Title: Please Have Snow and Mistletoe
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Pairings: Buffy/Faith, Dawn/Vi, Xander/Shannon, Willow/Kennedy
Summary: When Dawn returns home from college for winter break to a house she's never seen before in a city she's never been to, she finds out if it is possible to go home again.
Warning: Drunk sex.
A/N: There's a debt in this story to annakovsky. (More than one, actually.)
Please Have Snow and Mistletoe
"It's strange, y'know?" Dawn's roommate blathers. "Going home again after being at college for a semester, after, like, not having parents around for so long. It's like, it's not going to be the same as it was. You can't go home again."
"Yeah, strange," Dawn agrees noncommittally. Her house, along with her mother's grave and the entire city they were part of, has been destroyed by an "earthquake" of apocalyptic proportions. She hasn't seen her father in years. The house she is "going home" to, where her sister and her friends now live, she has never seen and is in a city she's never visited.
"You know, you don't have to, like, pack everything," Dawn's roommate offers unhelpfully as she watches Dawn try to fill her suitcase with her entire wardrobe. "Don't you have clothes at home?"
"No," Dawn answers. The truth is easiest, and it has the added benefit of startling her roommate so much she cannot speak.
Dawn steps out onto the concourse, looking for Buffy, or Faith, or--
"Dawn," cries out a slightly-familiar voice, and Dawn searches her memory for the Slayer it belongs to. She is able to stop trying when a redhead in a bright blue fedora steps out of the crowd, and Dawn immediately begins to follow Vi as they make their way through the airport to the baggage carrel. Vi's obviously learned the airport down pat--the Sisterhood of the Jhe recently tried to raise an Elder God in the Customs office, Vi explains to Dawn, not to mention the various Slayers coming and going. "A lot of them've gone home for the holidays," Vi continues, as she effortlessly picks up the suitcase Dawn had to struggle to get to LAX, "which means you'll be able to get your own room." Apparently the only ones left in Cleveland are Buffy, Faith, Xander, Shannon, and Vi. Willow and Kennedy are spending Hanukkah with Willow's family and Christmas with Kennedy's but will be home for New Year's, while the other Slayers won't be back until later in January.
They make their way out of the airport and into the parking lot, until Vi stops behind a green SUV, pulls out a set of keys, and opens the back door. "Your car?" Dawn asks, glancing at the "My other car is a broom" bumper sticker.
"Our car," Vi answers as she slips into the driver's seat. She waits before Dawn gets into the passenger seat before continuing, "For official Watcher's Council business. So, pizza runs, mostly."
Vi dishes the gossip as she drives to the house. Apparently Colleen and Caridad got into some type of fight, but the big news is that Xander and Shannon are now dating. "Buffy--" Vi starts, but then she looks pensive for a moment and finishes only with a, "Buffy is doing good. So is Faith."
The idea of Buffy and Faith living in the same house for four months and not killing each other is almost beyond belief, so Dawn just shrugs.
They put her in what is apparently Chao-Ahn and Rona's room, which means it is filled with a rather eclectic selection of stuff which Dawn mostly has no interest in whatsoever.
She spends a couple of hours in the room alone with her Concise Dictionary of Akkadian, then idly wonders the house. She finds Vi in the kitchen, making a grilled cheese sandwich. "Want one?" Vi asks as Dawn enters the kitchen.
"Yeah, thanks," Dawn says, pulling a stool up to the counter.
"I was going to go to the arcade after, shoot the heads off some zombies," Vi says as she drops a sandwich onto a plate and puts it in front of Dawn. "You want to come with?"
Dawn smiles. "That'd be great."
Dawn's there for two days before Buffy and Faith have their first fight since she's arrived. Dawn's not exactly sure what it's about--apparently Faith put in a requisition order for weapons without checking with Buffy first?--but the two are shouting at each other at the top of their lungs and Dawn wonders how it is the house is still standing if this is what the months she was at Stanford were like. Xander, Shannon, and Vi are all pointedly staring at nothing whatsoever, not getting involved, and Dawn figures they have more experience with this than she does, so she just follows their lead.
Just when, watching the argument out of the corner of her eye, Dawn thinks her sister and Faith are about to come to blows, Buffy grabs the other Slayer by the shirt--
--and drags her down the hall to the bedroom, pulling Faith in and shutting the door loudly behind them. There is a long silence.
"Did what I think just happened just happen?" Dawn finally manages to ask.
"Your sister just pulled Faith into her bedroom for some wild and crazy hatesex," Vi answered matter of factly. "Is that what you think happened?"
Suddenly, Dawn is very glad she is sitting down.
"Faith and Buffy are dating?" Dawn asks Vi when the capacity to reason finally returns the next morning.
"Well, not dating, exactly," Vi says. "Just . . . periodically having sex. Or we think they're having sex, it's not like we've seen them, but the walls aren't that thick, and it sounds like they--"
"That's enough," Dawn cuts Vi off not quickly enough.
"Well, it's usually just like last night. They start fighting over something, and then the next minute one of them's dragging the other into the bedroom."
"How often?" Dawn can't keep herself from asking.
Vi shrugs. "Once, maybe twice a week?"
Dawn shakes her head. Maybe she should call Giles, since apparently she has come home to Bizarro World. She wonders if the real Cleveland is out there somewhere, and the real Buffy and Faith--who are not having sex with each other, angry or otherwise, thank you very much--are suddenly similarly bewildered as they are faced with the appearance of the very horny, very kinky, and apparently very gay, Bizarro Dawn.
Dawn goes with Vi to the mall to do Christmas shopping. It's crowded as hell (more crowded, if the eyewitness reports she's heard can be trusted), but Slayer strength is very effective when clearing a path.
She picks out a shirt for Buffy, a pair of boots for Faith, and a comics trade for Xander. She has no idea what to get for Shannon, since pretty much the only thing she knows about the girl is that she had been branded in the neck by a deranged priest, but Vi tells her that she is a big fan of colorful jewelry, so Dawn gets her a bracelet.
Which leaves Vi.
With Buffy and Faith and Xander and Shannon making up couples (well, of a sort, in Buffy and Faith's case), Dawn has been left spending a lot of time with Vi, and even after only a couple of days she feels bad not knowing what to get for the Slayer. She finally settles on The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft.
On Christmas morning, they open their gifts. Xander gets Shannon a necklace, and she gets him a three-dimensional bust of Kitty Pryde in her Excalibur uniform. Dawn thinks their relationship has real potential.
Buffy turns beet red when she opens her present from Faith, then refuses to let anyone else see what it is.
Dawn gets a couple of fantasy novels from Buffy, a set of throwing knives from Faith, the entire Morrison New X-Men run in hardcover from Xander, and Manuel d'Epigraphie Akkadienne from Shannon. She pulls away the gift wrap from her gift from Vi to reveal--
The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft.
Vi, who has already opened her present from Dawn, shrugs guiltily. "Great minds think alike, I guess," she says.
It's not long before Buffy whispers something into Faith's ear and the one Slayer is dragging the other into the bedroom without either one even being angry. Xander and Shannon shoot each other significant looks and soon leave to follow Buffy and Faith's example, although Dawn notices that Xander brings the Kitty Pryde statue with him. This leaves Vi and Dawn alone in the living room at 11:00 am on Christmas morning, looking awkwardly across the room at each other.
"So," says Vi, pulling out Jenga Truth and Dare, her present from Faith. "Want to play?"
It only gets worse when Willow and Kennedy get back. Now there's three couples in the house instead of two, and the sense that Dawn and Vi are the odd girls out is only intensified. Not that Dawn would mind a boyfriend, but really the only guy she really ever sees is already claimed by Shannon and besides, he's Xander.
So she and Vi spend New Years Eve single and miserable as the eight of them watch Regis Philbin take over for Dick Clark on the television and wait for the ball to drop. Dawn passes the time by having an early glass of champagne. And another. And another.
Then it's 2005 and Buffy is kissing Faith, and Xander's kissing Shannon, and Willow's kissing Kennedy, so it just seems like the natural thing for Dawn to kiss Vi. And they're all using tongue, so it seems the thing to do for Dawn to do as well. And--
New Years Day 2005, Dawn doesn't wake up in her own bed. Well, technically, none of the beds are really hers, but she doesn't wake up in Rona's bed either. Or Chao-Ahn's.
In fact, she's pretty sure the bed she's woken up in is Vi's. This deduction is in large part based on the fact that Vi is in fact at that moment sleeping in what Dawn is assuming is Vi's bed. Vi is naked. As is, for that matter, Dawn.
"Oh, my God," Dawn says, as she hastily tries to remember what happened the night before and fails. "How much did we have to drink last night?" She pulls herself away from Vi and tries to sit up in the bed. "Well, that answers that question," she says to herself as she slowly lowers herself back down. "Talk about a hangover."
"Wha?" half-asks, half-groans Vi, stirring in bed next to her. She opens her eyes, looks at Dawn, squints, then closes her eyes. But apparently when she opens her eyes again, Vi still sees Dawn, because she just says, "Oh."
"Yeah," agrees Dawn, because she's unsure what you say when you suddenly find yourself naked in another girl's bed.
"It's okay," says Vi, quickly getting out of bed and then grabbing the bedpost to steady herself. Apparently her hangover is in just as full a force, if not quite so strong as Dawn's. "We were drunk, after all--" As she speaks she grabs her shirt, her brassiere, her panties, from the floor.
"Come back to bed," Dawn says, frowning. "You were warm. Comfortable."
She hesitates at first but then, obliging, Vi gets back into bed, and, her still-naked body wrapped around the other girl's, Dawn falls back asleep.
It's the third of January and Dawn and Vi haven't said a word to each other since Dawn left Vi's room in silence rather late in the day on New Year's Day. Dawn breaks the silence by knocking on Vi's door until the Slayer has to answer. "Yes?" Vi asks, conspicuously not making eye contact with Dawn.
"We need to talk."
Vi just waits.
"In private."
Reluctantly, Vi leaves the door open as she walks back to her bed--the bed she and Dawn both woke up naked in the day before. Dawn closes the door behind her. "Vi, we had sex."
"We were drunk, it doesn't mean anything, it won't happen again," Vi says with a shrug. "I like boys. You like boys."
"Buffy likes boys," Dawn points out. "Faith likes boys."
"So, you're saying we're both secretly bi and never knew it?"
Dawn shrugs. It'd been known to happen, after all. "I'm not saying anything. All I know is that I don't remember it being horrible."
Vi crosses her arms. "You don't remember any of it at all."
"True," Dawn admits it. "But if it's as simple as you propose, why are we suddenly so weird around each other?"
Vi sighs, uncrosses her arms. "What do you propose?"
"We'll just try it again one more time, sober," Dawn says. "If it's horrible, then we'll know it was just a random drunk mistake, we're both 100 straight, and we can put it behind us. This way it won't have to be weird, because we'll know."
Vi considers for a moment. "Okay," she says, and leans forward when Dawn leans in for a kiss, lets her mouth open to make room for Dawn's tongue. "Well," she says a few moments later after Dawn's broken the kiss. "I wouldn't call that 'horrible.'"
"No," agrees Dawn. "Not 'horrible.'" She leans forward for more experimentation.
None of it is horrible.
"You'll be back for Spring Break?" Buffy asks as the Slayers help Dawn load her baggage into the SUV.
Dawn looks at Buffy and Faith, Xander and Shannon, Willow and Kennedy, and most of all Vi, and smiles. "Don't worry," she says. "I'll be home."