Title: all that glitters
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Rating: G
Length: ~600 words
Content notes: none
Spoilers in the summary for Season 5 and 6 in general. Otherwise, none.

Summary: Buffy hasn't spent a lot of time with Dawn since... Well. No, she can say it. Since they brought her back to life.

*****

"This is ridiculous." Buffy drops the paper shopping bag onto an empty table in the mall's food court. A faint waft of ginger-scented soap fights briefly with the french-fry grease billowing from the McDonalds stall, then is lost amidst the general cheap perfume and body smell of a million teenagers on a Friday night.

Buffy scans the nearby crowd: teens with ice cream, teens with boyfriends, teens with Starbucks cups. No Dawn. The Sunnydale Mall should feel more welcoming; they'd been here thousands of times, even if it is their first time since... Well, since. But the stores are just boxes with stuff inside, and the shine off the escalators is only glare. It's all wrong, but that's something Buffy needs to get used to.

All the people look the same. They shouldn't, but they do, and honestly, Buffy doesn't really care if all the faces blur into each other in her memory. Being brought back is kind of like catching the flu; she doesn't have the energy to bother with the details.

But Dawn had dragged her here, saying it would be fun -- and then ditched her at the Lush counter. Which is how Buffy ended up with overpriced liquid soap and some kind of solid shampoo bar -- or maybe it's the other way around, she isn't sure -- and samples of a dozen other products she can't imagine ever wanting. But she'd stuck around at the counter too long, hoping Dawn would come back from her trip to the restroom or finish talking to her friends or whatever, and then they could go home.

Buffy really doesn't want this to be the start of some kind of demons-at-the-mall adventure. So she's glad when Dawn answers her cell phone. Really, she's glad, even if Dawn's “Hey,” sounds more put-out than scared.

“Where are you?” Buffy demands, leaning against the table and uselessly scanning the food court again.

“Looking for you,” Dawn shoots back. “Where were you? I waited in Macy's for like half an hour.”

“Oh.” Buffy grabs her bag from the table and starts heading – wait, which way is it? Left? “Nope, sorry, when did you tell me that?”

“Apparently when you weren't listening.” Buffy can imagine the eye-roll over the phone.

“Don't be mad, I didn't hear you.” She spots Dawn coming down the escalator and waves. “I spent my time waiting for you in Lush, and I seriously hope you like ginger soap, because some of it jumped in my bag when I wasn't looking.”

“Really?” Dawn looks up from her phone and waves back. Light catches on the gold in her earrings as she tilts her head, and Buffy thinks about saying something nice about them as she walks up – those are pretty, maybe, or even I like your earrings – but she can't remember if she's seen them before. They aren't really Dawn's style, and Buffy suddenly wonders if they're something she got from Mom and Buffy just hasn't been paying enough attention to notice.

“Hey,” she says instead, and brandishes her bag to cover the pang she feels. “Look: fancy things to make us smell nice. What do you think?”

Dawn gives her a resentful look, as if she wants to say something bratty, and then the whole night will be ruined and they might as well have stayed home. But she shrugs instead and opens the bag, and Buffy takes a breath around the sudden loosening in her throat.

She loves her sister, she really does. Now if she can just figure out how to hang on to that, maybe everything else will be all right.