Title: Shine
Author: Emily (emilyfractured-heart.org)
Rating: PG 13
Spoilers/Timeline: Sometime post "The Heights"
Summary: "Anna doesn't shine and so Seth doesn't see her."
Anna has always been perfectly happy with who she is. She like her clothes and she likes her collection of wacky earrings and she loves her DVD collection of cancelled TV shows and melodramatic films from decades ago. She likes to curl up in sweats and a tanktop and watch them accompanied by her favourite chocolate fudge ice cream. She's the smart girl who reads a lot and she is happy, she is. But sometimes? She wishes she was a little less who she was.
Because Anna is the type of girl who is friend material. She's cute, sure, but that's it. She's the girl who kisses a guy and pretends it's just for show - only it's not and it hurts. And even worse? Seth has no idea. She knows she is smarter than Summer and she is probably wittier than her too. She is most likely more interesting than her and most definitely less shallow. But none of those things matter because Summer is the type of girl who turns heads whenever she enters a room. Who shines on a rainy day and shimmers with no makeup and messy hair. Anna doesn't shine and so Seth doesn't see her.
It's okay though. She has always been her own girl and she's proud of that. She has always loved the scene at the end of the last ever episode of Buffy where Buffy just smiles. It's way better than any scenes with Angel or Spike or whoever because Buffy is her own girl now. And more importantly, she's okay with that. Anna has always been okay too, she has to be. She's practical too, because she needs to be.
Dreams are most likely to get trampled on and she's in Newport, California now, and she doesn't want the American dream, nothing so big. No, her dreams are small. They are little things that she kind of craves. They're made all the more painful by their impossibility. Mostly they're about Seth. She doesn't need a guy to be okay, it's just that she wants him and she can't make that go away. When Seth asks if the kiss is part of the plan, Anna smiles sadly and filed her dreams away because he just trampled all over them - and of course he didn't even know. Regretfully, she dismisses the thoughts. It's not gonna be - and she is better off this way anyway. She would always be second best and Anna doesn't want to be second best.
The thing is, when Anna imagines being with Seth, she is suddenly a girl who shines. That isn't a dream she can let go of so quickly.