"It's certainly an interesting hobby…"
Dawn closed the door and looked over to Mina, who was studying something with great focus. In the corner farthest from the window, a delicate tangle of brightly-coloured paper cascaded down from what looked to be the cannibalized remains of wire hangers. On closer inspection, each tiny construction proved to be a tiny paper animal, frogs and swans and bulls, an origami menagerie suspended on a network of thin filaments of fiber. The entire structure shuddered at the slightest movement within the room, making the animals look as though they were breathing.
Mina touched a dove gently, and it bobbed, causing all the other connected animals to take flight as well. "Some of these are incredibly elaborate – I'm always envious of people who can do things like this, I'm all thumbs."
"Oh," Dawn laughed a little, biting back a smile. "Those aren't mine. At least, I didn't make them." She crossed the room, seeing the origami again for the first time. They really were spectacular. "A friend made them for me. He was cooped up for a while, I guess he needed something to do."
Mina suddenly bent down, eyebrows raised, and pointed to a spindly black-and-green creature. "That's isn't a Knavroth spider?" Her tone of disbelief was understandable; very few people even knew of Knavroths, never mind could fold one from an origami sheet.
"Yeah, watch this." Dawn placed her hand underneath it and let the many legs rest on her palm. Then, just as the string above the creature began to slacken, a previously-unseen spike of paper descended violently from the spider's centre, jabbing into her palm.
"Good god!" Mina had jumped back a bit at the sudden motion, then laughed at herself, embarrassed to have been startled by a toy. "That's worryingly accurate! But not too accurate, thankfully, or you'd be a deep shade of purple at the moment. And on the floor. In liquid form, if I remember rightly."
Dawn grinned and carefully removed her hand, and the spider swung idly from the string again, lost in the forest that, upon closer inspection, Mina realized was far more varied than the usual flora and fauna found in origami books.
"So this friend – he's one of you?"
Dawn shrugged. "Sort of." She darted a quick, wry smile at the older girl, who was still carefully eyeing the spider. "When I first took that one out of the box, he'd made sure the spider's spike was sharp enough to give me a paper cut. Right there." She fingered her palm, now gazing past the mass of folded figures. Something sad was under her expression, Mina saw, and her unfocused gaze indicated she was deep in thought or memory.
"It must be nice to have someone to talk to about all of it," Mina ventured carefully.
"He didn't talk, really." Dawn's brow creased a bit. "He lived in LA with his dad, who…" And suddenly, she snapped out of her reverie, an almost audible break in her thought. She smiled brightly at Mina. "Doesn't matter. We didn't really know each other. He was a bit of a psycho, actually."
Door closed, then, Mina thought to herself. She allowed Dawn to avoid her gaze, and promptly became business-like again.
"Okay – do you feel all right to get started, then?" Mina said brightly.
"Sure. Is there anything that I have to do, anything that I should…?"
"Well, it's best if you're relaxed and just kind of drifting, mentally," Mina suggested. She glanced around the room; an office chair sat in front of a small desk, a low blanket chest with pillows piled on the top formed a makeshift window seat, and the bed were the only places to sit. Mina briefly wandered over to the window and peered out, but the sight of freshly-churned earth in the garden quickly convinced her that this would not be most relaxing viewpoint.
"How about we take some of the pillows from here, and you can sort of half-lie on the bed?" Mina suggested. "If you drop off to sleep, that would be just as good – I'll have to wake you up if you go into REM or start actively dreaming, though. I won't be able to see your dreams," she quickly added as Dawn looked alarmed, "It just would screw up the flow of things."
Dawn was quickly settled on the bed, propped up comfortably against the headboard. Mina drew the office chair up to the side, carefully positioning herself facing Dawn. Although she made no mention of it, Mina was very aware of the origami structure that would be right in Dawn's eyeline – it had managed to draw Dawn into a bit of a trance before, it might be able to do the trick again.
Dawn looked very slightly apprehensive. Mina patted her hand briefly.
"It'll work just like we said downstairs. You just breathe and let your mind wander, and I'll sit here and wait. All I'm doing is looking, so I won't touch you and you shouldn't feel anything odd at all. Nothing is going to be messing with you in any way."
Dawn nodded, still a little wary. "What are you looking for again? I mean, energies, I know, but how can you tell?"
Mina exhaled. "It's so difficult to explain, because I honestly don't understand myself. There's not exactly a science to this voodoo. But…" She glanced over at the window again, where afternoon sun spilled into the room in a long golden stream. "Do you see how, when you look at that sunbeam, there are tiny bits of dust glinting? Not that your room is dirty, it happens in even the cleanest room – tiny motes of matter that catch the light in just the right way. And they move with the air currents, so if I do this," she said, and took a huge breath of air before exhaling towards the light, "See how the eddies and currents change? And the tiny motes make that invisible air movement visible, right?"
All of this made sense to Dawn. "So… energy is like air? Invisible, but you can see tiny bits of stuff in it?"
Mina nodded smartly. "Yes. Except, just like sunbeams, you can only see it if you're looking at exactly the right spot, at the right time, from the right angle. It's really a pain in the ass." She made a face, so honestly disgruntled that Dawn laughed out loud.
"But YOU can see it, right?"
"Sometimes," Mina sighed. "I'm better at it now than I used to be, but you know how people say only twenty percent of the human mind is actually used consciously? Well, whatever this ability is, it's tucked well away in a section that I can't access easily. Most people can't access it at all, even unconsciously," she ceded, "But that doesn't make it any more comforting when I've been trying to see something for ages and it just won't kick into gear."
Dawn had relaxed considerably, her frame easy as she reclined on her bed, torso and head on a mass of cushions. Mina's explanations had been hesitantly accepted by the rest of the group downstairs, and though Dawn had been willing from the start, it was much easier that Mina was so ready to answer questions. The quiet of the room was beginning to sink in, the lazy way the dust floated in the sunlight, the gentle movements of the origami mobile in the corner – a crystallizing moment, as though they were all stuck in amber, able to sleep forever.
A chuckle bubbled out of Dawn; her eyelids were drooping a little now, the languor of the moment taking over completely, so she was almost half-conscious already. "I still can't quite believe my sister let us do this without her hovering."
Mina's voice was low and warm in response. "It's the blonde vampire I was more worried about, actually. The energy coming off of him alone – trying to block those two is hard enough to do when they're in a different part of the house, they'd put me in a coma if they were in here the entire time. But I left them the Jolly Red Giant as collateral. Which I'm sure they'll find interesting."
"Is he your boyfriend?"
The textures of Mina's voice changed ever so slightly, an echoing resonance that struck true in Dawn's bones. "He's my everything, forever, and from before forever existed."
And Dawn had only a moment to puzzle about that odd declaration before she felt herself slip into a light and absent-minded sleep.
..."How's the head?" Xander asked, joining Aled outside where the taller man stood amongst the freshly-made graves.
"Ah, I'm six foot seven, I'm used to occasional brain damage by now. Or perhaps it just isn't that noticeable in the first place," the man responded affably, accepting the drink Xander offered. Both men stood silently for a while, looking out at the garden full of turned-over earth.
"I'll assume this hasn't much to do with planting," Aled dryly broke the silence.
"In a way, yes. But mostly, no."
"Mmm." The manly silence ensued, and Xander realized how rare this situation was for him. Not since… well, Riley, actually, had there been another guy in this house who hadn't wanted to kill him, or hated him, or whom he hated, or – well, there was Giles, he supposed. But Giles hadn't been able to do this silent guy-thing, either. And frankly, he wasn't exactly sure that Giles liked him too much.
Ah, well. Can't have everything.
The light bounced off of Dawn's window and caught his eye, and he turned to Aled, only to see that the redhead was also looking up at that window, a twist of a smile on his face. "Mina's getting frustrated," he commented, in a half-indulgent, half-sympathetic tone.
"You can feel that?"
Aled shook his head. "No – but they've been up there for an hour. I've been with her for long enough to know where her thresholds are: one hour, she'll start getting tetchy; two hours, she'll have to take a break and argue with herself inside her head for a good ten minutes; three hours, that's usually when everyone gets hungry and she can take a break for a while. Then the entire cycle starts again." He sighed. "She's very hard on herself."
Xander frowned. "What about Dawn?"
"She's either asleep, or thinking, or bored," Aled shrugged. "Imagine if someone were telekinetic, and they were trying to lift a weight with only the power of their mind. It's the telekinetic who's going to go mental trying to do it, not the weight. The weight has no idea it's happening at all."
Xander was mollified, a bit. Mina, and to a lesser degree Aled, had tried to explain fully what was happening in the room upstairs, but they had a habit of speaking in a lot of metaphors. Apparently a lot of this was intuitive, and could not be interrupted by other… "energy signatures" nearby, but Xander had become used to dimensions, to numbers and diagrams and things he could calculate, touch, feel. After Mina's explanation, he had almost expected Mina to pull a dreamcatcher and crystals out of her satchel – this was all a bit too new-age for him.
Suddenly, Aled's head jerked up, startling Xander.
"Mina needs to see Buffy. Where is she?" Aled's tone was so casual, it was hard to reconcile with his words.
"Is something wrong?"
"No, Mina just needs her, and it would be better off if Mina needn't leave the room to fetch her." Aled began to lope towards the house, his progress abruptly halted when Xander grabbed his arm.
Xander was stockier than Aled, and for a moment it struck them both that they might be evenly matched, if they were ever set against each other. It was a brief thought, but one borne out of the intensity radiating off of Xander as it dawned on him that there was more to the Aled-Mina relationship than they'd been told.
But Aled spoke quickly and quietly, answering the unspoken question as he had a hundred times before. "Yes, there's more to the story. There's more to every story. And we will tell you, as we have told many others, including your Council, who know we're no threat at all to you. But right now, I need to get your Slayer to my wife." And he turned Xander's grasp so that now he held Xander's shoulder, not forcefully, but in an earnest gesture.
Xander stared at him for a moment, then rolled his eyes before striding towards the house. "One day," he muttered, "I will not be the last one to know things."
..."Mi."
Aled's voice was soft and low, exactly the right pitch to catch Mina's attention, but not enough to wake Dawn. He waited as she pulled herself together, like someone trying to wake from a very heavy slumber. Her cheeks were flushed, her hair had been hurriedly pinned back with the hundreds of bobby pins she kept tucked in a pocket, so it now twisted in tens of little tendrils all channeled down her back. She'd taken off her cardigan in the chilly room, and the freckles that dusted her shoulders and arms were vivid against her skin. Her eyes, when she finally looked up at him in the doorway, were dilated fully, deep and black.
His heart exploded in his ribcage, or at least it felt as if it had. A languid smile touched her lips gently, and he saw her chest lift as she breathed it in, the wash of emotion that came off of him, the strength of it making her skin tingle. She felt the beauty he saw in her, and he saw her blossom even more under it.
Buffy, of course, saw none of this. Ushered into the room just prior to Aled, she merely saw an exhausted-looking, plain woman with messy hair before her eyes darted to Dawn, comfortably reclined in bed. She'd been warned to stay silent, to not wake Dawn at any cost, and so she moved silently to the place by the bed Alec indicated.
Mina's movements were far from the brisk efficiency she'd shown earlier on. The woman's back was bent, her elbows on her knees and her forearms hanging loosely between them. Everything about her was slack as she gazed at Dawn, then Buffy, then back to Dawn again. Minutes passed as she repeated this circuit, again and again, and Buffy only barely held in the questions she felt ricocheting around inside of her. Then suddenly, Aled was moving, silently, his long legs taking him out of the room in two massive strides, though he stepped so lightly that Dawn didn't even stir.
It was maddening, this waiting. Dusk would be falling soon, Buffy noted, her glance flicking over to the window. She didn't have time for all of this. She needed results, and quickly, and nighttime was too precious to spend it cooped up in rooms with witch-doctoresses and their lanky sidekicks. She could keep Dawn safe, she knew. Why did Giles have to send these two, anyhow? Weren't there others? Couldn't he have come himself? At least then she would have known that Dawn was safe when she left in the evening, as she would certainly have to do tonight. Kane was still out there, still creeping around, and she didn't want to plant any more girls in the ground tomorrow.
Despite everything she'd been told, she was preparing to break the silence to question Mina when Aled returned as abruptly as he'd vanished. And this time, he had a shadow.
Spike's arrival was apparently sanctioned, as he walked over to the window without Mina moving a muscle. Spike's eyes found Dawn quickly, then briefly skipped over Mina and Buffy before returning to Aled. The tall redhead had moved closer to Mina, intense concentration evident on his face, before he looked back up to lock eyes with the vampire. He jerked his chin upwards briefly, and Spike began to roll up his sleeve. In her chair, Mina's skin glinted as the setting sun broke off a sudden sheen of sweat that covered her face, her arms, her chest.
Buffy would remember what happened next as if in a dream, it went so quickly and seemed so utterly unconnected to her, though everyone else played their part:
Spike thrust his right hand into the last of the sunlight as it spilled in through the glass, and the skin began to blister and burn immediately; Aled's voice cracked through the silence with shattering power as he called "Dawn, wake up!"; Spike jerked his ruined hand away from the light and cradled it in his other arm, just as Dawn's eyes opened and she saw the injured vampire at the foot of her bed; Dawn shouted Spike's name, her hands reaching out to him before she suddenly slumped over like a giant rag doll; Spike leapt to catch her, his arms coming up to cradle her, both hands intact and healthy and whole; and Mina let out a shout before flinging herself back against the chair, her hands pressed against her eye sockets and sucking in great gusts of air.
