[fic] yeah? write me a new one. (2/3?)
fic: yeah? write me a new one. (2/3?)
fandom: labyrinth/btvs
pairing: sarah/dawn; sarah/jareth; (faith, buffy, andrew)
word count: 1400
recipient: happyg_rl
prompt: this being the prologue
chapter one: gaydar
[being a prologue that details dawns life until this moment and how exactly she came to be sarahs roommate in the first place]
Dawn didn’t insist on paying for college on her own - per say - but she did do the community college third-year transfer route and applied for all the scholarships that she could find.
(Andrew once asked her if that wasn’t the unfair thing, throwing around her centuries-old brain like it was just a normal eighteen-year-old’s in with the other scholarship kids, and not the taking-tainted-Council-money… which she wasn’t exactly above doing to cover the rest of the costs of living. She responded by kicking him in the shins and ignoring him for a couple of hours.)
It was mostly Buffy’s idea - which was hammered home by Faith over a too-cheap bottle or two of wine and then again the morning after with all her stomach finding its way into the bucket that somehow just existed though Dawn is not sure where or how previously to that moment when it appeared in front of her along with a mug of coffee.
“She wants you to have some kind of normalcy.”
“So she wants me to struggle?”
Faith shrugged, “That’s life, isn’t it? So you have to take a different route than you thought, maybe you’ll learn more this way.” Dawn raised her eyebrows over the glass of extra-spicy Bloody Mary. “I don’t know anything about college… but I know that if you take the easy way, you’ll turn into Giles - all stuffed shirt and Watcher material muttering in Ancient Babadook to yourself and making jokes no one laughs at.”
“No one laughs at my jokes anyway.”
“Do this the way Buffy wants. Give her this.”
“And what do I get?”
Faith considered for a minute, taking a long swallow of coffee, “Jokes that people actually understand?”
“I can always do the Oxford thing later.”
“It’s not like you don’t have the time.”
So she found a small community college in Utah to do her first two years in (it came highly recommended and it was worlds away from anyone or anything that she ever knew). The supernatural world left her alone (for the most part) only really intruding when she really, really didn’t have time for it to.
She found a job at the local library in the tutoring center for kids and also helping out at an animal shelter on the weekends. She became one of those crunchy, liberal sort of college students with piercing or two and high-minded ideals, two jobs, absent parents, and a second-hand mattress on a dirty carpet in an apartment with four other people. She went to rallies and she went to parties and she rubbed elbows with humans like she was one. She was in a band for a while, but didn’t have any musical talent so she backed out gracefully.
When her two years in isolation were up, Buffy shyly suggested that she take up residence in the Council’s Department at Oxford - they practically had a private office set up and waiting for her.
She went to school under a pseudonym and meanwhile kept publishing articles and doing translation work for the Slayers and the Council as an ‘independent scholar’ - just like any normal girl her age.
But Dawn finally had seen what it was that Buffy had wanted her to learn - and wasn’t ready to go back to the blood and the death and the mayhem.
“I can always do Oxford later. It’s not like I don’t have time.”
“I know that. I just miss you.”
“I miss you… but I gotta do this.”
“Well… please come to London for Christmas this year at least.”
“I will.”
She chose a tiny English program in a small state in a tiny town where nothing remotely interesting ever happens (she checked) (thoroughly). The perky guidance counselor found her a job at the library through work study and kept pushing the idea of becoming an RA and living in the dorms to save money. Dawn finally relented with an eye roll and a shrug, how hard could it be?
The first week, not really actually. Easy as pie. A few too many meetings with ridiculous names and she could live without the overwhelming sense of responsibility that seemed to be hanging over her head at all times… but it wasn’t really all that different from living in a Slayerette Central. Maybe less kickboxing and a lot more coffee and ice cream, but she only had two years left before she was back in the land of bruises and midnight donut runs so this actually felt
And then she was called down to the guidance office to discuss her future at the university, which was cryptic and weird and not a little terrifying. The perky counselor and a team of suits stared at her and asked her a bunch of really strange questions that didn’t at all seem related to her ability to govern a floor of 10-12 eighteen year old girls.
“Jerry, what is this all about? I’ve been here for over an hour and these questions are starting to get a little creepy. Like does it really matter what kind of shampoo I use? And whether I eat bread?”
“We just…”
“Just tell me.”
“There’s this girl.”
“Yeah? Okay. That makes everything crystal clear.”
“She’s been kicked out of four different universities in the last two years for… odd behavior.”
Dawn raised her eyebrows, “You have got to be kidding me.”
“We just want her to … you know… stay. Take her finals, pass her classes. And her parents-”
“Wealthy parents.”
“Her parents are very important alumni to this institution and they just want their daughter to have a good college experience. So we thought… if she had a-”
“Babysitter.”
“Roommate affiliated with the university in an official capacity and therefore under contract to not divulge personal student information-”
“Yeah, yeah. I get it. What is it with this girl? Drugs? Like what kind of weird are we talking here?”
“Well - here’s her file,” Jerry threw a thick file on the desk. “It’s a mess. I can’t make heads or tails of it. She seems to literally disappear for weeks at a time and then reappear rather the worse for wear, a bit malnourished and a little off.”
“She bit her last psychiatrist.”
“She’s feisty.”
“She was nineteen at the time.”
“Now, Dawn.”
“I’ll do it.”
“Really?!” Jerry slumped down in her chair. “Thank the gods.”
“It’s no big. Nothing is weirder than me. Trust me.”
There were a lot of things weirder than Dawn Summers.
Niaflathorn Demons, for instance. Those things are fucking weird. Like if an Ent and a penguin had a love child and covered it in bees.
Sarah Williams was definitely somewhere between a Dawn and a Niaflathorn demon. Which was pretty par on course for Dawn’s life prior to this whole college-thing she was trying.
However, in all her time away from home (and counting years of Buffy’s slob), Sarah was without a doubt the absolute worst roommate in the history of roommates.
And once Dawn had bunked with a mime.
She had least had done the dishes when asked. If a little melodramatic about the whole thing.
Nothing - absolutely nothing - compared to Sarah Williams.
Tromping through a labyrinth, Dawn wished she could go back to Jerry’s office and laugh at that thick file, request a Niaflathorn demon for a roommate instead. Or a mime. Or a fucking Slayerette if what they wanted was to torture her. At least then she’d be prepared for an inter-dimensional crisis.
This spur-of-the-moment “oh yeah my ex is a demon king” thing was seriously a pain in the ass and Dawn didn’t want any part of it.
Sarah turned and smiled, “Look! Jasmine!”
Dawn watched her roommate construct two flower crowns with what seemed like a simple flick of her wrist and then very grudgingly let Sarah crown her.
“You have such a delightfully fae-look about you,” Sarah beamed at her, admiring the handiwork of her crown perched haphazardly on Dawn’s head.
“Just what I have always longed to hear,” Dawn said grumpily, kicking a loose rock at her feet.
“Oh,” Sarah twirled a bit, her arms and hair swinging about her. “Oh silly. Every little girl dreams of being a fairy princess at least once.”
“Little girl being the operative word,” Dawn mumbled under her breath before marching on.
(Yeah, she may have had the college-life like Buffy wanted, but what of that lost childhood gone up in flames with a dozen fabricated diaries?)
note: Dawn's junior college (Snow College) is a real place and is the 2-year college my grandmother desperately wanted me to attend. She had always wanted to go there and she instilled in me this ~need to experience it. Now, Dawn's experience of this campus is probably more liberal and wild than my grandmother would ever have intended for me, but it is a perfect location and it's just the kind of small-town community college I could see Dawn choosing as a personal walkabout location.
I would like to imagine that Dawn and Sarah are at Silas University, but canon says that it is in Austria and I'd very much like to keep this in the US. Therefore, imagine that instead Dawn and Sarah are in a University close to - but not actually in - Night Vale or somewhere similar. Something ~supernatural but not quite on the level of a Hellmouth and more like the ~weird of Silas or Night Vale. If that makes logic sense?
a/n: thanks to everyone for your lovely comments. I'm dealing with nasty and nearly bi-weekly incapacitating anxiety attacks atm so comment-response is going to be a little slow while I deal with that. I'm hoping not to have to delay any of the prompts on the Feb meme, so cross your fingers that this wave of depression leaves my muse out of the war.
:*
fandom: labyrinth/btvs
pairing: sarah/dawn; sarah/jareth; (faith, buffy, andrew)
word count: 1400
recipient: happyg_rl
prompt: this being the prologue
chapter one: gaydar
[being a prologue that details dawns life until this moment and how exactly she came to be sarahs roommate in the first place]
Dawn didn’t insist on paying for college on her own - per say - but she did do the community college third-year transfer route and applied for all the scholarships that she could find.
(Andrew once asked her if that wasn’t the unfair thing, throwing around her centuries-old brain like it was just a normal eighteen-year-old’s in with the other scholarship kids, and not the taking-tainted-Council-money… which she wasn’t exactly above doing to cover the rest of the costs of living. She responded by kicking him in the shins and ignoring him for a couple of hours.)
It was mostly Buffy’s idea - which was hammered home by Faith over a too-cheap bottle or two of wine and then again the morning after with all her stomach finding its way into the bucket that somehow just existed though Dawn is not sure where or how previously to that moment when it appeared in front of her along with a mug of coffee.
“She wants you to have some kind of normalcy.”
“So she wants me to struggle?”
Faith shrugged, “That’s life, isn’t it? So you have to take a different route than you thought, maybe you’ll learn more this way.” Dawn raised her eyebrows over the glass of extra-spicy Bloody Mary. “I don’t know anything about college… but I know that if you take the easy way, you’ll turn into Giles - all stuffed shirt and Watcher material muttering in Ancient Babadook to yourself and making jokes no one laughs at.”
“No one laughs at my jokes anyway.”
“Do this the way Buffy wants. Give her this.”
“And what do I get?”
Faith considered for a minute, taking a long swallow of coffee, “Jokes that people actually understand?”
“I can always do the Oxford thing later.”
“It’s not like you don’t have the time.”
So she found a small community college in Utah to do her first two years in (it came highly recommended and it was worlds away from anyone or anything that she ever knew). The supernatural world left her alone (for the most part) only really intruding when she really, really didn’t have time for it to.
She found a job at the local library in the tutoring center for kids and also helping out at an animal shelter on the weekends. She became one of those crunchy, liberal sort of college students with piercing or two and high-minded ideals, two jobs, absent parents, and a second-hand mattress on a dirty carpet in an apartment with four other people. She went to rallies and she went to parties and she rubbed elbows with humans like she was one. She was in a band for a while, but didn’t have any musical talent so she backed out gracefully.
When her two years in isolation were up, Buffy shyly suggested that she take up residence in the Council’s Department at Oxford - they practically had a private office set up and waiting for her.
She went to school under a pseudonym and meanwhile kept publishing articles and doing translation work for the Slayers and the Council as an ‘independent scholar’ - just like any normal girl her age.
But Dawn finally had seen what it was that Buffy had wanted her to learn - and wasn’t ready to go back to the blood and the death and the mayhem.
“I can always do Oxford later. It’s not like I don’t have time.”
“I know that. I just miss you.”
“I miss you… but I gotta do this.”
“Well… please come to London for Christmas this year at least.”
“I will.”
She chose a tiny English program in a small state in a tiny town where nothing remotely interesting ever happens (she checked) (thoroughly). The perky guidance counselor found her a job at the library through work study and kept pushing the idea of becoming an RA and living in the dorms to save money. Dawn finally relented with an eye roll and a shrug, how hard could it be?
The first week, not really actually. Easy as pie. A few too many meetings with ridiculous names and she could live without the overwhelming sense of responsibility that seemed to be hanging over her head at all times… but it wasn’t really all that different from living in a Slayerette Central. Maybe less kickboxing and a lot more coffee and ice cream, but she only had two years left before she was back in the land of bruises and midnight donut runs so this actually felt
And then she was called down to the guidance office to discuss her future at the university, which was cryptic and weird and not a little terrifying. The perky counselor and a team of suits stared at her and asked her a bunch of really strange questions that didn’t at all seem related to her ability to govern a floor of 10-12 eighteen year old girls.
“Jerry, what is this all about? I’ve been here for over an hour and these questions are starting to get a little creepy. Like does it really matter what kind of shampoo I use? And whether I eat bread?”
“We just…”
“Just tell me.”
“There’s this girl.”
“Yeah? Okay. That makes everything crystal clear.”
“She’s been kicked out of four different universities in the last two years for… odd behavior.”
Dawn raised her eyebrows, “You have got to be kidding me.”
“We just want her to … you know… stay. Take her finals, pass her classes. And her parents-”
“Wealthy parents.”
“Her parents are very important alumni to this institution and they just want their daughter to have a good college experience. So we thought… if she had a-”
“Babysitter.”
“Roommate affiliated with the university in an official capacity and therefore under contract to not divulge personal student information-”
“Yeah, yeah. I get it. What is it with this girl? Drugs? Like what kind of weird are we talking here?”
“Well - here’s her file,” Jerry threw a thick file on the desk. “It’s a mess. I can’t make heads or tails of it. She seems to literally disappear for weeks at a time and then reappear rather the worse for wear, a bit malnourished and a little off.”
“She bit her last psychiatrist.”
“She’s feisty.”
“She was nineteen at the time.”
“Now, Dawn.”
“I’ll do it.”
“Really?!” Jerry slumped down in her chair. “Thank the gods.”
“It’s no big. Nothing is weirder than me. Trust me.”
There were a lot of things weirder than Dawn Summers.
Niaflathorn Demons, for instance. Those things are fucking weird. Like if an Ent and a penguin had a love child and covered it in bees.
Sarah Williams was definitely somewhere between a Dawn and a Niaflathorn demon. Which was pretty par on course for Dawn’s life prior to this whole college-thing she was trying.
However, in all her time away from home (and counting years of Buffy’s slob), Sarah was without a doubt the absolute worst roommate in the history of roommates.
And once Dawn had bunked with a mime.
She had least had done the dishes when asked. If a little melodramatic about the whole thing.
Nothing - absolutely nothing - compared to Sarah Williams.
Tromping through a labyrinth, Dawn wished she could go back to Jerry’s office and laugh at that thick file, request a Niaflathorn demon for a roommate instead. Or a mime. Or a fucking Slayerette if what they wanted was to torture her. At least then she’d be prepared for an inter-dimensional crisis.
This spur-of-the-moment “oh yeah my ex is a demon king” thing was seriously a pain in the ass and Dawn didn’t want any part of it.
Sarah turned and smiled, “Look! Jasmine!”
Dawn watched her roommate construct two flower crowns with what seemed like a simple flick of her wrist and then very grudgingly let Sarah crown her.
“You have such a delightfully fae-look about you,” Sarah beamed at her, admiring the handiwork of her crown perched haphazardly on Dawn’s head.
“Just what I have always longed to hear,” Dawn said grumpily, kicking a loose rock at her feet.
“Oh,” Sarah twirled a bit, her arms and hair swinging about her. “Oh silly. Every little girl dreams of being a fairy princess at least once.”
“Little girl being the operative word,” Dawn mumbled under her breath before marching on.
(Yeah, she may have had the college-life like Buffy wanted, but what of that lost childhood gone up in flames with a dozen fabricated diaries?)
note: Dawn's junior college (Snow College) is a real place and is the 2-year college my grandmother desperately wanted me to attend. She had always wanted to go there and she instilled in me this ~need to experience it. Now, Dawn's experience of this campus is probably more liberal and wild than my grandmother would ever have intended for me, but it is a perfect location and it's just the kind of small-town community college I could see Dawn choosing as a personal walkabout location.
I would like to imagine that Dawn and Sarah are at Silas University, but canon says that it is in Austria and I'd very much like to keep this in the US. Therefore, imagine that instead Dawn and Sarah are in a University close to - but not actually in - Night Vale or somewhere similar. Something ~supernatural but not quite on the level of a Hellmouth and more like the ~weird of Silas or Night Vale. If that makes logic sense?
a/n: thanks to everyone for your lovely comments. I'm dealing with nasty and nearly bi-weekly incapacitating anxiety attacks atm so comment-response is going to be a little slow while I deal with that. I'm hoping not to have to delay any of the prompts on the Feb meme, so cross your fingers that this wave of depression leaves my muse out of the war.
:*