Ficlet - Just Dancing (Faith/Dawn)
Title: Just Dancing
Author: clawofcat & only_passenger
Timing: S7 during “Empty Places”
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Faith/Dawn
Words: 799
Summary: When the Potentials need to blow off steam, Faith takes the girls out to the Bronze. A dance with Dawn gets her more than she bargained for.
A/N: For snowpuppies, who asked for a Faith/Dawn drabble. About a year and a half ago, only_passenger and I were messing around and decided to co-write, as an exercise, a series of related vignettes featuring Faith. This scene was one of those vignettes. Part of the challenge was to merge our writing styles together to form a cohesive narrative voice. For those of you familiar with both our work and/or styles, feel free to try and guess who wrote which part.
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She’s gotta say she’s impressed. The girl’s got moves. Sipping on her beer from across the room, Faith finds she can’t take her eyes off of Dawn grinding against Willow’s new prep-school, Richie Rich reject. Sixteen was a couple of years back for her, but she remembers that first taste of freedom only another girl can kick up in you. Wasn’t until Sunnydale that she sampled the crazy high of trading blows and dancing fierce with another Slayer.
First time she met Buff, it was right here. Place looked a little seedier, beer was a little cheaper, lights a little dimmer, but it’s the same desperate high school and college crowd that always littered the joint. Casting a glance over at this gangly girl - a girl important enough for B to call final curtain for - she decides it’s time for some one on one. No Watchers or Potentials to cramp her style.
Sidling closer to the kid with a few ass shakes and pelvic thrusts against the slavering dudes giving her hungry eyes gets the blood going. She easily falls in step with Dawn, sandwiching up against her back as Kennedy gyrates and takes the front. Dawn throws her head back and smiles a little at her, giving Faith the go ahead to get more physical. Not a stuck up priss like her sis, check.
Faith’s a touch surprised when the kid bumps her ass back into her groin with a twitch of her hips. A smirk breaks out as she loops her arm around Dawn’s stomach, tilts her crotch forward and slides along, matching her pace. She stares at Kennedy over Dawn’s shoulder, enjoying this whole sitch far too much. Leaning against her neck, she draws in a breath and whispers against her ear.
“Like the moves, Sunny D. Big sister show you how?”
“Yeah, right.” Dawn cranes her neck back-and damn’s it long-to respond. “Like Buffy’d ever dance like this. The girl thing alone would wig her out. She kept it under wraps, but when Willow came out, she freaked.”
Faith has to chuckle, though the band drowns it out. “Was a time, Princess. Might be a thing or two you don’t know about her.”
Dawn spins, interested enough to shrug Kennedy back into the rolling sea of flesh and sweat. “Like what kind of stuff?”
Faith grins, laces her legs with Dawns like praying from the waist down. “Maybe I shouldn’t say. Your sister’s always been large with the skeletons keeping to their closets.”
“Waaaiiit.” Dawn pulls her shoulders back like she’s trying to open her peripheral vision up wide enough for a whole new reality to squeeze in. “Are you saying Buffy-”
“Not sayin’ anything, Dawn. Dancing. With jail bait, no less, so be a good little girl and mind those Ps and Qs, or else turn that tight ass a’ yours around and get back to Little Miss Upstate. This here’s the grown up table.”
Dawn slows down long enough to give Faith a good hard look before sliding her hips back into her hands. The calculating smirk-and-eyeroll combo that follows rubs Faith the wrong way. Sass like that doesn’t fly in her parts, especially not from this pipsqueak.
“You get fresh with me,” Faith warns, digging her fingers into Dawn’s waist for emphasis, “you’re gonna find that, as a rule? I give better than I get.”
Dawn just smiles, working to suppress her grin, and shakes her head to herself, hair still bouncing to the beat like a shampoo commercial.
“What?” Faith demands, grabbing Dawn by the shoulders for a single shake.
“Just,” and still with the smile, the kind you put on when you know exactly what the person in front of you has been searching for their whole life and you’ve got it stashed behind your back. “You throw this stuff about Buffy in my face, like ‘oooo, here’s little Dawn, let’s break out the power play so she knows I got the upper hand.’ Thing is, Buffy may have a closet somewhere with a couple skeletons crammed inside. But my closet? A total walk-in. So you little girl me if that’s what butters your bread, but the truth is that I have millennia on you. So before you get fresh with me, you might want to consider that your general rules aren’t gonna so much apply with me.”
Faith baulks, taken aback for a minute, lost somewhere in Dawn’s eyes, kohled ovals with a hint of green in them she’d never noticed before. Just when she thinks this one might have to get stepped outside, she feels Dawn’s hand slip into her back pocket.
“Shhhh,” Dawn whispers against Faith’s ear, the beer on her breath fogging down under Faith’s nose. “I wasn’t really saying. Just dancing, remember?”