Ten Years After, Chapter 20.
31 Aug 2005 08:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
curiouswombatMy holiday slowed me down - it's taken me a few days to get back into the swing of TYA, but here at last is Chapter 20. There will only be a few more to go - we're getting near the end now!
Tomorrow I might 'borrow' a few of D-d's Australia photos to share with my LJ friends - you have been warned!
This Chapter is again a 13 I guess.
Ten Years After, Chapter Twenty.
Chapter Twenty.
Buffy and Dawn ate in a small, but smart, Parisian bistro. They talked about the sort of things that a Slayer and a Watcher could discuss in a small Parisian bistro – clothes stores, Buffy’s sons, shoe stores, Buffy’s husband, department stores, Buffy’s visit to Willow, and more about the shoe stores – things that anyone could overhear. Dawn refrained form mentioning her shopping trip with Spike when they discussed shoe stores...
Only when they got back to the hotel did conversation become more specific. In the past Buffy had wanted Dawn to ask to be transferred out to her group of Slayerettes in Sacramento. Now she repeated the suggestion - quite firmly - it would be good for Dawn, she said, to spend time back in the US - she was, after all, American, and it would be so nice for 'the boys' to see more of their aunt.
‘Added to which,' Dawn thought, 'Spike would be unlikely to come and see me out there and so, you hope, we'll just "get over it"!'
However she didn’t even mention Spike in her refusal. Instead she said that she wanted to keep working with Giles, especially as she was his current research subject, and she also pointed out that it would be difficult to persuade girls in their teens, or early twenties, that she was senior enough to teach them anything when she looked as if she should still be at college.
There had been a lot of discussion, in the early post-Sunnydale days, about what would happen now that all Potential Slayers had become active Slayers. Did the line follow just one Slayer? If so, that would logically be Faith, would there be no other young Slayer until Faith’s death? Or would the death of any Slayer activate another one?
The questions were still unanswered as it was hard to say whether the new young Slayers, who were still being discovered had been activated by the death of an existing Slayer, or whether they had been pre-pubescent Potentials at the time of the great activation, but only being found now.
Whilst it should have been easy to pair up a newly found Slayer with the death of another Slayer, or not, there could be other unknown Slayers being killed, for any number of reasons, throughout the world; and so there was still no clear answer. It would only really be clear if, eventually, a new Slayer was found who had been conceived after the great activation; or a minimum age became apparent, showing that no-one was being Chosen who had been born after May 2003.
In the long term this was important for the Watchers’ Council because they currently needed an operation to cope with many Slayers; yet they might eventually have to wind things down again to cope with just one... or none. No-one yet knew. However it had occurred to Dawn that she might be one of the few current Watchers who would be around, and working, when the answers were all clear. It might be very odd to work with Slayers who were all in their sixties or seventies!
However that was not part of the conversation with Buffy.
Buffy accepted that, for now, Dawn did not want to transfer to Sacramento; that Dawn loved her sister, but didn't want to live in her pocket - for a number of reasons. It was a discussion they had had before, but this time there were more reasons on Dawn’s part to stay in Europe; more reason on Buffy's part to push for it, as a way of stopping Dawn 'making the same mistake as she had', but in reality it was a case of Buffy going through the motions.
That night Dawn lay in bed listening to Buffy sleeping, her steady breathing and slight movements, and thought about her relationship with her sister. She knew that, technically, sister was the wrong word. 'Sister’ would mean having a parent, or parents, in common; but Joyce Summers was the only parent Dawn had ever had and so she, really, couldn’t think of Buffy as anything other than her sister. Anyway, Buffy’s behaviour over the past couple of days was totally that of a big sister; as long as Dawn was a person, Buffy was her sister.
It occurred to Dawn that, actually, she felt sorry for Buffy. When Dawn remembered her sister, as she grew up, Buffy had been exciting; even mysterious. She sneaked out of the house when Mommy didn’t know, she had secrets with her friends, and Dawn had wanted to be like her. She would even have settled for being let into Buffy’s secrets. M'kay, these were implanted memories; but it is how it would have been, and so it is how it was.
In time Dawn had learnt more about Buffy’s ‘other life’ as The Chosen One, the One Girl in All the World; Buffy was Very Special, and Dawn knew that she was just the kid sister who got in the way. This didn’t mean that Buffy hadn’t loved Dawn – she had actually died to save Dawn’s life. How much more love could a sister show? But, it had been clear to Dawn, that all of Buffy’s friends, all the people who were Dawn’s ‘family’, would have preferred it if Dawn had died rather than Buffy, as long as it wouldn’t have given Glory what she wanted.
No-one ever put it quite like that; but that was the truth of it. The Slayer was much more important than any kid sister. When Willow brought Buffy back there had been much rejoicing - even from Spike who had been so sure that it was a Bad Thing. When it became obvious that Buffy was not her old self, Dawn had slowly faded into the background, while everyone worried about Buffy. The things she had done because she felt bad had only made people more sorry for Buffy; coping with depression, Slaying, and Dawn-the-nuisance.
Spike had cared about Dawn, but then he spent more and more time with Buffy, until he had gone away leaving Dawn hating him. She'd hated him for what she had been told he had done to Buffy; and hated him, at least as much, for going away and leaving them both.
When The First Evil came to Sunnydale Buffy’s role as The Slayer made her the centre of everything that went on. Even when Faith arrived in town everyone knew that Buffy was The Most Chosen One – the Top Slayer.
Buffy had led the troops into the big battle. Dawn wasn’t even one of the Potentials – she was just a kid in the background. After the battle, when Buffy had lost Spike – someone who was obviously very important to her – and had only just made it out herself, she was the central figure in the aftermath. In the middle of all the new Slayers being amazed at their own power, or mourning their recently made friends who had died in the battle, people had still treated Buffy very carefully; Dawn amongst them.
Always Buffy had been the sun around whom everything revolved, Dawn was a minor orbiting planet, maybe only an asteroid – ‘Just call me Pluto,’ she thought wryly.
As the years passed the existence of multiple Slayers allowed Buffy to take a back seat; just as she’d always said she wanted. But she was still A Slayer, still The Senior Slayer, still The Slayer that other Slayers respected and held in awe – she had been the One Girl in All the World – none of the others had ever been that, not even Faith. Dawn was just a back-room researcher for the Watchers’ Council, not even a Watcher with her own Slayer, even though this was from choice. Dawn’s main claim to fame was always that she was Buffy’s sister.
But now the status quo had turned upside down and Dawn was the centre of attraction. Dawn was The Key, like it or not, and it was beginning to look as if being The Key was every bit as important, if not more so, than being The Chosen One ; let alone a partially retired Chosen One amongst Chosen Ones.
Buffy lived in happy semi-retirement these days, away from the centre of The Slaying World, she was now not as close to Giles and Willow, either figuratively or literally, as Dawn. People that Buffy thought of as ‘hers’ were now genuinely Dawn’s friends; they had cared about Dawn before the real significance of The Key began to become clear, and they were willing to stand up to Buffy on Dawn’s behalf.
Then there was Spike.
Buffy had never claimed that Spike had been the love of her life. But she had always ‘known’ that, if she admitted that vampires could have such emotions, she had been the love of his life (or unlife, whatever!).
Dawn had a feeling that, in Buffy’s shoes, she would have had a tiny part of her that sometimes thought slightly nostalgically of Spike. A vampire who had sought his soul for her; had burned to dust for her. Sometimes that little bit of Dawn-if-she-had-been-Buffy would have thought of him, sadly dreaming of his Slayer, still a fool for love. Instead Buffy had discovered, by e-picture, that he was happily coping without her; and was currently dating her sister.
‘Poor Buffy,’ Dawn thought, ‘my screw-up with that picture meant that, instead of having it broken to her gently, she has had a very rude awakening. She is no longer the star we all revolve about, not even Spike. Not that I'm the centre of the universe, either, but I am probably a more important planet than she is right now.
‘She's always said she didn’t want to be so important, didn’t want the responsibility; but it must, totally, be hard for her to realise that it’s more about me than her right now – and it will probably stay that way. Her Watcher is my ‘father’, her b.f.f. has more girl-talks with me than with her, and her 'romantic hero’ is now my knight in shiny armour. No wonder she isn’t exactly happy. She must feel like spitting in my eye.
‘Still,’ Dawn thought before rolling over and going to sleep herself, ‘I’m so not giving Spike up just to make Buffy feel better. But I will try to be nice to her... and not rub any of it in!’
.................................
Buffy also seemed to have decided that it was no use saying anything else on the subject of Spike and so, when Dawn saw her onto her London-bound train the next morning, they parted on fairly amicable, sisterly, terms.
Not so amicable that Dawn believed Buffy totally accepted the relationship with Spike, though. She knew that Buffy would try to persuade both Willow and Giles that ‘something should be done about it’; but she was equally sure that they would remain on her side in this argument. Especially with the prophecy that Andrew had found – she must ring Andrew and thank him for that – or, better still, buy him a really good present.
Before she thought any more of presents, however, there was something else Dawn had to do. She was determined not to be caught out again the way she had been with Buffy. Therefore, as soon as Buffy’s train pulled out of the Gare du Nord, Dawn rang Willow.
She told Willow that Buffy had left on time and Willow said that she was on her way to St Pancras' station to meet her.
“Will, I have a really big favour to ask you,” Dawn continued. “Could you tell Xander about me? The Highlander Syndrome thing?
“Buffy remembered The Key thing, just as you and Giles had, even though she wanted to convince me that it was all in the past.
“I don’t expect Xander has thought about it much since Sunnydale either, but I'm sure he'll remember if you mention it, and understand how it might do something like this to me. But, uh, now the hard bit. Will, could you fill him in on me and Spike? ‘Cos I think Buffy might try to get him to back her on this, and I so don’t want Xander turning up all ‘Spike – horrible, evil monster trying to corrupt my innocent Dawnie’.
"If anyone seduced anyone then it was totally not Spike seducing me! But Buffy wouldn’t have any difficulty putting that sort of spin on it for Xander.”
“Uh-huh... you’re so right, Dawn,” Willow said straight away. “Leave Xander to me. I’ll make sure he understands the Highlander thing clearly first, then explain how Spike is trying to help you come to terms with it. The smoochies, and things, I’ll leave till last. But, unless Buffy is on her phone to him this minute, I’ll get in first. And if she has beaten me to him I’ll still make sure that he won’t turn up on your doorstep clutching a stake.”
“Oh thank you, Will!” Dawn said with relief. “I think that earns you at least two sets of sexy underwear!”
Sexy underwear had been avoided when Dawn had been shopping with Buffy but now, she decided, was the time to look; not only in the shop Willow had told her about but a few others as well.
‘Pity I can’t say thank you to Andrew with silk frillies,’ Dawn thought, ‘but perhaps not!’
Remembering Willow’s comment about a cream basque being more something that she would wear for a man than a woman, when Dawn found a beautiful set in cream silk, trimmed with antique lace, she started with a balconette bra and French knickers. There was a beautiful teddy in the same fabric... a soft and silky teddy somehow seemed likely to appeal to both Willow and a female lover, but would Willow want the garter belt to complete the set? Were women into other women wearing stockings, or was it just a male thing?
In the end Dawn decided to buy it, and cream lace stockings as well – after all it would be easier for Willow to have them, and choose not to wear them, than to try and get them later.
Now Dawn wondered what Spike would like her in. Was he a basque, or even a corset, man? Stockings? His decision to get Dawn to keep her high-heeled sandals on when they had been in bed together after the trip to the Folies Bergeres, and the way he had kissed all the way up her legs from her toes, made her think he might rather like stockings and what the English called suspenders.
Pity the person still alive and most likely to know the answer was Buffy. Although Dawn didn’t think that Buffy would know, anyway, from what she knew of her sister’s relationship with Spike. She could ring him up and ask him – but that would spoil any surprise.
The boyfriend who had been an English Lit. student had rather liked stockings – he had been the one who had explained that, in Britain, ladies’ stockings were held in place by a suspender belt – garters were purely a band worn around the top of a stocking, mainly for show. Two nations divided by a single language again.
Her mind half on Willow, half on herself, Dawn spent the rest of the day indulging in Parisian underwear. She decided that, with Willow’s pale skin and red hair, pale pinks and blues would look insipid. Bright fuchsia pink probably wasn’t a good look on Willow either – in fact, she thought, bright colours were probably all out for Willow, but some of the bright colours might look good on herself...
There were some very ‘little girlie’ sets, with polka dots, or cartoon patterns. Not only were they too young looking for Willow but, Dawn decided, she wouldn’t want anything for herself that made her look like a teenager either. She realised, sadly, that some of the underwear was probably ‘too old’ for her body even if not for her mind; she would look like a child dressing up in her mother’s things.
Eventually she bought Willow the promised second set; bra, pants and chemise in a dark wine colour – the almost sheer 'little boy' style pants would make Willow look fuckable even to her, Dawn decided. They had the same set in black, and she was tempted to buy it for herself – only black still had overtones of Drusilla – but, hey! the dark blue probably didn’t, she thought, as she had it wrapped for herself.
Back in her hotel room she put the two gift wrapped boxes for Willow into her wardrobe, and spread her other purchases out on the bed – it was truly amazing how many Euros you could spend on so little fabric, she thought.
Now what to wear tonight? The dark blue, the deep pink, a teddy, or even a basque? In the end she chose cream silk, trimmed with gold thread and ribbons, including a garter belt, (suspender belt, or even ‘une porte-jarretelles’ as it had been bought in France!) and matching stockings. She studied herself in the mirror and nodded.
‘Let’s see if I’m right about Spike and stockings!’ she thought, then covered it all with a simple sweater and a calf-length skirt, and waited, demurely, for her date to arrive.
…………………………….
As usual - The characters in this story do not belong to me, but are being used for amusement only and all rights remain with Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, the writers of the original episodes, and the TV and production companies responsible for the original television shows. BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER ©2002 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All Rights Reserved. The Buffy the Vampire Slayer trademark is used without express permission from Fox.
Previous chapters are all in memories Ten Years After, Previous Chapters
You can also find them via tags.
The next chapter is here.
I'm ready to get going on the next chapter later this evening - so it will be posted before D-d and I go off-island again next week to visit universities.
Tomorrow I might 'borrow' a few of D-d's Australia photos to share with my LJ friends - you have been warned!
This Chapter is again a 13 I guess.
Ten Years After, Chapter Twenty.
Chapter Twenty.
Buffy and Dawn ate in a small, but smart, Parisian bistro. They talked about the sort of things that a Slayer and a Watcher could discuss in a small Parisian bistro – clothes stores, Buffy’s sons, shoe stores, Buffy’s husband, department stores, Buffy’s visit to Willow, and more about the shoe stores – things that anyone could overhear. Dawn refrained form mentioning her shopping trip with Spike when they discussed shoe stores...
Only when they got back to the hotel did conversation become more specific. In the past Buffy had wanted Dawn to ask to be transferred out to her group of Slayerettes in Sacramento. Now she repeated the suggestion - quite firmly - it would be good for Dawn, she said, to spend time back in the US - she was, after all, American, and it would be so nice for 'the boys' to see more of their aunt.
‘Added to which,' Dawn thought, 'Spike would be unlikely to come and see me out there and so, you hope, we'll just "get over it"!'
However she didn’t even mention Spike in her refusal. Instead she said that she wanted to keep working with Giles, especially as she was his current research subject, and she also pointed out that it would be difficult to persuade girls in their teens, or early twenties, that she was senior enough to teach them anything when she looked as if she should still be at college.
There had been a lot of discussion, in the early post-Sunnydale days, about what would happen now that all Potential Slayers had become active Slayers. Did the line follow just one Slayer? If so, that would logically be Faith, would there be no other young Slayer until Faith’s death? Or would the death of any Slayer activate another one?
The questions were still unanswered as it was hard to say whether the new young Slayers, who were still being discovered had been activated by the death of an existing Slayer, or whether they had been pre-pubescent Potentials at the time of the great activation, but only being found now.
Whilst it should have been easy to pair up a newly found Slayer with the death of another Slayer, or not, there could be other unknown Slayers being killed, for any number of reasons, throughout the world; and so there was still no clear answer. It would only really be clear if, eventually, a new Slayer was found who had been conceived after the great activation; or a minimum age became apparent, showing that no-one was being Chosen who had been born after May 2003.
In the long term this was important for the Watchers’ Council because they currently needed an operation to cope with many Slayers; yet they might eventually have to wind things down again to cope with just one... or none. No-one yet knew. However it had occurred to Dawn that she might be one of the few current Watchers who would be around, and working, when the answers were all clear. It might be very odd to work with Slayers who were all in their sixties or seventies!
However that was not part of the conversation with Buffy.
Buffy accepted that, for now, Dawn did not want to transfer to Sacramento; that Dawn loved her sister, but didn't want to live in her pocket - for a number of reasons. It was a discussion they had had before, but this time there were more reasons on Dawn’s part to stay in Europe; more reason on Buffy's part to push for it, as a way of stopping Dawn 'making the same mistake as she had', but in reality it was a case of Buffy going through the motions.
That night Dawn lay in bed listening to Buffy sleeping, her steady breathing and slight movements, and thought about her relationship with her sister. She knew that, technically, sister was the wrong word. 'Sister’ would mean having a parent, or parents, in common; but Joyce Summers was the only parent Dawn had ever had and so she, really, couldn’t think of Buffy as anything other than her sister. Anyway, Buffy’s behaviour over the past couple of days was totally that of a big sister; as long as Dawn was a person, Buffy was her sister.
It occurred to Dawn that, actually, she felt sorry for Buffy. When Dawn remembered her sister, as she grew up, Buffy had been exciting; even mysterious. She sneaked out of the house when Mommy didn’t know, she had secrets with her friends, and Dawn had wanted to be like her. She would even have settled for being let into Buffy’s secrets. M'kay, these were implanted memories; but it is how it would have been, and so it is how it was.
In time Dawn had learnt more about Buffy’s ‘other life’ as The Chosen One, the One Girl in All the World; Buffy was Very Special, and Dawn knew that she was just the kid sister who got in the way. This didn’t mean that Buffy hadn’t loved Dawn – she had actually died to save Dawn’s life. How much more love could a sister show? But, it had been clear to Dawn, that all of Buffy’s friends, all the people who were Dawn’s ‘family’, would have preferred it if Dawn had died rather than Buffy, as long as it wouldn’t have given Glory what she wanted.
No-one ever put it quite like that; but that was the truth of it. The Slayer was much more important than any kid sister. When Willow brought Buffy back there had been much rejoicing - even from Spike who had been so sure that it was a Bad Thing. When it became obvious that Buffy was not her old self, Dawn had slowly faded into the background, while everyone worried about Buffy. The things she had done because she felt bad had only made people more sorry for Buffy; coping with depression, Slaying, and Dawn-the-nuisance.
Spike had cared about Dawn, but then he spent more and more time with Buffy, until he had gone away leaving Dawn hating him. She'd hated him for what she had been told he had done to Buffy; and hated him, at least as much, for going away and leaving them both.
When The First Evil came to Sunnydale Buffy’s role as The Slayer made her the centre of everything that went on. Even when Faith arrived in town everyone knew that Buffy was The Most Chosen One – the Top Slayer.
Buffy had led the troops into the big battle. Dawn wasn’t even one of the Potentials – she was just a kid in the background. After the battle, when Buffy had lost Spike – someone who was obviously very important to her – and had only just made it out herself, she was the central figure in the aftermath. In the middle of all the new Slayers being amazed at their own power, or mourning their recently made friends who had died in the battle, people had still treated Buffy very carefully; Dawn amongst them.
Always Buffy had been the sun around whom everything revolved, Dawn was a minor orbiting planet, maybe only an asteroid – ‘Just call me Pluto,’ she thought wryly.
As the years passed the existence of multiple Slayers allowed Buffy to take a back seat; just as she’d always said she wanted. But she was still A Slayer, still The Senior Slayer, still The Slayer that other Slayers respected and held in awe – she had been the One Girl in All the World – none of the others had ever been that, not even Faith. Dawn was just a back-room researcher for the Watchers’ Council, not even a Watcher with her own Slayer, even though this was from choice. Dawn’s main claim to fame was always that she was Buffy’s sister.
But now the status quo had turned upside down and Dawn was the centre of attraction. Dawn was The Key, like it or not, and it was beginning to look as if being The Key was every bit as important, if not more so, than being The Chosen One ; let alone a partially retired Chosen One amongst Chosen Ones.
Buffy lived in happy semi-retirement these days, away from the centre of The Slaying World, she was now not as close to Giles and Willow, either figuratively or literally, as Dawn. People that Buffy thought of as ‘hers’ were now genuinely Dawn’s friends; they had cared about Dawn before the real significance of The Key began to become clear, and they were willing to stand up to Buffy on Dawn’s behalf.
Then there was Spike.
Buffy had never claimed that Spike had been the love of her life. But she had always ‘known’ that, if she admitted that vampires could have such emotions, she had been the love of his life (or unlife, whatever!).
Dawn had a feeling that, in Buffy’s shoes, she would have had a tiny part of her that sometimes thought slightly nostalgically of Spike. A vampire who had sought his soul for her; had burned to dust for her. Sometimes that little bit of Dawn-if-she-had-been-Buffy would have thought of him, sadly dreaming of his Slayer, still a fool for love. Instead Buffy had discovered, by e-picture, that he was happily coping without her; and was currently dating her sister.
‘Poor Buffy,’ Dawn thought, ‘my screw-up with that picture meant that, instead of having it broken to her gently, she has had a very rude awakening. She is no longer the star we all revolve about, not even Spike. Not that I'm the centre of the universe, either, but I am probably a more important planet than she is right now.
‘She's always said she didn’t want to be so important, didn’t want the responsibility; but it must, totally, be hard for her to realise that it’s more about me than her right now – and it will probably stay that way. Her Watcher is my ‘father’, her b.f.f. has more girl-talks with me than with her, and her 'romantic hero’ is now my knight in shiny armour. No wonder she isn’t exactly happy. She must feel like spitting in my eye.
‘Still,’ Dawn thought before rolling over and going to sleep herself, ‘I’m so not giving Spike up just to make Buffy feel better. But I will try to be nice to her... and not rub any of it in!’
.................................
Buffy also seemed to have decided that it was no use saying anything else on the subject of Spike and so, when Dawn saw her onto her London-bound train the next morning, they parted on fairly amicable, sisterly, terms.
Not so amicable that Dawn believed Buffy totally accepted the relationship with Spike, though. She knew that Buffy would try to persuade both Willow and Giles that ‘something should be done about it’; but she was equally sure that they would remain on her side in this argument. Especially with the prophecy that Andrew had found – she must ring Andrew and thank him for that – or, better still, buy him a really good present.
Before she thought any more of presents, however, there was something else Dawn had to do. She was determined not to be caught out again the way she had been with Buffy. Therefore, as soon as Buffy’s train pulled out of the Gare du Nord, Dawn rang Willow.
She told Willow that Buffy had left on time and Willow said that she was on her way to St Pancras' station to meet her.
“Will, I have a really big favour to ask you,” Dawn continued. “Could you tell Xander about me? The Highlander Syndrome thing?
“Buffy remembered The Key thing, just as you and Giles had, even though she wanted to convince me that it was all in the past.
“I don’t expect Xander has thought about it much since Sunnydale either, but I'm sure he'll remember if you mention it, and understand how it might do something like this to me. But, uh, now the hard bit. Will, could you fill him in on me and Spike? ‘Cos I think Buffy might try to get him to back her on this, and I so don’t want Xander turning up all ‘Spike – horrible, evil monster trying to corrupt my innocent Dawnie’.
"If anyone seduced anyone then it was totally not Spike seducing me! But Buffy wouldn’t have any difficulty putting that sort of spin on it for Xander.”
“Uh-huh... you’re so right, Dawn,” Willow said straight away. “Leave Xander to me. I’ll make sure he understands the Highlander thing clearly first, then explain how Spike is trying to help you come to terms with it. The smoochies, and things, I’ll leave till last. But, unless Buffy is on her phone to him this minute, I’ll get in first. And if she has beaten me to him I’ll still make sure that he won’t turn up on your doorstep clutching a stake.”
“Oh thank you, Will!” Dawn said with relief. “I think that earns you at least two sets of sexy underwear!”
Sexy underwear had been avoided when Dawn had been shopping with Buffy but now, she decided, was the time to look; not only in the shop Willow had told her about but a few others as well.
‘Pity I can’t say thank you to Andrew with silk frillies,’ Dawn thought, ‘but perhaps not!’
Remembering Willow’s comment about a cream basque being more something that she would wear for a man than a woman, when Dawn found a beautiful set in cream silk, trimmed with antique lace, she started with a balconette bra and French knickers. There was a beautiful teddy in the same fabric... a soft and silky teddy somehow seemed likely to appeal to both Willow and a female lover, but would Willow want the garter belt to complete the set? Were women into other women wearing stockings, or was it just a male thing?
In the end Dawn decided to buy it, and cream lace stockings as well – after all it would be easier for Willow to have them, and choose not to wear them, than to try and get them later.
Now Dawn wondered what Spike would like her in. Was he a basque, or even a corset, man? Stockings? His decision to get Dawn to keep her high-heeled sandals on when they had been in bed together after the trip to the Folies Bergeres, and the way he had kissed all the way up her legs from her toes, made her think he might rather like stockings and what the English called suspenders.
Pity the person still alive and most likely to know the answer was Buffy. Although Dawn didn’t think that Buffy would know, anyway, from what she knew of her sister’s relationship with Spike. She could ring him up and ask him – but that would spoil any surprise.
The boyfriend who had been an English Lit. student had rather liked stockings – he had been the one who had explained that, in Britain, ladies’ stockings were held in place by a suspender belt – garters were purely a band worn around the top of a stocking, mainly for show. Two nations divided by a single language again.
Her mind half on Willow, half on herself, Dawn spent the rest of the day indulging in Parisian underwear. She decided that, with Willow’s pale skin and red hair, pale pinks and blues would look insipid. Bright fuchsia pink probably wasn’t a good look on Willow either – in fact, she thought, bright colours were probably all out for Willow, but some of the bright colours might look good on herself...
There were some very ‘little girlie’ sets, with polka dots, or cartoon patterns. Not only were they too young looking for Willow but, Dawn decided, she wouldn’t want anything for herself that made her look like a teenager either. She realised, sadly, that some of the underwear was probably ‘too old’ for her body even if not for her mind; she would look like a child dressing up in her mother’s things.
Eventually she bought Willow the promised second set; bra, pants and chemise in a dark wine colour – the almost sheer 'little boy' style pants would make Willow look fuckable even to her, Dawn decided. They had the same set in black, and she was tempted to buy it for herself – only black still had overtones of Drusilla – but, hey! the dark blue probably didn’t, she thought, as she had it wrapped for herself.
Back in her hotel room she put the two gift wrapped boxes for Willow into her wardrobe, and spread her other purchases out on the bed – it was truly amazing how many Euros you could spend on so little fabric, she thought.
Now what to wear tonight? The dark blue, the deep pink, a teddy, or even a basque? In the end she chose cream silk, trimmed with gold thread and ribbons, including a garter belt, (suspender belt, or even ‘une porte-jarretelles’ as it had been bought in France!) and matching stockings. She studied herself in the mirror and nodded.
‘Let’s see if I’m right about Spike and stockings!’ she thought, then covered it all with a simple sweater and a calf-length skirt, and waited, demurely, for her date to arrive.
…………………………….
As usual - The characters in this story do not belong to me, but are being used for amusement only and all rights remain with Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, the writers of the original episodes, and the TV and production companies responsible for the original television shows. BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER ©2002 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All Rights Reserved. The Buffy the Vampire Slayer trademark is used without express permission from Fox.
Previous chapters are all in memories Ten Years After, Previous Chapters
You can also find them via tags.
The next chapter is here.
I'm ready to get going on the next chapter later this evening - so it will be posted before D-d and I go off-island again next week to visit universities.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 01/09/2005 05:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 01/09/2005 06:13 pm (UTC)Love the icon by the way!