Here it is, the next chapter!
AUTHOR'S NOTES: This was originally meant to be a stand-alone story, but due to overwhelming demand (Whoo! Two requests!) I shall continue on with the saga of Dawn's first crush and her bonding with Willow. No, this isn't fem slash. It's friendly bonding.
Also, you can visit my *new* Buffy site. Here's the address (hopefully the html will go thru right and I'll have a nice, neat, link. If not, oh well. Sorry.
a href= Buffy Site/a
If you read the fanfic I have here (Staking My Sister, Monkey Brains, Breakfast At Dawn, Date, and Babysitting and the ASOS) you can see a pic that I made myself for each story. Some are better than others, and they may all stink, I don't know, but take a look anyway if you so desire. I'm proud of them. :-)
I've also been nominated for the Shades of Grey Awards and the Barefoot Awards by gidgetgirl. Thank you for the nominations, here's hoping for the best! (In case you haven't noticed by reading my site and my user profile, I'm really obsessed with this award stuff.)
CHAPTER TWOCHESS
(A/N: Before I start, let me just say that I know nothing about chess, except that there are these little things shaped like royalty that you move around on a checkerboard. And that when you win, you yell "Checkmate!" Okay, I'm done now.)
Dawn stared hesitantly at the chessboard. "What do I do?" she asked tentatively.
Willow leaned forward and examined the board, her brow furrowed. Then her face lit up.
"Dawnie, you won!" she exclaimed, sliding Dawn's king to the proper game-winning place.
"I did?" Dawn asked, hardly believing it.
The redhead nodded enthusiastically, her hair bouncing up and down. "That's great, Dawn! On your fifth game and everything! You pick up on this stuff fast."
Dawn beamed at the compliment. Everyone always talked about Buffy. So pretty, they said. So much potential. It's just awful about her…problems. No one ever directly mentioned Buffy's "problems" with violence. Not even Dawn. She didn't understand it, either. Buffy was okay, for the most part. No, Dawn told herself, in all honesty, Buffy's a great person. Dawn couldn't figure out how such a good person had such an awful record. So far the only possible explanation was some kind of identity theft. Or maybe Buffy had an evil twin. When Dawn was little, Mom would always tell her stories about how each person had a twin somewhere in the world. Buffy's version of the story made each person have an evil twin.
Dawn had one day wondered aloud if she was the evil half of the set, and if maybe her good twin lived in Taiwan or something. Buffy had snorted and said, "If you're the bad half, Dawnie, your good half must be nauseatingly good."
Even after she had looked up the word nauseating, Dawn couldn't figure out if Buffy had insulted her or paid her a compliment.
Willow shook her out of her thoughts. "What do you say? Another game?" She began resetting the board.
"Actually," Dawn said, "I'm kind of getting sick of chess."
Willow gave a sigh of relief. "Oh, you too?" she asked. She smiled at Dawn. "I was hoping you'd say that."
Dawn giggled. Willow was so cool.
"So what do you want to do then?" Willow asked. She gestured around the Summers' living room. "Do you have any other board games?"
"Only Scrabble," Dawn said. "I hate Scrabble." The reason Dawn hated Scrabble was because of the fact that she always played against Mom and Buffy, whose vocabularies were much wider than Dawn's. Plus the fact that Buffy and Mom got away with non-words like "um" and "slayage". Where Buffy had come up with the word "slayage" was anyone's guess.
"How come?" Willow asked. "Scrabble is a perfectly nice game. Nothing evil."
"Evil?" Dawn asked.
"Uhh, you know, like Jumanji," the redhead stammered. "Have you ever read Jumanji, Dawnie?"
"It's a book?" Dawn asked. "I thought it was a movie."
"It is," Willow said, "but it's based on the book. Loosely based, I might add."
"Oh."
Willow turned to face Dawn. "Remind me to pick it up at the library some time this week. I think you'd like it. There're cool pictures."
"Cool," Dawn said. Then she asked, "Would you like to see my room?"
"Sure," Willow nodded. She really enjoyed hanging out with Dawn. She was like a little sister, but she was mature for her age, too. It was a nice break from fighting the forces of darkness.
The two girls made their way upstairs to Dawn's room, which had pale yellow walls and a bed with a pastel quilt on top. A framed picture of Dawn and Buffy at much younger ages hung on the wall above a framed "Perfect Attendance" certificate and a blue ribbon for a school writing contest. A bulletin board on the wall by the door held a more recent snapshot of Dawn and Buffy at the beach sitting by a sandcastle. Another picture of Dawn and her mother was tacked to the bulletin board. They were hugging.
On the other side of the board was a certificate for Dawn making the honor roll. Below that was a strip of pictures, probably taken at the photo booth at the mall. Buffy and Dawn were smiling in the first picture, making funny faces in the second, laughing hysterically in the third, and partially hidden by shopping bags in the fourth. Willow had never seen Buffy and Dawn get along that well before.
Dawn looked at Willow. "I don't like my room very much," she admitted. "It's babyish.
"No it isn't," Willow disagreed, meaning every word. "It's very pretty and very feminine, that's all."
Dawn nodded, looking as if she'd gotten a whole new perspective of her room.
Willow checked the clock on the wall. "Dawnie," she said regretfully, "I have to go home."
Dawn looked disappointed. "Will you come over tomorrow?"
"I'll try," Willow smiled. "We didn't get to talk that much about you-know-who," she said, grinning to indicate that 'you-know-who' was Xander. "We will next time, though, if you want."
Dawn nodded. "Okay," she said. "See you later!"
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**Next time: Willow and Dawn hang out some more. Dawn invites Willow to her birthday party.**
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