Summary: A stolen moment between Dawn and Conner, AU I guess. First time attempting a Dawn or Conner-centric fic, so don't flame me if I don't get the characters 100% right. Dawn may sound not as annoying and immature as people may be used to, but keep in mind, this is set one or two years after Season 6. I'm not really a shipper of this stuff, just decided to try it for fun. Forgive the romantic mushiness, it's a compulsion with me.

Disclaimer: You know they don't belong to me. Case closed.

Pairing: D/C, B/S and A/C implied

Feedback: Yes please! Here or Buggers267@aol.com

"I think it's weird."

The boy lies back on the chamois blanket, gazing up at the dust sparkled sky and listening to rising fall and low lilt of the ocean tide, ebbing over the moonlit sand. "You think what's weird?"

The girl throws her hand up in a semi-gesture. "Here. This. You know, based on . . . well, based on everything that's happened. I feel like we're reliving history some how, the kind of history that's there in order to make a glaring point not to repeat it."

The boy tosses a pebble into the surrounding purple air, waiting to hear the small "splosh" as the stone makes its new home in the glittering waves of black and white before them. "Ah. You and me. I guess it is, kind of. But I'm not a vampire and you're not a slayer."

"No. I'm just a girl who has slayer powers though." She turns around to face him, her long brown hair falling into broken highlights by the moon. "And you're the son of a vampire."

"Former vampire," he corrects, emphasizing the words with a firm nod.

"Alright," she concedes. "Former vampire." She still frowns. "But still . . . it's just . . . okay, how about the fact that when I was eleven, you were just some non-existent entity, some dead eggs floating around in an undead mother?"

He rises up from the blanket, causing a reckless wrinkle and allowing sand to splay onto it, inviting the grittiness onto the soft space of luxury. His eyes are burning with slight anger. "Well when you were eleven, you weren't even really here. You were just some glow-y ball of energy."

Her eyes meet his, sparks of anger glimmering in them as well. But they soon subside, and she sighs, reaching over to smooth the blanket. "Touché. But we've established weirdness, let's try looking for some non-weirdness now." She again gazes at him sideways, head cocked, cascade of hair spilling beside her shoulder. "You don't think it's weird?"

He shrugs carelessly. "Not really. I mean, we're two normal people----"

"One raised on the Hellmouth, the other in some far-off hell dimension," she finishes for him.

"Well it wasn't that different," he objects.

She gathers her legs to her chest, holding them tightly to her chest as she surveys him intently. "What was it like?" she asks softly.

"What? Quartoth? Another shrug. Typical male adolescent gesture. You could be talking about the existence and creation of the almighty universe with a boy like him and be rewarded with the same flippant motion. "It was alright, I suppose. Much hotter than here. Darker sometimes. And a lot more fighting." He again looks back up at the sky, a myriad of splattered white dots over a canvas of black. "You pretty much was born and raised to fight and hunt and die. Really, not so much different than here."

She laughs a little, knowingly. "Instead of hunting wild game, it's the job market and the fat cats on Wall Street. So it's not at all better here?"

He turns his attentions back on her, giving her a small suggestive smile. "Some things make it better I guess."

She smiles back coyly. She likes this part. Mostly because they hardly ever get to this part. "Like what?"

The twinkle in his eye is bright enough for her to already guess, but he leaves her hanging and looks down at the half-ravaged package of cookies lying on the blanket with a mischievous grin. "These, for one thing." He picks up one and flops it around in his hand. "They don't have Double-Stuff Oreos in Quartoth."

She pouts, lower lip plump and stuck out in indignation. "Is that all?"

"Well there's also those sort of mini log things with the cream in the middle . . . um . . ."

"Twinkies," she supplies flatly.

"Yeah. Those are great. Nothing like those in Quartoth."

"So the only thing distinguishing that demon dimension from this one is the overabundance of packaged snack foods?"

Waggish smirk maintained, he looks back up at her, two pair of blue eyes melting together, highly visible to each other despite the night's cloaked darkness. She breathes with unnecessary quickness. "Not the only thing," he says in a hushed voice while still peering at her.

She cocks an eyebrow saucily. "Well?" she replies, waiting.

He's still smiling, less roguish now, just looking at her, marveling the dancer-like fluidity of her motions and body. She's amused at his staring and clears her throat meaningfully, waiting for the words. He just shakes his head, as if waking from a trance and resumes picking at the blanket restlessly. "How's your sister?" he abruptly asks, looking up.

She frowns aggravatedly, irked she lost him again. He's as roundabout and non-emotive as his father.

"Great time to bring up my sister!" she yells, her voice rising above the loud crashing slap of the waves colliding into the rocks near the shore. "You and me, sitting all alone on the beach and all you can think to bring up is my sister!"

"How's your sister?" he persists, eyebrow raised, roguish smile returning.

She throws her hands up again in with her usual dramatic flair. She sighs frustratedly. "Buffy is Buffy. My sister who is Buffy. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the one, the only."

He's not falling for her overwrought display and lies back on one elbow. "And how's the baby?"

She curls her hair behind her ears with more force than necessary, a sign of her annoyance. "Again, the name kinda gives it away. It's just a baby. William's a crawling, spitting, screaming, annoying little pooper machine." Her face twists into a scornful scowl. "And god forbid Buffy herself take care of her own child, noooo, she's too busy at work, or slaying, or making kissy-face with that besouled baggage William calls a father. He always gets dumped in my lap."

"Doesn't Spike help at all?"

"He tries too. As much as humanly possible . . . for a non-human bloodsucker. But William's a bundle and . . . why are we talking about my sister's kid?"

"I dunno. I find it interesting. Souled vampire, vampire slayer, both as parents of one kid, I can't help but find it kinda cool."

"It's nothing big. You came from similar roots. And William's not interesting anyway. Just sleeps and eats and pees more often than your higher evolved human."

"Oh come on. You were once a baby like him too."

"Excuse me, but never. Never did I excrete so many bodily fluids as this rug rat does. You'd have thought that kid swallowed the whole of Lake Michigan."

He laughs. "I bet you were an antsy baby. All babies are. I bet I was."

She looks at him a little wonderingly, the corners of her mouth crinkling upwards again. "I bet you were a beautiful baby. In fact, a year or two ago, I would have been able to hold you in my arms if we knew about you."

He makes a face. "I'm glad your sister and my father weren't talking then."

"They're talking now," she points out. "Your dad calls almost every week. Although Spike always seems to come down with a huge coughing fit whenever Buffy's talking to him on the phone. Have you talked to him lately?"

"Who, my dad?" He shakes his head casually. "No, he's still on his honeymoon with Cordelia. And it's not like he and I ever talk . . . cause you know . . ." he shrugs wordlessly.

"It runs in the family," she again supplies. She's used to finishing his sentences for him.

"Yeah . . . but he sent me this postcard from Tuscany. Well more like a book, it was so long. He was going on and on about the Italian sunset."

"Well that's probably because it's been a centuries since he's got to see one. Now that he's all shasnu-ed, he's entitled to gush a little."

"Uh huh. I guess." She frowns a little at his laconic answer, growing more and more exasperated with his reticent nature.

"At least he gushes. More than what I can say for you."

"What's that supposed to mean? Why would I want to gush over anything?"

"Because, I don't know, maybe to show a little emotion, maybe! To show that you're capable of feeling something!"

"We weren't big on gushing in Quartoth."

"Quartoth, Quartoth, we're not in Quartoth anymore! We're here, where people whine and blubber and talk endlessly about how they feel about every little excruciating detail of their boring lives! And look where we are! The beach! One of the most poetic places on the planet! And all you can come up with is an 'uh-huh'?!"

His composure shifts, suddenly he's no longer ambivalent but guarded, his face darkening as he stares back out at the rippling black satin sea. "I can't consider the beach very poetic," he says in a low voice that's disguising growing seriousness. His expression struggles to maintain an apathetic blankness, but his mouth is twitching in a telltale way as he continues flicking pebbles into the shore. "I've never enjoyed this place . . . too many things . . ." He can't finish and ducks his head when his face is no longer as stoic as he'd like. But he forces himself to continue as if he's performing some mini-exorcism. "I've seen . . . I've done things that were to ugly to be considered poetic here."

He says it and all the while, visions of a dark night, not unlike this one, flash through his mind. There's a man, looking entirely too young to be his father, urgently pressing his hands against the glass of a coffin-like box as it's slowly engulfed by shadowy waters. He's looking down at the helpless man with a mixture of guilt, contempt, anger, pain and anguish, the same expression that's etched across his face now. For a moment, he's completely lost in this memory, as if he can see himself standing on an invisible pier right in front of him, bobbing solemnly under the grave stars. She knows this because she can see it in his eyes, that burning edge of pain that she can so easily sympathize with. Not sympathize, empathize-----she knows what it's like to feel a part of you is lost and eternally damaged by the past. She was fool enough to think he wasn't capable of feeling. She knows exactly how much he feels. She knows because she feels it too, the wave of emotion that always surrounds her and washes over her when she's near him. So she softens, bring her hand down to his face in a gesture of tenderness and comfort. She wants to add words of comfort as well, but she can only croak:

"Oh Conner . . ."

He turns back to her and suddenly it all falls away; the pain, the screwed past, the marred memories. He finds something in her luminous blue pupils that makes him think that maybe, just maybe, there is some poet in him. He wants to write a hundred-stanza poem describing her eyes and her lips and her nose and her hair. But of course he can't. So he opts for revealing his feelings in a manner more typically him. He springs up and kisses her.

It's one of the best kind of kisses----not the vulgar, twenty-minute snog-fest; just a soft, expressive, dizzying kiss that's fitting for the setting. They part and she's still got her eyes closed.

"See? I don't need poetry to express myself," he says, eyes twinkling mysteriously. "I have other ways of showing you how I feel."

Her eyelids are still fluttering as if she's waking from a reverie. It's her turn for brevity now. "Uh-huh," she hazily replies. When she fully recovers, she drags him down from where he's crouching so that he's sitting and she's propped up in his arms and they're both searching the sky for stars shining as bright as they feel.

After a bit of what feels like what her sister's boyfriend would call and "effulgent moment", she interrupts the eloquent silence. "So do you think you can answer the question properly now?"

"What?"

"What makes this dimension so much better than the other."

"Oh." He smiles. "Okay, umm . . ." He ticks it off on his hand. "Double Stuff Oreos . . . Twinkies . . ." He lets this pause hang longer than the other. She hates him for it. " . . . And a certain slayer's younger sister." He's holding her a little tighter now. She's just annoyed again.

"Hey!" She jabs him with her elbow, dismayed at her third-place position on this list, as well as his continuing ambiguity. "I'm still on par with snack foods? What do I have to do, track down Little Debbie and beat her to death to ensure she doesn't steal your affections from me?"

He laughs and it's her endless frustration that finally breaks him. "Fine. Fine, you win." He looks back down, black hair in his face, framing the intense grin that's growing rapidly. "You know what makes this dimension a thousand times better than Quartoth? You. It's you, Dawn Summers. It's all you."

Her face is upturned, reaching for his to see if he's smirking or if lack of integrity is present. But the poor boy is bursting with integrity, so she emits a satisfied sigh. But not before wrinkling her brow into a face as she says, "I still think it's weird."

"You do?"

She nods, absently intertwining her fingers with his. " . . . But I can live with 'weird'."