Disclaimer: don't own any of it

Teaser: well, someone has to take care of Dawn

Spoilers: Post Chosen (7.22) and post X-Men 2: X-Men United

/A Summers Connection/

Buffy was bringing out the big guns.

It was time to track down some long-lost Summers relatives.

"I'm not having Dawn with me in Bora Bora," Buffy told Giles when he suggested the thing. Dawn was pouting in her room. "She's going to high school and having a nice, boring life. Whether she likes it or not."

She tried calling her father, but Daddy Dearest was currently not around to take care of a teenager daughter on the start of her puberty. And Giles and just about everyone else was busy doing something dangerous—Willow working with the Coven, Xander heading to Cleveland, Robin in Watcher-Training, she wasn't even going to think about Faith, and Giles going back to Britain to salvage the Council—so she had to find someone else to take care of Dawn.

Luck was on her side that day. Apparently, she had an aunt and uncle that Joyce Summers had lost contact with during the move to California and then… well… there had been the plane crash.

But that wasn't the point. People died. Buffy got used it.

The point was that they were survived by a son. A son who was a mature, responsible young man and was currently occupied as a teacher. A teacher!

There was just one problem Buffy found as she did research on Mr. Scott Summers. He was a teacher at the Xavier Institute up in New York. And the Xavier Institute had been rumored to house… mutants. And though, honestly, Buffy had no problem with the mutants, a lot of people did and that could spell trouble for Dawn, who had a knack for finding it by herself.

In fact, the government had raided the school only a month or so before.

But the President had come onto the TV and had pardoned and apologized to the school so Buffy decided they weren't all that bad. Beside, desperate times desperate measures.

So she picked up the phone and dialed. "I'd like to speak to Scott Summers," she told whoever answered the phone. When Scott Summers answered—in a weak, hoarse voice; Buffy ignored it, of course—the phone she started, "Hey, look, you don't know me very well. But I'm like a cousin. My mom and your dad were siblings. So I thought: hey! I could totally ask you!"

"What?" Scott Summers said over the other line, completely confused. And the fact was—Buffy Summers didn't get it—that he didn't need this.

"Well, I'm leaving the country and heading down to some nasty areas and I don't want to take my kid sister with me and my father's hit his midlife crisis so I was wondering if she could board at your school. I'd be willing to pay," Buffy explained, wriggling her hands over the cord of her phone. Oh please… oh please… oh please.

"You want to send her… here?" he asked in disbelief.

"Yeah," she laughed with a shake of her head. "I mean, it's the safest place for her."

Note: Yet again with the uselessness. Where's a plot? I don't see a plot. Do you see a plot?