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She’s saved the world sixty five point four three times (okay so there was that one time with Adam where the Scooby Gang might have contributed around point five seven – and she’s kind of being generous really— in the world saving business, but it isn’t like she was totally out of the scene there).
Not that she’s keeping count or anything.
-x-
She thinks someone should write a book.
Not the Watcher’s Diaries. Not records that will only ever be read by some British guy in a stuffy suit with a stiff upper-lip. Not records which will tell everyone who bothers to know that she died twice, and that she once fell ‘in love’ with a vampire (‘in love’ within quotes because it’s a record and she doesn’t know if they have that phrase in the Basic Guide to Slayerisms or if it’s blasphemy for a Slayer to mention the word because it’s not a synonym for ‘duty’ or ‘destiny’ or whatever the cool kids call it nowadays).
Not records with the dates and the Joyce Summers died on— Dawn Summers was inserted into the fabric of reality on—Buffy Summers came back to life on— not that stuff. Not about the life and times of Slayer Number 104-whatever-the-hell-42343699432. But like a real, proper book. The interesting kinds in the aisles that Dawn drags her through, with the dark mysterious covers and blood dripping out of half-eaten apples, which are cliché and symbolic and romantic all at once.
And it’ll be titled Buffy. Not something like Buffy the Slayer of Forces of Darkness or Buffy the Vampire Slayer or something. Because that’s too mundane. That’s every single day of her life in one title and she doesn’t want to be the kind of girl whose entire life can be compressed into four words.
So maybe, like, Buffy the Girl. Buffy at Age Sixteen and Her First True Love. Buffy and the Amazing Adventures of the Self-Titled Scooby Gang. Buffy the Skank and Her Bleached Blond British Lover. Buffy the Daughter and the Five Stages of Grief. The Endless Shenanigans of the Summers Sisters. Something about those moments that slip through the cracks in the everyday of being heroic and averting apocalypses and things.
Because she thinks those are the ones that might be forgotten someday. She remembers saving the world a lot, but she thinks those are the ones she might forget.
(She thinks when that book is written she'll keep a copy in her desk to remind her. Just in case.)
-x-
She hopes she has enough time to rename the Endless Shenanigans to Travelling Sisterhood of the Communication Gap because it'll end up being misleading otherwise.
“I’m old enough to decide this stuff on my own, Buffy!”
The response is automatic. She's automatically becoming a paranoid control-freak apparently. “The fact that you need to state that kind of implies you may not be, Dawnie.”
“Stop calling me that,” her sister is nearly in tears, “you think you can forever categorize me under the ‘kid sis’ label and never really bother at all about anything till you get the chance to refuse me something.”
“Dawni…Dawn, I—”
“And everyone thinks you’re like, a cool, older sister that they would like to have. That is, everyone who doesn’t think you’re a freak. Which is everyone who actually has a cool, older sibling who went to high school with you. Everybody is going to be there. Everybody. I’ve already said I would go, Buffy.”
There’s a hammering at the back of her skull that resembles the hammering of her heart all those times Angel was around. There may be some poetry lost in the metaphor but god, she misses Angel. She doesn’t miss Angel when it’s Spike above her and around her and all over, but that’s neither here nor there.
“I told you it’s too dangerous, especially at that time of the night, with the possibility of an impending apocalypse and—”
“Screw the apocalypse,” Dawn is actually in tears now and she’s suddenly so very, very tired, “there’s always an apocalypse. There’s always going to be an apocalypse. And if I can’t live because of that, then how is it any better than dying in the stupid freaking apocalypse anyway.”
And honestly, it makes her stop for a second because she hasn’t thought about it like that. Maybe she was too busy actually being dead in the last stupid freaking apocalypse to carpe diem it. Saving The World is like a mission statement or a job or a calling or destiny or something, she’s hazy on that part. But it’s something she’s kind of good at and they don’t pay her for it, so it probably gets her heaven cred. And she wants to go back. She wants to go back so, so badly.
(And because she’s not stupid she knows she can’t. Not after S—everything. Not when the only thing to bring her pleasure these days is something as removed from raindrops and roses as she will be from heaven the next time she grandly sacrifices herself or accidentally falls off a cliff or something. She’s pretty sure she lost the metaphor again, but there’s poetic justice somewhere in there for sure.)
“Mom would have let me go,” her sister says with quiet triumph, like she can’t believe that argument won’t win her the case even with a jury comprised of her neo-nazi sister, “she always let me go. Even when she found out about the Slayage and that the world was a badder, horribler place than it had always seemed. She still let me go because she knew how to live.”
You only know how to die.
And she wants to say something ugly then. Something about yeah well, she knew how to live but she’s dead now, so your point is moot. Or something uglier about how the girl in front of her had never known what mom would do because she had never been there to know what mom would do. And mom, mom had been real. Mom had been too real and too overprotective and cared too much and she didn’t get mellower with the second child because there was no second child.
She bites her tongue then, swallows the ugliness. The blood tastes real enough. Maybe someday she'll let S…omeone confirm it for her.
Dawn goes anyway, and she thinks she's done with the world because it was never worth saving in the first place. It’s a sort of habit with her, she thinks, and she can break it. Because habits, those can be broken. Unlike memories of blinding light that doesn't blind and peace that doesn’t fit into the word she uses for it.
-x-
(That night she saves the world again.
Which brings it to sixty six point four three or maybe sixty six point four two, because it's not like she's keeping count or anything).