FICLET: Back To School

AUTHOR: Mint Witch

RATING: G

SPOILERS: I dunno. I'm spoiler-free? None, or I'm Joss. HA! ***

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September.

Even in California, it was different. The air was lighter, less heavy. Cooler. A crispness in the mornings that promised a renewal more permanent than Spring's heady wine.

Shopping for new clothes and notebooks, picking out the perfect pen assortment. These are things she had once done with her mother.

Now she was the mother, and Dawn was her. Strangely, it was all right. Still September. Still that mixture of fear and anticipation and oh my god will I be able to find my locker.

New job, new apartment, new school. It was all the same but different. Maybe it was the rawness of the hallways that made her look for him, seek out the familiar among the all the freshly painted odors. Look forward to Parent Teacher Night with a discordant anticipation.

Just one more time. She would just check, just in case. A back to school patrol, to make the Hellmouth safe for a new crop of freshmen.

The door no longer creaked, and the scent of Cheetos had faded. Clem had moved on to a deluxe apartment over the lamp store. Not quite the sky, but nice digs, nonetheless. His housewarming had been quite the party.

Actually, it had been pathetic and sad, but she didn't dwell on that part. Best not to think on what was missing.

But Spike's crypt smelled new, somehow. Like freshly sharpened pencils and Penguin Classics. It still looked the same. Maybe.

The voice drifting up from below was new as well. Not unfamiliar, but just as newly shaved as a fresh #2. Raw. Reeking of college ruled pages and teenaged angst.

Buffy stood frozen, eavesdropping on the Fig Newton of her over-ripe autumn imagination, expectations torn into sophomore geometries of hope and fear.

"I saw my soul at rest upon a day

As the bird sleeping in the nest of night,

Among soft leaves that give the starlight way

To touch its wings but not its eyes with light;

So that it knew as one in visions may,

And knew not as men waking, of delight.

"This was no measure of my soul's delight;

It had no power of joy to fly by day,

Nor part in the large lordship of the light..."

Not again. The door of the tomb croaked shut on her retreat.

"'Allo?" The tawny-haired thing popped his head through the hole in the floor. "Buffy?"

He shook his head. "Bugger. Dream on, William."

Still, it smelled like new pencils.