The Syntax of Things by Kyra Cullinan
Dawn's neck feels startlingly bare with her hair off it. Braided and pinned
on top of her head, it brings a welcome if brief respite from the heat. She
brushes her fingertips against the nape of her neck, concentrating on the strange
intimacy of her own skin.
The air conditioning is another casualty of the oh so special Summers Summer
Budgeting Project. The opression of Southern California in July makes her feel
drained, vaguely miserable but devoid of the energy to be actively cranky. She
curls her bare toes against the linoleum of the kitchen floor, seeking whatever
coldness it has to offer, wondering how many cool showers a day she ought to
allow herself. Somewhere outside, a lawnmower drones into the still, stifling
air. There's nothing to do; it's been nearly a month since she turned sixteen
and all her birthday money is long spent. She wishes they had a pool. She wishes
Xander still worked in an ice cream truck. She wishes she were in England with
Willow and Giles, where she knows it's just got to be cooler than here.
Something cold on her foot makes her blink and look down. Ice cream. Her fudgesicle
is melting, liquifying into what she supposes is its natural sticky brown state,
dripping down the side of her hand to drop onto the floor. She mutters a curse
under her breath and hurries to the sink, holding it over the stainless steel
where any further meltage will be more easily contained. Anya looks up from
her seat at the counter as she swears, but doesn't say anything, turning back
to the wholesale magic supply catalog she's leafing through. She seems to have
an unending supply of them lately, conveniently producing one wherever she goes.
When Dawn had asked her why the sudden interest, she shrugged.
"I'd gotten so used to looking at bridal catalogs, I needed something to replace
them. I suppose it might have been real estate brochures or clothing for infants
if ... things had turned out differently," she said, looking away, and Dawn
hadn't asked again. Actually, Dawn considered, Anya might literally be pulling
them out of thin air, for all she knows. She's more than a little sketchy on
exactly what powers a vengeance demon has at her disposal. Either way, the catalogs
seem to be doing the trick, providing a buffer between her and the rest of the
Scoobies during whatever contact proves necessary in the uneasy truce they seem
to have come to. Buffy and Xander are worried about her loyalties as a demon
and though they pretend not to, they keep throwing suspicious glances at her
in a way which reminds Dawn of how they treated her when they found out she
was the Key. Mostly, she's decided, Anya just looks sad.
Her fudgesicle is still dripping merrily away and she stares, transfixed,
at each tiny chocolate blob sprinkled across the sink's chrome. She should probably
finish it before it all melts away, but she didn't really want it in the first
place, just something to cool her down. Behind her, Anya sets down her glass
of iced tea with a clink and crunches another ice cube. It's a good idea, but
Dawn hates the feeling of ice breaking between her teeth, the strange combination
of solid shards and melting liquid it makes in her mouth.
In the sink, the brown spots look like tears, like the ice cream is crying
its life away. Dawn closes her eyes and thinks 'or sweating'.
When she opens them again, she can see her reflection in the window above
the sink, the faintest of outlines and she looks without blinking at her own
solemn face and the braids crisscrossing above it. Tara used to wear her hair
like this. She taught Dawn how to do it one day last summer, sitting cross-legged
behind her on the bed, mouth full of bobby pins while Dawn giggled at the tickle
of fingers ghosting across the back of her ears, on the curve of her shoulders.
She squeezes her eyes shut against the memory, taking a shaky breath. Her whole
body is tired of crying, not for the moment, but deep in its cells, weary from
an entire year and a half of grief, and she steadies herself on the edge of
the counter with her free hand.
'I don't know how to do this,' she thinks, and then almost laughs, because
of course she doesn't and yet it keeps happening. You'd think, though, that
she would've figured it out at least a little by now. And Tara wasn't her mother,
or her sister, but she was the one person who'd been there to hold her after
both of them had died, and now she was gone too and so what's Dawn supposed
to do now? She wonders, sometimes, in the part of her mind which refuses all
logic, who'll die next.
"Why doesn't it get easier?" she says suddenly to the room, without moving.
In the bright window, she can barely catch the movement of Anya looking up.
"I mean, shouldn't we be able to get ... sadness calluses or something?"
"I don't know, Dawn," Anya says from behind her, her voice frank. "I thought
it would. When Joyce died, when it didn't make any sense, I thought 'Well, at
least now I'll know for next time, I'll figure it out now.' But I didn't. I
couldn't. I still don't understand. It hurt just as much when Buffy died, and
Tara, but different each time. Always in different ways. I wish it got easier."
The half-melted ice cream is making little pools in the sink, sweet brown
puddles which remind her of chocolate milkshakes and Tara's laughing eyes. Suddenly
her mouth is heavy with the ice cream's sickly-sweetness clinging to her tongue
and teeth.
"Dawn?" Anya is saying from close behind her. She's crossed the kitchen without
Dawn noticing and is hovering nearby. Her face, when Dawn turns, is worried,
uncertain. She's out of her league and she shifts uncomfortably from foot to
foot.
"It's so lonely without her," Dawn whispers, looking down at her bare legs
and khaki shorts. "Which is stupid, because she wasn't even living here for
most of the last few months. And now I get to see you and Buffy and Xander so
much more, but --"
"I know" Anya says softly. "Even when I walk into a room and Buffy is there
or you are or anybody ... it's not the same, because it's not Xander. And even
when it is, it's not my Xander, he's not going to smile at me or hold
my hand ..." Her voice almost breaks.
"Do you miss Tara?" Dawn asks softly, because she doesn't know what to say
about Xander and she thinks if she goes on another moment feeling like she's
the only one who even notices she's gone, she might scream or explode into some
giant green ball of Key energy or do something equally dramatic.
"Yes," Anya says without hesitating. "I liked Tara."
Dawn blinks at her. "Really?"
"Yes. She knew a lot about magic; she used to give me good suggestions about
things to stock. And she understood about ... about Willow and Xander and knowing
you're always going to be on the outside. And she never treated me like I was
the stupid demon everyone else did."
Dawn looks away again, feels her eyes swimming and wills the tears away.
"What do you do?" she asks and turns back to Anya who's biting her
lower lip. "How do you make the hurting stop?"
"I don't know," Anya says simply, and Dawn is grateful that she doesn't try
to talk about time or embracing life or any of the other cheerful little truisms
everyone's been saying to her for the past year. "You ... you find the things
that make you feel good and you hold onto them as best you can, because you
don't know when you'll get another."
"Like Buffy with Spike?" she asks, and then her eyes widen. "Like you
and -- ohh." She thinks maybe this is something they shouldn't be talking about,
but it seems to bother Anya less than thinking of Xander. She's standing close,
and Dawn can smell her perfume, something light and citrusy. She still makes
every effort to seem the picture-perfect human girl, and for an instant Dawn
can identify with her entirely. Her lip gloss and Anya's sundress and everything
in between are all dedicated to creating these fragile images of normalcy and
humanity where none exists in either of them.
They're about the same height now, and Dawn idly wonders for the thousandth
time whether she'll be taller than absolutely everyone she knows by the time
she finishes growing. For now, though, she's eye-to-eye with Anya, who reaches
up to touch her shoulder, resting her hand slightly awkwardly on the strap of
her tanktop, but then she seems to relax into the feeling of Dawn's skin under
her fingertips.
"I feel so old, Anya," Dawn says. "Isn't that stupid? I'm the youngest teenager
in the world and I feel so tired and ... ancient."
She expects her to laugh, say something about her centuries as a demon, but
she surprises her by shaking her head.
"It's not stupid," she says. "Sometimes I feel like the time I spent with
Xander was more than all the years I did vengeance. Plus," she adds. "You are
old. You're older than me, really."
Dawn blinks at that, but it's true, she supposes. And that's something you
have to admit -- whatever Anya says is always backed up by fact. Eternally practical.
"Anya --" she starts, not entirely sure what she's going to say. Thank you,
perhaps, but Anya is looking at her strangely.
"Shhh ..." she says and Dawn stops talking and looks at her. "You're so pretty,
Dawn," Anya says. "Really. People don't say that enough. All girls ought to
be told how pretty they are."
And then she's kissing Dawn, her lips warm and gentle and undeniably real.
She's softer than Kevin was, and less insistent, and when Dawn opens her mouth,
Anya's tongue slips inside to explore her so carefully. She's cool, not
at all like Kevin's all-over chill, but with residual coldness from the ice
cubes she's been crunching. She tastes like tea and lemon, vaguely bitter yet
familiar tastes which chase away the cloying chocolate lingering in her mouth.
When she pulls back, Dawn's lower lip slipping from between hers last of all,
Dawn whimpers at the loss of contact. She breathes for a moment and then opens
her eyes.
Anya is looking at her with an expression Dawn can't decipher and for a moment
her hand drifts up from Dawn's shoulder to cup her cheek.
"It's all going to be okay," she says, without a trace of forcedness, and
from that alone, Dawn can believe her.
She turns and is gone in a moment, leaving Dawn staring after her. After a
minute she turns back to where her fudgesicle has melted away almost entirely.
She looks at it blankly before dropping the stained wooden stick into the sink
and turning on the faucet to wash off her hands.
*
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
*
.End