Title: The Dark Side of the Moon
Author: BehrBeMine
Disclaimer: I don't own these things. Sad. I feel poor.
Feedback: It's like clapping to keep Tinkerbell alive. You have to comment or authors won't be able to fly, I tell you.
Summary: Buffy's had boyfriends before. But never one quite like this.
Spoilers: Takes place during 'Buffy' season one episode, 'Angel'.
Distribution: Take, but please tell me where it's going.
Beta: Semby the amazing. This story would not be so coherent without the gentle prodding and attention to detail this story was given by Semby.
Notes: Written for the angellovesdawn "First Time" Ficathon.
The Required 'First': First time Dawn meets Angel.
Dedication: To Robyn, even if she doesn't read it, for being there for me at the right times.
- -
During the daytime, arguments are all that ensue in the Summers household. At least, when Joyce's two "firecrackers" occupy one room at the same time, which is unfortunately inevitable, as the house is not large enough to separate them entirely.
Dawn likes to pour a bowl's worth of milk down the drain straight from the carton before wetting her cereal with more every morning. She enjoys the puzzlement on Buffy's face when sometimes all that's left in the carton is tiny squiggles and drops of liquid. She never meets Buffy's eyes that try to burn a hole in her skull, merely eating her share of the Honeycomb Buffy asked for when their mom went shopping the week before.
"God, you're a pig," Buffy mutters under her breath, but Dawn catches it like a ball thrown right to her open palm.
"I'm not the one who snorts when she laughs," she says, picking up her bowl to slurp down the flavor-tinted milk that remains.
"That was once," Buffy corrects.
"It still counts."
"Like you even know how to count." With that, Buffy turns on her heel to complain to their mom about the absence of breakfast.
Dawn counts as high as she can in her head before the yellow elementary bus pulls up in front of the house. "Four hundred and eight!" she declares with a scream, pulling the heavy front door shut behind her with an indignant slam.
--
The trees loom overhead as she trudges home from Janice's house. She watches how the glittering sun shines through the spaces between the leaves. Lush green, penetrated with gold. She can see the sky. Fluffy white clouds marring what otherwise would be a perfect canvas of blue. Dawn paints now. Her new hobby. She is striving day by day to find the proper technique and the artistic vision to create a portrait of heaven. The place she wants to inhabit some day. When things are perfect, and parents no longer fight or separate, leaving their daughters to pick up the nasties their arguments left behind.
"Does it look like heaven?" Dawn very specifically asks her mother as she showcases her latest painting of the sky. "You work in an art gallery and all... You would know better than anyone, especially 'cause nobody's been there and can remember it."
"Sure they can. I've been to heaven," Buffy says, her tone a confusing one to read until she adds, "It's called 'when Dawn goes to bed at night'."
Dawn huffs noisily, conjuring a frustrated scraping sound from her throat. "I think we should have the same bedtime now. Or maybe Buffy should be the one to go to bed early. She's the one who gets so grouchy when she's tired."
"I do not, you dufus."
"See?"
Joyce sighs. "Girls, I'm tired. Can we not do this now?"
Dawn sticks her tongue out in response to Buffy's glare her way, wanting to win this, but she never wins anything as long as Buffy's involved. Buffy, the perfect ballerina who twirls in a white satin box. Buffy, the one who has so many secrets; so many Dawn has yet to learn, despite her excellent investigative tactics.
--
She sits at the top of the stairs, hidden behind the bars of the banister that she clings to and pokes a nose through to see what's going on below. She takes notes in her head of all the words in the conversation as Buffy introduces a guy to her mother.
Buffy's had boyfriends before. Dawn even saw one of them as he kissed Buffy near their front lawn in L.A. after school. "Eww!" she'd squealed, loudly enough to tear the two apart, before she continued into the house, her head down, her innocence disgustingly tainted.
Joyce leaves Buffy and her friend to say goodbye. When she walks past the top step, she reaches down to scoop Dawn's weight up from below her arms, groaning at the ever-increasing heft of her youngest daughter's weight as she is sincerely passing the embarrassingly infant stage everyone wants to keep her in. "It's not nice to spy," is her advice, as she cuddles Dawn's elementary school body to her chest, and walks toward Dawn's newly painted bedroom. It's been the one time she's ever been allowed to write on the walls, her mother having promised that she could decorate her new haven however was going to suit her best. She warned that Dawn might not like the prancing bunnies when she gets to junior high, but Dawn doesn't think that's possible.
Her mother rubs her back as she slumps against the mattress on her front half, her face turned so that her right cheek smashes into the pillowy softness. She thinks about the boy that was downstairs, and the way his hair was so smoothly gelled, a vast improvement from the boys in her classrooms, with their buzz cuts that make them look like tiny soldiers, especially as they play "army" at recess, and tackle one another to the ground "for fun".
"Sleep tight," Joyce says, inching the covers up over Dawn's body that still remains in the same position. She turns off the light by the door, which darkens the Pepto Bismal pink of the painted walls to a greyish magenta.
"Mom?" Dawn calls, as the door inches close to shut.
"Yes?" Her mother peeks back through the slit in the doorway.
"My nightlight?"
"Oh. Of course." Joyce steps back into the room, and turns on the babyish carousel that lights up in a soft tint of blue, playing in its music box tune that resembles the kind from toys in a cradle. And Dawn sighs, for she feels like such a baby. "Night-night," Joyce whispers, this time closing the door entirely, which gives Dawn a shiver, as always, making her feel so much less than brave. Buffy is the brave one, and Dawn is... yet to be defined.
As the music plays on and she ignores the strange shadows cast on her wall from the blue light, Dawn shifts to all kinds of awkward positions on the mattress that's much harder than Buffy's because "children's spines need to be strengthened", or so says her mother, the expert. She pulls a leg up toward her chest, bending it, as the other is stuck straight down under the covers. She kicks the covers off restlessly, dropping back onto the bed with a thud, right on her back. She groans and turns onto her side, curling into the fetal position, staring at the nightlight as if waiting for it to move or entertain.
After successfully hating the feel of every new position that usually only spiders can get into, Dawn gives up on sleeping in her own room.
She tiptoes along the darkened hallway after her door opens with a telltale creak, making her shut her eyes tight and hope against hope that nobody heard that. Buffy's bedroom door is closed, as usual, the butterfly decorating the outside of it staring back at Dawn with its unseeing crushed velvet eyes.
Planning on stealing Mr. Gordo, who aids her in sleeping sometimes, Dawn is grateful that Buffy's door doesn't squeak as it's opened, rewarding her careful stealth. But as she enters the room, Buffy's soft breathing coming from the lump on the bed, she stops dead in her tracks. There's something else in the room.
Not something. Someone. She bites back a scream as she sees the stillness of no visible breaths rising from a body's chest as it lies on the floor. Through the darkness of the room, she can see its eyes as they open and the body awakens, sniffing rather loudly as if catching her scent. The eyes, tinted yellow, widen, yet the body itself stays deathly still.
She creeps closer to Buffy's bed as fast as humanly possible, pouncing on Buffy's sleeping form and startling her body, making her jolt away. "Dawn!" Buffy snaps in a frenzied whisper, her voice almost a hiss.
"There's somebody in here," Dawn whispers back, her voice just as frantic. The body rises from the floor to a stand-still on its feet, and Dawn can see in the moonlight from the window the form of a man, masculine and broad in the chest. She eyes it warily, frighteningly, continuing to talk as if all ears but Buffy's are deaf. "I--I think it's that guy with the cool hair."
"What?" Buffy snaps. "Were you spying?" She pushes Dawn's body off of her, and runs a hand through her hair as she sits up in bed, turning to the body at the side. "Angel, just... go back to sleep. I'll handle this."
"Angel?" Dawn says, tasting the word in her mouth. "What a girly name."
"Hey," the male body croaks, taking obvious offense.
"Don't come near me!" And now it's Dawn's voice that sounds like a hiss. "Buffy, I'm gonna tell Mom on you!"
"Dawn. Stop. He -- well, he needs a place to stay tonight, and you can't tell Mom, okay? Let it be our secret."
Dawn begins to steady the rate of air moving in and out of her lungs. "You'd share a secret with me? You never do that..."
"That's because you can't keep them."
"I can, too! I just never want to, 'cause it's more fun when you get in trouble."
"Hello, rude much?" Buffy scoffs.
"You're mean to me. It's my way of getting back. Why is there an Angel in your room? I bet he's not as nice as a real angel."
The man's body sighs. "Maybe I should leave," he says, talking only to Buffy, as if Dawn's presence doesn't merit attention. She's so tired of not being good enough to be accepted as more than a kid. She can so be an adult whenever she wants to.
Dawn focuses on the glistening orbs of Buffy's eyes that follow the sound of Angel's voice to his body that now stands uncomfortably beside the bed. It takes her forever to drag her sight back to her sister, while Dawn makes herself wait patiently. Like an adult, right? That's what they do, she figures. Drag moments out as if to go too fast is a hindrance to living, except in places where it's allowed, like loud car races.
"Dawn, you have to keep this a secret. Mom would throw Angel out, and it... can't happen right now."
"Why not?"
Buffy's shoulders sag, her voice nagging as she brings a hand to her forehead and says, "Never mind that. Just believe me, okay?"
"Why don't you ever want to tell me anything? Like, the truth?"
"You're too young to know the truth."
And suddenly Dawn's adopted adult tactics are thrown to the darkness of the room. "I'm going to tell Mom now."
"No! Wait -- "
"Dawn... right?" She pauses after leaping off the bed, and slowly turns to face the deep voice that has said her name for the first time. It rolls smoothly off his tongue, as if he's been waiting to say it. Or maybe she's just been waiting to hear it from someone so... good at styling his hair. Among other things.
"What...?" she asks of him, her voice shaky in its pause.
His clothes are so dark they seem to blend in with the wall behind him, even as his skin, in desperate need of a tan, shines like polished teeth. It reminds her of the bared fangs of a wildcat as it circles its prey, though for some reason, she isn't feeling the fear of an animal about to be demolished. Something about him keeps her tattletale betraying screams at bay.
"I think you can keep a secret," he tells her, flicking his eyes at Buffy and then back to Dawn again.
She feels her stature raise an inch as she straightens her posture. "I -- I can. I so can do that. Buffy doesn't know anything about me."
Angel holds a steadying hand out toward Buffy when she clicks her tongue in annoyance, silencing her biting response with his mysterious aura. Dawn feels her lips spread into a smile, pleased as punch that someone's made Buffy shut up. She thought the only way of doing that was to remove her sister's mouth.
"Prove it to her," the Angel says, and though she can hardly see anything, Dawn can feel his stare that makes her cheeks burn a little, like a fever. She soaks up the stillness of his body, not even able to see that fabulous hair.
"You're the guy who was downstairs, huh?" she asks, changing the subject and yet hoping he understands her submission to what he says. "I... like your hair."
With that, she plucks Mr. Gordo from the floor where it had fallen from Buffy's bed, no doubt as she performed those furious kicks in her sleep, as if she takes a wrestling class in her dreams. Either Buffy doesn't see Dawn stealing her favorite plush toy for the thousandth time, or she's still held in the silence from Angel's hand that didn't even touch her physically as it took her vocabulary away.
As Dawn tiptoes back to her room, the smile warms her lips again, and she's able to sleep in a normal position, on the floor beside her cherry wood day bed.
--
"I think I'm sick," Dawn croaks, making her voice like a smoker's, and making a performance of letting her head fall to the side on her pillow.
"Maybe it's because you were sleeping on the floor?" Joyce offers, feeling her daughter's forehead. "Heat rises, honey. That means the air nearest the floor is the coldest. You should really stay on your bed all night."
"I told you, I fell off..." Dawn is careful to keep the tone of her voice with that same unhealthy vibe.
"You don't seem to have a fever. And I can't stay home from the gallery today, there is stock that has to be numbered."
"I'll be okay. I'm just gonna lay here forever." She'd like to thank the academy like celebrities do on TV, as her mother gives in, and allows her to stay home from school for the day, with the promise made that she will call her mother if she needs anything.
--
When Buffy leaves for school - late, yet again - and the yellow elementary school bus pulls away from the house because she's staying home today, Dawn fluffs her silky strands over her shoulders and brushes her teeth, careful not to hum a Spice Girls tune as she does so.
Satisfied with her look in the mirror, she makes her way to Buffy's room, creeping by the walls as if it's midnight again, and she could get caught if she makes a noise too loud which would awaken the hallway, and make the walls soak up secrets they'll spill in an instant. She feels like a detective as she stays close to the wall, and then sneaks into Buffy's room with nary a sound, closing the door behind her and immediately whipping around to face the bedroom that she knows is not empty today. Something in her bets Buffy left a little something behind when she walked off lazily to school.
Confronted with a room empty of bodies other than her own, Dawn furrows her brow and says carefully, "Angel?..."
When a few seconds have passed, the closet door opens, and cautiously Buffy's Angel slides out. Dawn's eyes widen with appreciation at the handsomeness of his face, and the big, manly arms he joins across his chest as he inches along the bits of shadow on the left side of the room.
"It's Dawn," she tells him. "Buffy's sister. From last night. Remember?"
"I wouldn't have come out if I didn't know it was you." His words are so confident, filled with the kind of dignity that Dawn wants to possess in her own voice, the one that squeaks when startled.
"Oh." She looks around, notices the way half the shades are tightly shut so that fat slants of light can't fall in through the window in certain parts of the room. She clings to this fact, the detective, working on her case. "How come you won't come into the sun?"
Angel tilts his head up a bit. "I don't like it."
She doesn't tell him that she wants to see him more clearly, and study him as if he were a painting with a quality far better than hers. "Why not?"
"I burn easily."
Child-like, she latches on to a memory attached to her absent parent. "Me too. I burn easy in the sun, or at least I did this one time, when Daddy came on vacation with us, and I fell asleep next to the pool." She clicks her tongue at the memory of how Buffy abandoned her by the poolside for a visit to the snack machine that turned into a hogging of the hotel room the two of them shared.
When silence meets her response, she shifts her weight from one foot to another, trying to avoid looking at Angel's face to search his eyes when she can barely stand to look into them without having to shyly look away. She wonders if Buffy can hold his solid stare, and realizes that's a stupid question, because of course Buffy can. Buffy can do anything. Dawn resents it daily.
"Are you and Buffy like... going out?" she asks uncertainly, meaning to keep her voice from swaying to betray a hope for one answer or another.
He doesn't answer, merely stares at her from the shadows, drinking in her body as she stands partly pigeon-toed without thinking, letting her teeth slide over her bottom lip and back into her mouth again. She doesn't want to appear vulnerable to his opinion of her, but somehow she can't help but let it leak out from her eyes that flit from one of his body parts to another -- sculpted arms, strong thighs, big hands, long fingers.
She thinks of her sister, and how lucky she is to have a guy like this sleep in her room, when all Dawn can attract is stupid Todd Stoffer, short and pudgy, who wouldn't even hold her hand when they went out for two school days last year. She didn't really know him, but when he asked through his friend who sat by Dawn in class, she'd said okay, as if that was a hand she really wanted to hold.
Swallowing over a bitter lump in her throat, Dawn raises her eyes from the floor, and forces them to mingle with Angel's that shine with that yellow tint. "You better be good to my sister," she tells him, narrowing her eyes at the way he remains ensnared in the shadows of the room. She advances forward, not quite toward him, but to the patch of sun on the right side of the room. Reaching toward the window with the shade drawn, the plastic pieces slanted, she sends the figure skating wind chime to tinkling. She likes playing the good cop/bad cop at the same time, her intent hidden behind her cat-like eyes.
"I started a rumor at school about the last guy who was mean to her, in L.A. Buffy said it reached the high school and he kept ducking behind lockers whenever she'd go near him after that." Dawn stops to think. "I don't know if she made it up or not, 'cause Buffy lies. My mom says everyone does."
She focuses her stare on Angel once again, this time trying to penetrate through the skin of his chest and see the name written on his heart. She makes her voice deep, dangerous. "But I'm not lying right now. Got it?"
Angel is careful with his words, as if he can only spare a certain amount in a day. "You shouldn't play with fire when you don't understand the flame."
"I can work a lighter, for a few seconds, anyway. Amy's dad has one, and he let me try."
"That's not the kind of fire I mean."
"What other kind is there?" Dawn asks, trying to mask her naïveté. She pulls at her nightgown sleeve, expanding the white material past her fingertips till she can see minute holes in the fabric. She lets it go, and the cotton snaps back into place above her wrist.
"You'll learn someday."
She doesn't tell him how she thinks she loves him already more than Buffy can love anything. But she thinks of forest fires as she nods and exits the room, disappointed at her inability to bear the scrutiny of his fixed gaze any longer.
--
Dawn lays in bed, like she said she would, despite the fact that her throat isn't sore and her head doesn't ache the way she said they did. She thinks of afternoons with Buffy, before her sister puts on more make-up and heads out to that Bronze club where she probably dances with every boy there.
"God, you are so embarrassing," Buffy said the other day, after Dawn tripped over her own feet in front of Xander and Willow, who had kindly ignored the stumble and left without a word about it.
"Um, okay then," Dawn had answered, her voice purposefully uptight.
Buffy found some resolve as she set her fork down on her plate and looked to the right of her at Dawn as they sat together at the dinner table, the night that Mom had to stay late at the gallery and Buffy had made the gourmet grilled cheese sandwiches with the crust still on and the burnt outsides that tasted like ashes. "I'm going to tape your singing in the shower and share it at bad moments."
Dawn shifted in her seat, considering it. "I'm not gonna sing in the shower anymore."
Buffy shrugged. "Then I'll find some other form of blackmail slash torture to share with my sister."
Dawn shoved away from the table, and jumped out of her wooden-backed chair. "Stop stalking me, you weirdo!"
She thinks about it now, turning the words over as if with a spatula in her brain. Now she has something on Buffy, and suddenly things aren't always following the same irritating identical line. As soon as she learns what this aforementioned blackmail term is, she's pretty sure she's going to use it with this information against Buffy any time she can't get her way. Maybe it will show Buffy what it's like, she thinks, to have a life less than perfect all the time.
--
When Buffy gets home in the afternoon, Dawn is waiting for her, perched on the bottom step of the stairway. Buffy sighs upon seeing her there, but allows Dawn to follow her into the kitchen for a snack.
"I'm beginning to think you have a need to follow me like someone else I know. It's creepy to think someone's watching you all day," Buffy says, irritated, as she takes a slice of cold pizza from the fridge.
"This Angel guy..." Dawn starts, clinging to the clue and determined to finish, "he like follows you around and stuff? And you don't know when he's there?" Her nose crinkles in disgruntled curiosity. "What if you have to pick a wedgie or something?
"...My friend Janice has an older sister, who is so way cooler than you. She got this nose ring, when she pierced her nose? A--and she was so embarrassed when a guy caught her moving it around, 'cause it looked like she was picking her nose."
Dawn stops to giggle. "Janice said she would have been mortified. I love it how my friend uses big words. She's like one of those dictionaries that you say weigh more than you."
"Are you done now?" Buffy asks, with a roll of her eyes.
Dawn sticks her chin up, snotty-like. "I bet you didn't know what mortified meant until like five seconds ago."
The doorbell rings. "Oh, that's Xander," says Buffy, gratefully standing taller and smoothing down her silk shirt that is so clingy, it makes Dawn's jealousy stir just to see it move here and there. "I bet you're going to leave soon. Or, sooner than soon, like: now."
"But I want to see Xander!"
"Well, he doesn't want to see you."
"You don't know that." Dawn's chin wibbles a bit at the thought of her first real crush not wanting to be around her. She disappears from the living room before the telltale tears of believing everything Buffy says can spill down her make-up-less cheeks.
--
"I--I'm gonna steal Angel," Dawn says to best Buffy's insult a few days later as she follows her through the hallway, finally making Buffy stop to confront her as she turns around.
Buffy's resolve face retreats, and she looks down, vulnerability snagging in the closed eyelids and the sad locks of hair framing her face.
Dawn's eyebrows raise at the insinuation of something gone wrong. "Buffy...?" she tries, her voice more gentle now.
"Dawn, just, just stop. I gotta go."
Dawn tries to remain indignant, but when Buffy walks away, so does her need to bite. She slumps her shoulders, and feels horrible, though she keeps it mostly on the inside.
--
She goes into the backyard. She crouches into the corners of the garden, trying to make herself as small, as invisible as possible. Maybe, she thinks, if I can scrunch up tightly enough, I can disappear.
She waits for someone to tell her that Dad has a good reason for skipping on the weekend, again. Especially when he was there to take Buffy out a few weeks ago. Some ice show that bores Dawn, like hockey.
All she's been told is that there are monsters in the darkness. Buffy swears by it, and all their mom does is roll her eyes. "Stay out of the darkness, Dawn. Always stay inside at nighttime," Buffy warned her about a week after Sunnydale became a permanent fixture in both their lives.
Because of that, she makes herself small in the shadows, and waits for a monster to swallow her whole.
And she thinks of Angel, wondering if he'd be the one to snag her or save her, if the worst happened, and Buffy wasn't there.
- -
end