it’s
like the phone booth in that weird old British sci-fi show that Andrew loves.
There are days when she feels that way herself, like she’s bigger on the inside;
like the teenage girl shaped part of her that the world sees is tiny compared to
the inner Dawn.
Line of poetry she comes across when she’s flipping
through her English book avoiding homework (eugh, summer school): I am large,
I contain multitudes.
She copies it down into her new journal, the
one she’s started to self-consciously call her Watcher’s
Diary.
**
The movie theater’s old and she lives in fear that one
day the ceiling’s going to pancake them all, but the seats are wide enough for
two people and the popcorn’s the way she likes it. They fall into a Friday
afternoon routine – Dawn and Xander on one couch-seat, Andrew in a seat of his
own on her other side. Dawn holds the popcorn in her lap and sneaks more of it
than the boys.
They see Pirates of the Caribbean three times. By the
third time she knows exactly when Andrew will go glassy-eyed over Orlando and
when Xander will make a joke about his eye-patch.
“Don’t,” she finally
bursts out. “It’s not funny.”
He looks surprised, then smiles at her. Not
a real smile, and she works out that he knows it’s not funny, but he has to say
it anyway.
His hand’s on the faded velvet beside her, and she sets her
own over it. Lights are down, Andrew at the wrong angle to see and nobody’s
going to notice her holding hands with the guy who’s supposed to be practically
her brother. Slips her hand underneath, entwining their fingers. His palm’s
broad, the fingers rough. She hasn’t seen him build anything recently. Maybe he
can’t, she realizes, now that his depth perception’s gone.
He looks at
their hands, looks at her, back to the hands, and is he blushing? She can’t tell
by the light from the screen but just the possibility that she’s making an older
man blush gives her a thrill of power.
She doesn’t let go till the
lights come up. He doesn’t pull away.
The next Friday he makes excuses
about not having time to go to a movie. She and Andrew go alone, and it’s just
not the same.
**
Buffy must’ve had it backwards, because kissing a
real live guy is way better than kissing a vampire. Warmer and softer, and he’s
better at it than Justin. Or maybe it’s just because he’s older.
She’d
like to talk to Buffy about this but she’s away, gathering together the girls in
Europe, and she’d only wig out anyway.
“Dawn,” Xander says. Voice harder
than she remembers him ever using to her. “You’re late.” Responsible and bossy
and non-Xander, like it’s Buffy or Giles speaking out of his mouth.
She
gives Paul one last kiss. Makes it a good one, because Xander’s still watching
them from the porch, then sends him away with a smile.
“Nice car,” Xander
notes, once Paul’s driven away. “Sweet set-up. He’s, what,
seventeen?”
He’s a month off nineteen. “He’s twenty-two,” she says,
brushing past him. “Night.”
**
September means school, regular
school. Means an end to the four hours a day of make-up classes and eating
bagged lunches with Paul as she listens to him talk about the accident that
killed his parents and kept him out of school for nearly a year. He moves away
the last week in August, and she promises to write and call, knowing she won’t,
knowing he won’t either.
Other years, back in Sunnydale, she went
shopping for school supplies with Buffy, Tara, her mom. Xander offers to drive
her to the mall, in the awkward, too-jovial way he talks to her these days, but
she borrows money from Giles and takes the bus.
She wishes she could tell
Xander that he doesn’t have to try to squeeze her into this little place in his
worldview; she’s not his sister. She’s not a child any more. He doesn’t have to
worry that he can’t protect her.
**
Without slayer strength or
magic or years of training there’s not much to do in a superhero group except
stand back and watch. So she should have guessed, really, that Andrew sees
things, too.
“You’re way too young for him,” he says out of the blue one
day, as they’re playing Prince of Persia on the console they finally cajoled
Giles into buying.
The color rises high in her face, making her hot and
irritated. “Yeah? Well, you’re way too male for him.”
“Whatever,
girlfriend,” he divas in that way he’s getting freakishly good at. Then he goes
soft and serious, which is so much worse. “Seriously, Dawnie. Anya’s only been
gone five months.” Voice catches and he says gone, not dead, like she’s on a
beach in Acapulco and every week she sends postcards that they stick to the
fridge along with Buffy’s. Andrew Wells, protector of Anya’s memory.
“I
miss her too,” Dawn says, feeling miserable, remembering what a bitch she used
to think Cordelia was. She wishes Cordelia was around. She might
understand.
**
Xander kisses her for the first time at Halloween,
and freaks. She knows he freaks because he looks panicky and so weirded out that
she’s scared she’s turned into her costume and become the real Arwen. Stranger
things have happened.
Drumbeat in his chest when she lays her hand flat
there, before he makes a lame quip about demon possession and says they should
go find the others.
She kisses him two nights later on the porch, and
it’s better.
**
“I spoke to Buffy.”
Xander strokes her
hair. “How’s our esteemed ambassador to Italy?”
“She’s coming back next
week. For Christmas.”
His hand stops. Withdraws.
Dawn sits up,
pulls back so they’re not quite touching. She tugs at one of the cushions on the
floor and wonders why she and Xander and Andrew prefer sitting against the couch
to on it.
Buffy’s coming back, and it could be the end of everything, but
it won’t. She won’t let it.
She is large, she contains
multitudes.
“I totally have a master plan,” she says, brightly enough to
make Xander smile. His arm goes around her again and she smiles, too.
“Yeah, me too,” he says, “but mine involves a last alliance of men and
elves, so let’s go with yours.”
“She’ll be so relieved I’m not pregnant
with Andrew’s baby she’ll think it’s great we’re together.” Snuggles close into
his side. “But that elves thing is good, too.”
This is going to be major.
There’ll be yelling and maybe crying and questions about why they spent months
sneaking around in secret. She’s got her defence ready for that one – Willow and
Giles could have noticed, if they’d been watching. They never told Andrew, and
he knew. Plus for the rest of it, she has a secret weapon she likes to call the
Angel Card. Five years age difference versus two hundred plus? Not a big
deal.
She’s seventeen. She’s happy and in love and maybe loved back.
She’s not a fling or a rebound or a substitute for Anya, because if she was any
of those things this wouldn’t be such a battle.
She’s not a slayer or a
witch, but she’s going to be a Watcher someday and Xander’s going to help her
because extraordinary people need to stick together, and because they seem to
keep saving each other’s lives.
She’s Dawn Summers.
She’s starting
to figure out what that means.