Chapter Text
“Rage comes upon every girl like a growing sickness, all red and swollen and sore
And we keep it quiet
We keep it inside
Because we want to be wretched and full, to have something no one else can take”
Dawn lowers the notebook and touches Cassie’s fingers where they’re spread on the bedspread, fanned out with the way her body is slumped tiredly against the pillows. She opens one eye, looking up through the long lavender streak in her hair. “So?”
“So? So you’re terrible. Devastating. I hate everything about it and any future drafts because it’s stupidly better than mine.” Dawn feels very vast sometimes, when Cassie is there in her space, like her skin is barely big enough to hold all the scary stuff inside.
Cassie throws herself back into the sheets and laughs at her, feet kicking, arms flailing, grossly adorable. Her left foot slides along the bedsheets and lifts just enough to poke Dawn on her right thigh. “You dork. Write something that’ll make me cry or I’ll walk out on you.”
Dawn stops Cassie’s foot, wraps her hand all the way around her ankle and strokes the soft skin there. I’m gonna blow up in your face and you’ll still smile at me just like you are now. “You are a neurotic masochist, I hope you know.”
Cassie sits up suddenly, eyes bright like sunlight got stuck between her skull and the rest of the world. “If wanting this is neurotic, then I’m neurotic as hell.”
Dawn bites her lip. “Can it, Sylvia Plath.” Her fingers flex where they’re settled on Cassie’s ankle, firm and knowing something much bigger and older than either of their bones and still wanting it. Wanting it desperately.
“Never.”
*
The first day of summer Janice is waiting for her on the steps of the Sunnydale Arts museum, smoking a clove cigarette and not looking at the brochure in her lap. Her headphones are tangled in her lap but still whining out tinny little death-sighs, padded with guitars. Her sunglasses are huge. Her makeup is perfect.
Janice can be a bitch sometimes, just by daring to breathe. All that dark skin drawing in light so everyone else dims in comparison. It's the short skirts. It's the audacity.
“‘sup, bitch”, she snaps her gum at Dawn and bares her teeth, tilting her head back toward her lap but still not reading the brochure. If she were, her lower lip would be tucked between her teeth. Dawn doesn’t mean to notice, and doesn’t reply either.
They’re on the outs.
“ Fine , be that way”, Janice jumps up and stretches, headphones staying plugged to her phone by will alone. “What do you want to do for my last day on earth?”
Summer for ex-valley girls and mothers who squeezed shut their mascara-ringed eyes and wished hard on stars for homecoming queen daughters means some archipelago, sun-dipped and bored to hell and back. Janice will not be staying in Sunnydale for the duration. Dawn is a staunch advocate of shooting the messenger.
(The thing they don’t discuss is the brochure screwed up and flung into the gutter, a question of moving trucks and a long drive to Massachusetts and the best arts programme in Boston.)
“I’m feeling very culture absorbent. Trail the museum for an hour then make fun of the dickwads in the coffee shop, jerking off on their notebooks like they’re gonna be the next Hemingway?” Dawn squints up at Janice, above her on the steps as a marble statue, some angry god or other, veins lined with powdered pigments and vibrant inks.
Janice regards Dawn and then the sky. “Sounds like a plan”, she blows out a smoke ring that fans Dawn’s face and dissipates against her skin. “Wanna steal the last drag?”
Dawn raises one eyebrow and crosses her arms. “Still trying to make me a deviant? For shame, Ms Penshaw.”
Janice’s laugh is the ugliest sound Dawn has ever heard; deep, dry, dirty. It makes Dawn smile all the way down to the warm pit in her belly. The clove gets snuffed out on the bottom step and the two walk into the museum with their arms linked, close enough their cheeks brush when they duck together to whisper.
The museum is a cultural travesty, but it’s a place away. Dawn has been sneaking here since her Mom died, sometimes with Janice, sometimes with nothing but her own internal suffocation for company. The lines of the canvasses start to spill away now if she stares too long, leaving her lost to nothing but colour.
“There’s something about them, isn’t there? The old gods. Always said if I was going to get a tattoo it’d be this long arrow on the back of my arm so I could say, oh, yeah, I’m a patron of Artemis. I dream the moon and I hunt through the wildflowers.” The girl beside her is looking up at the painting on the wall - some imitation Titian, Diana and Acteon. She looks - looks like what she’s describing. Old God. Seraphim. Her silver-blonde hair is streaked with lilac and sky blue and her eyes are old as anything.
“Yeah I.” Dawn smiles and looks away, nervous in some new way that sinks down into her guts. Janice is in the bathroom. This girl is beautiful. Dawn is being a silent moron. “I, uh, like the Egyptian Gods better. Animal and unknowable but still stupid for one another. Gods for people but still Gods for themselves.”
(She doesn't say there are Gods older than this and older than anything, ones that crawl around like wretches when she closes her eyes, fingernails full of blood and legs full of scars. She doesn't say I am one. )
“Neat perspective.” The girl smiles at Dawn. Squinty eyes. Nose crease. “Savage Gods would make a cool name for a poem, right?”
“You write poems?” Heart picks up, drops down, flutters around her insides like a dying creature starved of air. Every writer is a destructive force. Every girl is a knife. To be both is to be a devastation.
“I dabble.” The girl spins around and smiles again, this time to the air, to the art like an extension of her body. “It was nice to meet you.” She wanders closer to the doorway, sinking into the unknown of the next exhibit. “Dawn, was it?”
“But I didn't -”
And she's gone.
“Talking to ghosts again, babe? The abyss is most certainly last year.” Janice threads her arm through Dawn's and tugs.
“No. there was -”
“Let's go already I want our last time to be special!” Her lashes exist in undiscovered dimensions, and when they batt that way in her direction everything inside Dawn is enslaved to the molten feeling at the pit of her stomach.
She lets herself be led, lets everything go but the feeling of skin-on-skin, colours behind her eyes.
*
Buffy is home when Dawn gets there, a mountain of clothes between her and the tv, one arm lost to the pile. “Did you know that thrift stores will pay serious cash money for crap like this just because it has a boutique-y label on it?”
“That would be common knowledge, Buff.” Dawn flops down on the couch and pulls a sweater from the pile, a mess of purple fuzz and a cartoon cat sewn in with sequins. “I’m pretty sure this one is evil.”
“I think I borrowed that from Willow back in highschool so I could burn it.” She shudders and makes a squicked face. “Maybe a blind person will pick it up thinking it’s a very tiny blanket?”
Dawn throws it in the direction of the trash.
“Good thinking.” Buffy flops back onto the couch and tips her head onto Dawn’s shoulder. “The house is quiet, huh? I pretty much hate it. I keep thinking if I get stuff done everything will magically stop being silent and lonely and pathetic, y’know?”
Buffy’s head is such a solid weight on her shoulder it makes the moment feel less real somehow, hyper-real, stress-dream-like. Every moment has felt this way since - Tara, Buffy, her Mom, her self. Every moment has felt this way since every moment began. “I really really know.”
Buffy runs her hands through Dawn’s hair and kicks at the clothes mountain until it topples over.
“Are there any, uh - in there, any -”
Buffy sits up and stares at the collapsed pile, clothes spat out across the carpet, her eyes very far away. “None of Tara’s. Some of Mom’s. I didn’t really know what to do with the boxes anymore.”
“That's - you.” Dawn can be a girl or she can be a fire and in that moment every inch of her skin flares up, flames tickling at the edge of her awareness and then - sometimes she doesn't want to be a fire or a girl and sometimes she's nothing, a river drowning herself down. Buffy looks incredibly tired tonight. “Thanks for trying.”
Dawn throws her arms around her sister, presses them close enough together their blood can shiver under the surface, like against like. Buffy squeezes back and strokes her hair away.
“You know I used to spend a long time fixing up this hair and how do you repay me? You get it all windswept like some vintage movie heroine. How dare you.” Buffy’s hands are always slightly too tight on her, like a knowing thing along her body screaming you are you are you are. More than anything in the house ever will, it feels like a home.
“You wanna braid it?” She asks, pulling back and twisting so they’re not facing each other and neither is facing the clothes; Dawn to the wall, Buffy to Dawn.
“Hm”, Buffy twists Dawn’s hair around one of her fingers. “This conditioner smells familiar. Like mine. Like my special conditioner for date-type situations. Wanna tell me about that?”
She can feel her throat heat, pulse pick up and then slow again. “Just meeting friends. Have you seen Janice's hair? It's otherworldly. She might be giving me some kind of complex.”
Buffy’s fingers tease through her hair, separating it into sections. “Right”, she says. “Sure.”
*
"Hey, Isis-girl."
Dawn looks up from her refill pad and the half-scrawled letters there. Ancient alphabets are probably harder to do with a pen and paper than they were to carve into stone tablets. Probably. It takes a moment for her to come back into the room, her brain subsumed with histories; monsters on her shoulder and sand beneath her fingernails. Across from her table in the only acceptable fro-yo place in Sunnydale is the girl from the museum. Poetry girl. Knows-Dawn's-name-by-magic girl.
"I never told you which God was my favourite."
The girl's answering smile is sudden and blinding. Everything is too genuine. Everything is surface level. Everything but her face is a secret.
“I took a guess. The crease in your eyebrows tells me I'm either right or you change it every week so it never really matters.” She shrugs and picks up her hoodie from the back of her chair.
“Wait - you’re going to be cryptic then walk away from me?”
The girl throws her head back when she laughs, like it runs through her entire body. “No, I’m going to be cryptic and sit with you.” She drops her bag down and flops into the chair opposite Dawn, her hand outstretched in greeting. “I’m Cassie.”
“Nice to meet you. I’m the harbinger of doom.” Dawn takes a mouthful of her coffee and frowns at her notepad.
“That’s something I’ve heard, actually.”
She smiles into her coffee and refuses to elaborate. Impulse pushes Dawn over the table, pinching the thin skin on the back of Cassie's hand. “Surrender your information.”
Cassie laughs. “Never,” she says. “Or, later, maybe, if you're good.”
*
“So there’s this girl,” Dawn says into the phone, pen in the other hand, tapping out rhythms to get her haikus just right, five syllables, seven syllables, five syllables. Uniform is worth it sometimes.
Janice hmm s. “Replacing me already, Deenie?” Deenie, short for Deenie Baby, short for If I say I love you then I can’t leave you Deenie Baby so suck it up and fix your fucking mascara.
“Not replacing. Substituting. Uh, that’s not better is it?”
5-7-5.
Why did you leave me?
Wanted to be everything.
Call me for once, bitch.
5-7-5.
“Does she send your heart all aflutter? Did ya send her violets in the mail?” Brash laughter, like church bells. Dawn feels her skin flush bright pinkish in the bedroom gloom.
She coughs into the receiver. “I wrote her a poem.”
Janice sniffs. “A poem? How sweet, what poem would that be?”
“Did you just quote fucking Matilda at me, you nerd?” She draws a big spiral across the page, running straight through the words already there.
I hate you sometimes.
Then you say something awful.
Goodbye, goodbye good -
“Dawnie, my mom is looking at me like she found where I hid the vibe Aunt Mels bought me, I think I gotta go.”
“Oh,” she says. “Bye. I miss you.”
Please don’t say it back.
Please. Don’t. Please. Don’t. Please. Don’t. Please.
“Miss you too, baby.”
5-7-5. Uniform.
*
Dawn gets a phonecall at six am on a Saturday, in the middle of balmy summer, certain the apocalypse must be clawing through something.
“Janice,” she mumbles into the receiver, Buffy standing above her with a crease between her eyebrows, shaking her head.
“Who? No uh. Cassie.”
Dawn freezes. “Cassie? Are you alright?”
World feels very shrunken and hot around her, slicked up against her skin like more than sheets and heavier than Buffy’s concerned weight on the end of her bed and Cassie's small, frightened voice on the phone.
“You ever have dreams that aren't dreams? There was. God. There was a lot of. Blood. Dawn, I’m sorry I shouldn’t have - I didn't know. It felt like I should call you. You guys are in the phone book and I'm scared , Dawn.”
Breath rushes between her mouth and lungs and everything squeezes tighttighttight. “Cassie, slow down, it's okay, I'm here.” Buffy leans forward, touches Dawn’s wrist. “Where was the blood?”
“It wasn't. Or. I think someone's about to die.”
Dawn breathes in deep, holds out the phone and pulls on pants. She looks at Buffy for a long moment, her mouth a tight little sleepless line. “I think it's superhero time.”
*
She loses herself sometimes, a place between the words on lined paper or the skin of her thighs and the bright spot hidden deep inside her head, the dark swell behind her eyes. She sees the world, the green cascade of trees and bright points of flooding light and it's always laughter, female laughter, like the sound between her mouth and Janice's.
Except -
When they are crowded up on the library floor and Cassie is hiding her small bird wrists under the sleeves, a collage of half-thoughts and dead gods spread between them, Dawn is tracing the words inked out on her thighs and it's the light breath of laughter that spills from Cassie’s pink, glossed mouth.
“What's so funny?”
Cassie traces the gold filament paper lining her own words of divinity and says, “I dreamt this, too.”
“This?” Dawn twists her hair between her fingers and wishes it were Cassie's for a sharp moment that sinks into her ribs.
“Summer. Being happy. Something that tastes like this.” She leans forward, just enough to have their lips touch, their hair mingle.
“Oh,” Dawn says, because it's the closest thing to a word she can make up.
Cassie laughs again, and leans in.
*
Janice sounds completely, unacceptably far away, even though her breaths are amplified through the phone. “It's the sea,” she says, laughing, “makes me sound closer to God.”
“Whatever, traitor. You're meant to be hating this.” Dawn taps her pen against her notebook. She’s been practising her freeform, something for Cassie, or on honor of. By the time summer ends she will have a whole collection, detailing her devotions. And her neuroses. And her fears.
“And you're meant to be acting like a chaste heterosexual. But here we are, Deenie.” There is - always and forever - laughter tainting Janice’s voice.
“Hey! Part of that sentence remains true.” It’s been nothing, not ever, just brushes of lips and presses of bodies. Boys don’t count. Her and Janice - that’s what they have always promised - boys don’t count. None of that practise bullshit, Deenie. We’re doing this
“Oh don't tell me you and the muse of freaking poetry aren't dyking it up in all that sweaty summer free time. Have I taught you nothing?”
“You taught me to kiss and fuck with the heads of Neanderthal boys. This is slightly out of my - or your - jurisdiction.” The truth is, nothing beyond a closed mouth kiss, almost nothing at all between herself and Cassie has gone down. Perhaps it’s fear or just the newness, not like Janice and her brash simplicity and boldness.
“As if I've never been pearl diving.”
“Nope, no, I refuse to hear that sentence until you make it less horrifyingly gross.”
Janice laughs louder, like waves crashing, like the whole world falling into the sea at her voice and Dawn forgets for a second what it’s like to be the dangerous one.
*
“You were wrong,” Dawn has her spoon pointed at Cassie and three drips of mint-choc-chip down Buffy’s her favourite sweater. “Just, y'know, so you don’t get a big head about being the almighty psychic or whatever.”
Cassie snorts and kicks her under the table. The streak in her hair is green today, and Dawn’s belly feels uncomfortably buoyant and fuzzy whenever it falls in front of Cassie’s face.
“What are you talking about?” She’s picked every piece of honeycomb out of her fro-yo to eat after. Savouring the sweetness - and Dawn is pathetically stuck inside the fantasy of what it might leave her mouth tasting like.
“Before, when we met - you guessed Isis was my Goddess of choice. You were wro-ong. ”
Cassie grins up through her hair. She watches Dawn carefully as she twists the spoon around the cup. “So who?”
In the air it feels like a loaded question, or perhaps a loaded gun and Dawn knows her answer and she knows what it means to say it but what she’s really thinking is Janice. And you. But Janice. What she says instead is; “Nephthys, protective Goddess of the dead.”
Cassie says, “You sound so sad.”
“No,” Dawn replies, pushing ice cream around the bottom of her cup, full suddenly, just this side of sick. “Just being honest with myself.”
They don't say anything for the longest time, but the silence doesn't stray into the uncomfortable.
*
Janice calls, (which she doesn't do, which is always Dawn's side of the bargain, to want so much she gives in.)
Janice calls, and she's crying.
“I fucking miss you,” the girl on the phone is half devastation and half softness. “I don't know what's going to happen now.” Quieter, now, like the world of teenage girl bedroom is a silenced enclave for Dawn and the phone and her heartbeat like a drum. “I don't think I'm coming back there, Deenie. My dad just drove up with half our furniture in the back of his truck, we’re going straight on to Boston.”
Dawn's breath takes a leave of absence for so long her chest aches just slightly, a tautness inside her growing bigger by the second.
Janice makes a soft and terrible sound on the other side of the phone. “Dawn?”
Dawn laughs like a dam breaking inside her, tears making pathways down her cheeks. “What the hell do I do now, without you here?”
Janice doesn't hesitate. She's always sure, always terrible and everything Dawn hurts to be. She says, “ go get your girl ,” and hangs up the phone, leaving Dawn clinging to the sound of the dead line and her heavy breathing laid over the top.
*
Cassie is downstairs, sat in the living room and thumbing through her notebook. She doesn't see Dawn come down the stairs, introspection like an art form as she scans her own words for something to tear apart.
The room is quiet like ticking clocks and off-rhythmic heartbeats and Dawn doesn't even think.
She glides up to Cassie and kisses her hard, arms wrapped around her tiny body, taking the fire that warms it into herself.
“I didn't see this,” Cassie whispers against Dawn's mouth.
“I did,” she says, burying her hands in Cassie's hair.