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apocalypsos) wrote2003-09-19 10:02 pm
apocalypsos) wrote2003-09-19 10:02 pm
Entry tags:
It's not beta'd, but I got Chapter One finished and that's all right by me.
Title: An Unbearable Lightness of Brain Cells
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Buffy/Angel
Pairing: None. I swear. Witch's honor. I don't care what it looks like.
Summary: A chance meeting between Connor and Dawn results in some major life-changing damage.
Archive: Just give me fair warning.
Disclaimer: I don't own any of these characters. Otherwise, I'd be much nicer to them, with the sole exceptions of Connor and Dawn, who'd be fed to rabid mutant squirrels. But I swear I'll be nice to them in the story, honest.
Spoilers for: Angel -- "Home", Buffy -- "Chosen"
Chapter One: A Chance Meeting
When Connor Jacobs bumped into the skinny brunette as he got off the Metro, he couldn't decide whether the strange tingle he felt was annoyance or love.
Nope. No, he was definitely annoyed.
"Hey, watch where you're going," he snapped over his shoulder.
He could have sworn he heard her mutter, "Bite me, you jerk."
Somehow, between Professor Lakefield's abysmal German literature final, Tracy moving out of their apartment this weekend, and his mother's continued requests that he move back to California after he finished college, that "bite me" crack was the one that grated against his last nerve. He stopped dead halfway to the escalator and spun around. "What'd you say to me?" he yelled back.
The girl stuck her head through the open subway doors, bright blue eyes wide and a plastered-on smile just oozing sarcasm. "I hope you're devoured alive by vampires," she said sweetly, right before she ducked back into the subway car.
The Metro train sped away as Connor shook his head and seethed silently on the platform. God, what a bitch.
********
When Dawn Summers bumped into the hot frat boy as she stepped onto the Metro, she couldn't decide whether the strange tingle she felt was hunger or love.
Oh, no. That was hunger. Anybody who'd had to fight with a bunch of other people in a school bus for a medium french fry could recognize hunger right off the bat.
She stepped up to the nearest pole and grabbed a tight hold, mentally going over her art history notes as she heard a "Hey, watch where you're going!" from behind her.
Dawn rolled her eyes, so not in the mood to deal with arrogant frat guys, and said a bit louder than she'd intended, "Bite me, you jerk."
A split second later, she caught sight of the guy as he turned towards the train and glared in her general direction. "What'd you say to me?" he called out.
She grimaced and growled softly under her breath. Today was just not the day to piss her off. Giles's offers for her to join the Watchers when she graduated had gotten far too insistent, Willow kept sending her spellbooks and trinkets as if they were going out of style, and Buffy was still trying to get her to spend the summer with her in London or Budapest or wherever the hell she was training Slayers this month. So reining in her anger before she did something she'd regret, Dawn pasted on a fake smile, leaned out the open doors, and said, "I hope you're devoured alive by vampires."
The look on his face as the train raced away from the station did just that much to make her day just a wee bit brighter. Sheesh, what a jerk.
********
If he was going to be honest, Connor would have had to admit that his apartment, while not in the worst part of town, was definitely in a section that required no eye contact and a firm grip on anything you wanted to keep. Keeping his gaze lowered to avoid looking at the gang members finishing off forties in the building's parking lot, Connor ducked between a pair of Cadillacs that had seen better decades and headed up the back steps to his apartment.
He gritted his teeth at that last thought and tried not to notice the empty space in the lot where Tracy normally parked her Vespa. *His* apartment. It had been theirs until Tracy had gone to that conference for the pre-law students two months ago and met Brad. *Brad*. What the hell kind of a name was Brad? Wasn't that a nail or something?
Yeah, that sounded like Brad. Thick, flat-headed, and short.
Sighing, Connor reached into his jacket pockets for his apartment key, then stopped dead in his tracks. Where were his house keys? For that matter, he thought as he reached for his back pocket, where'd his wallet go? He could have sworn ... oh, no. That girl on the Metro had probably lifted them both. It'd be just his luck to get his pockets picked by someone who probably thought she could get away with anything. With that deceptively pretty face and those eyes, ten bucks says most people *did* let her get away with a lot of things.
Okay, that was a mental image he didn't need in his head, Connor thought with a grimace, then dropped his knapsack onto the porch and tried the living room window. He'd always been the only one who could ever get the front window to open -- the landlord had warned them the windows were painted shut when they'd moved in, but Connor had opened the front window on the first try. And just as always, he'd barely given it a tug before it slid upwards as if it ran on rails. Smiling, he tossed his knapsack inside and crawled through the window.
And froze.
Jesus, what the hell had Tracy done to their apartment?
"Oh, you've got to be kidding me," he groaned, looking around the place. All of his things -- his photos, his textbooks, his clothes, his CDs -- were gone. There wasn't even faded cartoony shadows where any of his stuff should be. He would have thought that he'd find some evidence of his existence, but a thorough search of the apartment made it look as if he'd never lived there at all.
Damn it, she'd even taken the framed photo of his parents and his sister Marcy that he'd hung in the kitchen. Connor groaned softly, then reached for the phone. As annoyed as he was with his mother's recent phone rants, this called for some serious venting, and that's what she was there for, after all.
Two rings, then his mother's familiar voice said, "Hello, Jacobs residence."
"Mom, you would not believe what Tracy did to the apartment," Connor said in a rush. "It's like she waved a magic wand and made everything that had my DNA on it vanish into another dimension or something. I swear, if I didn't know any better, I'd think Tracy lived alone with the TV and a bunch of rank-smelling law books."
There was a pause, long and unnerving, then ... "Who is this?"
Connor frowned. What was she playing at now? "Mom, it's me. Connor."
"I'm sorry, dear, you must have the wrong number."
He laughed softly, a little bit anxious. "What, did Marcy put you up to this?"
"How do you know Marcy? Look, I can assure you, if you're looking for your mother, I'm not her. I don't have a son."
It shouldn't have hit him so hard, that simple sentence said just so casually, but Connor wouldn't have been more stunned if she'd snuck up behind him and dropped a sack of bricks on his head. If this was a joke, it was about as fucked-up at it could get. He stared at the phone in something stuck between confusion and suspicion, not sure what was going on but positive it was the weirdest thing he'd ever had to deal with.
She just ... she sounded so sure. So positive that she didn't have a son.
"Sorry, I just ..." It suddenly hit him that he was holding the receiver away from him, and he whispered a "Sorry" into the speaking end. His hands shaking, Connor hung up the phone, staring at it as if it had grown tentacles and would crawl after him if he tried to walk away from him.
He started to pace, back and forth and back and forth, the same frantic round-and-round he'd done every time he'd gotten this anxious for as long as he could remember. He practically hummed with nervous energy, and he ran his fingers roughly through his long hair as he let loose with a heavy exhale. "Okay, just stay calm, Connor. Take it easy. There's got to be a logical explanation for this."
Yeah, sure. Logical. All of his wordly possessions were gone and his mother said she didn't have a son. Either there was a serious case of mass hysteria going on, or there was a camera crew stuffed into the closet.
He very nearly made a crazed dash for the coat closet when a key rattled in the lock, and he froze as Tracy walked into the living room, followed close behind by that miniature musclebound jerk loaded up with groceries. Connor had to clench his fists to keep from pouncing on the guy and pounding him through the floor -- the guy might be a gym junkie, but Connor had always been able to hold his own in a fight, even with guys twice as big as this jagoff.
"Tracy," he bit out, trying to surpress his anger. But then Tracy -- who, while she was moving onward and downward with Brad the Muscle Beach shrimp, had broken up with Connor as amicably as she could -- did something that both shocked and scared Connor to the core of his being.
She grabbed one of her basketball trophies from the shelf next to the door, held it above her head, and with an angry glare right at him, his longtime girlfriend said, "All right, who are you and what are you doing in my apartment?"
********
Hitching her messenger bag up higher on her shoulder, Dawn tossed her long brown hair out of her face and jogged towards Stafford Hall. She liked living in Stafford -- most of the other artsy types were on the first floor with her and Casey, her theater-major roommate. Casey wasn't so bad, considering she didn't snore, always replaced what she borrowed or used, and hadn't sucked out Dawn's soul while she slept like Buffy's first college roommate had.
Still, it would have been nicer if Dawn could have known that before she'd moved it. Dawn would have gladly given up the choice of smoking or non-smoking if she could have checked a box that said, "No, I do not want a roommate who howls at the moon, drinks my blood, uses any of my body parts for sick experiments or quick meals, or listens to Britney Spears." That would definitely have eliminated every form of evil she could think of, and maybe even a few that she would have been willing to room with but not to clean up after.
Dawn dashed up the steps leading up to Stafford, just in time to nearly run headlong into Casey and the girl she'd been talking to. The two of them danced around one another before Dawn laughed and stepped away. She tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear and said, "Oh, Casey, I was going to leave you a note, but could you do me a huge favor and stay over Tony's tonight? I've got my art history final on Monday and I want to --"
Her dark brown eyes narrowing, Casey frowned and said, "I'm sorry, do I know you?"
Dawn stared for a second, not understanding what Casey was trying to pull. Her roommate had never been big on surprises or pranks -- hell, she'd even argued against the first floor throwing a surprise birthday party for Dawn because *she* didn't want to deal with it. "Casey, what --" Something about the way both girls looked at her sent an eerie shiver running down Dawn's spine. A part of her brain that had stayed silent for a blissfully stretch of months suddenly awakened with a vengeance, a long-buried fear flaring to life the longer her roommate stared at her. Forcing a weak smile, Dawn said, "C'mon, quit it with the mental vacancy, would you?"
Casey's frown deepened, and her friend rolled her eyes as the pair of them exchanged a glance. "Look, I don't know you," Casey said. "And if truth be told, you're starting to move into creepy stalker territory."
Dawn didn't think, just reached out and grabbed a hold of Casey's right wrist. "Casey, I'm your roommate."
Yanking her wrist from Dawn's trembling grasp, Casey darted further away from her and massaged the spot Dawn had grabbed onto as if Dawn had left behind deranged psycho cooties. "I don't know what you're on, but the addiction clinic's two blocks down. Comprende?" She gave the girl with her a gentle nudge, and the girl stopped gaping at Dawn like an out-of-water trout. "C'mon, Tina, let's go." Both girls gave her strange, annoyed looks as they headed down the steps, the hair on the back of Dawn's neck rising with every passing moment.
What the hell was going on? How could the girl she'd spent the past year rooming with not know who she ... was ...
Her fingers shaking with quickly growing anxiety, Dawn took a deep breath and walked into the dorm, ignoring the looks of the students standing nearby. This couldn't be happening, it just ... she'd had nightmares like this for the longest time, and now, when she had a real, nearly-normal life ...
The left turn that led to her and Casey's dorm room came up quicker than she'd thought, and Dawn peered down it as if a swarm of vampires or werewolves or a crowd of Glory's minions were going to come careening around the far corner with her in their sights.
She couldn't. She just couldn't. Because if she went down the hall and there was something else on her door, another name and a different dry-erase board and somebody else's patchwork of photos, she'd crack right then and there. Heck, she'd probably shatter into a million pieces in a literal sense, and just the thought of what might be left behind if that happened settled a healthy patch of goosepimples all over her arms.
So, Dawn went straight for the pay phone.
The pay phone in back of the TV room was, as usual, deserted. Dawn was the only person in the entire dorm who didn't have a cell phone, but that was because the last thing she needed was Giles calling her during a kegger and quizzing her on weapons or Xander giving her a ring during her oceanography class and filling her in on whatever demons he and the trained Slayers had decapitated lately in Cleveland. She'd always liked to think that should the world be ending and the others be desperate for her to show up, she could be hiding out in the deepest recesses of the library, in some chair deep amongst the stacks, absolutely and totally unreachable. One too many apocalypses will do that to a person.
Dialing the 1-800 number and code for her phone card, Dawn couldn't help but feel grateful for some reason when the automated voice prompted her to dial without giving her any hassle about the validity of it all. Something told her she should be amazed it had worked, and she had to bite back a "Yes!" as she dialed the phone number Buffy had given her the last time they'd talked.
A moment later, her sister's voice carried over the phone lines. "Hello, Buffy Summers speaking."
"Buffy?"
"Yes. Who's this?"
Dawn's heart sank just a little bit in her chest, and her lips moved, but no sounds came out.
"Hello?"
Clearing her throat, Dawn managed a raspy, "It's Dawn." Then, that sinking feeling in her chest getting downright abysmal, she added, "You know, your sister."
Dawn thought she heard a choking sound, but she couldn't be sure. "I don't have a sister," Buffy said. "Sorry, you've got the wrong number."
The next sound that Dawn heard was the sharp click of a receiver being hung up.
Taking deep, fast breaths that she didn't dare call hyperventilating, Dawn thrust the pay phone's receiver back towards the phone, not noticing when it dropped to dangle from side to side by the cord. All she could do was exhale and inhale harshly, a woozy feeling overcoming her. Her roommate didn't remember her. Her sister ... oh, God, Buffy had thrown herself off a tower for her and died for her and Buffy didn't *remember* her.
And then Dawn did the only thing she could think of.
She fainted.
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Buffy/Angel
Pairing: None. I swear. Witch's honor. I don't care what it looks like.
Summary: A chance meeting between Connor and Dawn results in some major life-changing damage.
Archive: Just give me fair warning.
Disclaimer: I don't own any of these characters. Otherwise, I'd be much nicer to them, with the sole exceptions of Connor and Dawn, who'd be fed to rabid mutant squirrels. But I swear I'll be nice to them in the story, honest.
Spoilers for: Angel -- "Home", Buffy -- "Chosen"
Chapter One: A Chance Meeting
When Connor Jacobs bumped into the skinny brunette as he got off the Metro, he couldn't decide whether the strange tingle he felt was annoyance or love.
Nope. No, he was definitely annoyed.
"Hey, watch where you're going," he snapped over his shoulder.
He could have sworn he heard her mutter, "Bite me, you jerk."
Somehow, between Professor Lakefield's abysmal German literature final, Tracy moving out of their apartment this weekend, and his mother's continued requests that he move back to California after he finished college, that "bite me" crack was the one that grated against his last nerve. He stopped dead halfway to the escalator and spun around. "What'd you say to me?" he yelled back.
The girl stuck her head through the open subway doors, bright blue eyes wide and a plastered-on smile just oozing sarcasm. "I hope you're devoured alive by vampires," she said sweetly, right before she ducked back into the subway car.
The Metro train sped away as Connor shook his head and seethed silently on the platform. God, what a bitch.
********
When Dawn Summers bumped into the hot frat boy as she stepped onto the Metro, she couldn't decide whether the strange tingle she felt was hunger or love.
Oh, no. That was hunger. Anybody who'd had to fight with a bunch of other people in a school bus for a medium french fry could recognize hunger right off the bat.
She stepped up to the nearest pole and grabbed a tight hold, mentally going over her art history notes as she heard a "Hey, watch where you're going!" from behind her.
Dawn rolled her eyes, so not in the mood to deal with arrogant frat guys, and said a bit louder than she'd intended, "Bite me, you jerk."
A split second later, she caught sight of the guy as he turned towards the train and glared in her general direction. "What'd you say to me?" he called out.
She grimaced and growled softly under her breath. Today was just not the day to piss her off. Giles's offers for her to join the Watchers when she graduated had gotten far too insistent, Willow kept sending her spellbooks and trinkets as if they were going out of style, and Buffy was still trying to get her to spend the summer with her in London or Budapest or wherever the hell she was training Slayers this month. So reining in her anger before she did something she'd regret, Dawn pasted on a fake smile, leaned out the open doors, and said, "I hope you're devoured alive by vampires."
The look on his face as the train raced away from the station did just that much to make her day just a wee bit brighter. Sheesh, what a jerk.
********
If he was going to be honest, Connor would have had to admit that his apartment, while not in the worst part of town, was definitely in a section that required no eye contact and a firm grip on anything you wanted to keep. Keeping his gaze lowered to avoid looking at the gang members finishing off forties in the building's parking lot, Connor ducked between a pair of Cadillacs that had seen better decades and headed up the back steps to his apartment.
He gritted his teeth at that last thought and tried not to notice the empty space in the lot where Tracy normally parked her Vespa. *His* apartment. It had been theirs until Tracy had gone to that conference for the pre-law students two months ago and met Brad. *Brad*. What the hell kind of a name was Brad? Wasn't that a nail or something?
Yeah, that sounded like Brad. Thick, flat-headed, and short.
Sighing, Connor reached into his jacket pockets for his apartment key, then stopped dead in his tracks. Where were his house keys? For that matter, he thought as he reached for his back pocket, where'd his wallet go? He could have sworn ... oh, no. That girl on the Metro had probably lifted them both. It'd be just his luck to get his pockets picked by someone who probably thought she could get away with anything. With that deceptively pretty face and those eyes, ten bucks says most people *did* let her get away with a lot of things.
Okay, that was a mental image he didn't need in his head, Connor thought with a grimace, then dropped his knapsack onto the porch and tried the living room window. He'd always been the only one who could ever get the front window to open -- the landlord had warned them the windows were painted shut when they'd moved in, but Connor had opened the front window on the first try. And just as always, he'd barely given it a tug before it slid upwards as if it ran on rails. Smiling, he tossed his knapsack inside and crawled through the window.
And froze.
Jesus, what the hell had Tracy done to their apartment?
"Oh, you've got to be kidding me," he groaned, looking around the place. All of his things -- his photos, his textbooks, his clothes, his CDs -- were gone. There wasn't even faded cartoony shadows where any of his stuff should be. He would have thought that he'd find some evidence of his existence, but a thorough search of the apartment made it look as if he'd never lived there at all.
Damn it, she'd even taken the framed photo of his parents and his sister Marcy that he'd hung in the kitchen. Connor groaned softly, then reached for the phone. As annoyed as he was with his mother's recent phone rants, this called for some serious venting, and that's what she was there for, after all.
Two rings, then his mother's familiar voice said, "Hello, Jacobs residence."
"Mom, you would not believe what Tracy did to the apartment," Connor said in a rush. "It's like she waved a magic wand and made everything that had my DNA on it vanish into another dimension or something. I swear, if I didn't know any better, I'd think Tracy lived alone with the TV and a bunch of rank-smelling law books."
There was a pause, long and unnerving, then ... "Who is this?"
Connor frowned. What was she playing at now? "Mom, it's me. Connor."
"I'm sorry, dear, you must have the wrong number."
He laughed softly, a little bit anxious. "What, did Marcy put you up to this?"
"How do you know Marcy? Look, I can assure you, if you're looking for your mother, I'm not her. I don't have a son."
It shouldn't have hit him so hard, that simple sentence said just so casually, but Connor wouldn't have been more stunned if she'd snuck up behind him and dropped a sack of bricks on his head. If this was a joke, it was about as fucked-up at it could get. He stared at the phone in something stuck between confusion and suspicion, not sure what was going on but positive it was the weirdest thing he'd ever had to deal with.
She just ... she sounded so sure. So positive that she didn't have a son.
"Sorry, I just ..." It suddenly hit him that he was holding the receiver away from him, and he whispered a "Sorry" into the speaking end. His hands shaking, Connor hung up the phone, staring at it as if it had grown tentacles and would crawl after him if he tried to walk away from him.
He started to pace, back and forth and back and forth, the same frantic round-and-round he'd done every time he'd gotten this anxious for as long as he could remember. He practically hummed with nervous energy, and he ran his fingers roughly through his long hair as he let loose with a heavy exhale. "Okay, just stay calm, Connor. Take it easy. There's got to be a logical explanation for this."
Yeah, sure. Logical. All of his wordly possessions were gone and his mother said she didn't have a son. Either there was a serious case of mass hysteria going on, or there was a camera crew stuffed into the closet.
He very nearly made a crazed dash for the coat closet when a key rattled in the lock, and he froze as Tracy walked into the living room, followed close behind by that miniature musclebound jerk loaded up with groceries. Connor had to clench his fists to keep from pouncing on the guy and pounding him through the floor -- the guy might be a gym junkie, but Connor had always been able to hold his own in a fight, even with guys twice as big as this jagoff.
"Tracy," he bit out, trying to surpress his anger. But then Tracy -- who, while she was moving onward and downward with Brad the Muscle Beach shrimp, had broken up with Connor as amicably as she could -- did something that both shocked and scared Connor to the core of his being.
She grabbed one of her basketball trophies from the shelf next to the door, held it above her head, and with an angry glare right at him, his longtime girlfriend said, "All right, who are you and what are you doing in my apartment?"
********
Hitching her messenger bag up higher on her shoulder, Dawn tossed her long brown hair out of her face and jogged towards Stafford Hall. She liked living in Stafford -- most of the other artsy types were on the first floor with her and Casey, her theater-major roommate. Casey wasn't so bad, considering she didn't snore, always replaced what she borrowed or used, and hadn't sucked out Dawn's soul while she slept like Buffy's first college roommate had.
Still, it would have been nicer if Dawn could have known that before she'd moved it. Dawn would have gladly given up the choice of smoking or non-smoking if she could have checked a box that said, "No, I do not want a roommate who howls at the moon, drinks my blood, uses any of my body parts for sick experiments or quick meals, or listens to Britney Spears." That would definitely have eliminated every form of evil she could think of, and maybe even a few that she would have been willing to room with but not to clean up after.
Dawn dashed up the steps leading up to Stafford, just in time to nearly run headlong into Casey and the girl she'd been talking to. The two of them danced around one another before Dawn laughed and stepped away. She tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear and said, "Oh, Casey, I was going to leave you a note, but could you do me a huge favor and stay over Tony's tonight? I've got my art history final on Monday and I want to --"
Her dark brown eyes narrowing, Casey frowned and said, "I'm sorry, do I know you?"
Dawn stared for a second, not understanding what Casey was trying to pull. Her roommate had never been big on surprises or pranks -- hell, she'd even argued against the first floor throwing a surprise birthday party for Dawn because *she* didn't want to deal with it. "Casey, what --" Something about the way both girls looked at her sent an eerie shiver running down Dawn's spine. A part of her brain that had stayed silent for a blissfully stretch of months suddenly awakened with a vengeance, a long-buried fear flaring to life the longer her roommate stared at her. Forcing a weak smile, Dawn said, "C'mon, quit it with the mental vacancy, would you?"
Casey's frown deepened, and her friend rolled her eyes as the pair of them exchanged a glance. "Look, I don't know you," Casey said. "And if truth be told, you're starting to move into creepy stalker territory."
Dawn didn't think, just reached out and grabbed a hold of Casey's right wrist. "Casey, I'm your roommate."
Yanking her wrist from Dawn's trembling grasp, Casey darted further away from her and massaged the spot Dawn had grabbed onto as if Dawn had left behind deranged psycho cooties. "I don't know what you're on, but the addiction clinic's two blocks down. Comprende?" She gave the girl with her a gentle nudge, and the girl stopped gaping at Dawn like an out-of-water trout. "C'mon, Tina, let's go." Both girls gave her strange, annoyed looks as they headed down the steps, the hair on the back of Dawn's neck rising with every passing moment.
What the hell was going on? How could the girl she'd spent the past year rooming with not know who she ... was ...
Her fingers shaking with quickly growing anxiety, Dawn took a deep breath and walked into the dorm, ignoring the looks of the students standing nearby. This couldn't be happening, it just ... she'd had nightmares like this for the longest time, and now, when she had a real, nearly-normal life ...
The left turn that led to her and Casey's dorm room came up quicker than she'd thought, and Dawn peered down it as if a swarm of vampires or werewolves or a crowd of Glory's minions were going to come careening around the far corner with her in their sights.
She couldn't. She just couldn't. Because if she went down the hall and there was something else on her door, another name and a different dry-erase board and somebody else's patchwork of photos, she'd crack right then and there. Heck, she'd probably shatter into a million pieces in a literal sense, and just the thought of what might be left behind if that happened settled a healthy patch of goosepimples all over her arms.
So, Dawn went straight for the pay phone.
The pay phone in back of the TV room was, as usual, deserted. Dawn was the only person in the entire dorm who didn't have a cell phone, but that was because the last thing she needed was Giles calling her during a kegger and quizzing her on weapons or Xander giving her a ring during her oceanography class and filling her in on whatever demons he and the trained Slayers had decapitated lately in Cleveland. She'd always liked to think that should the world be ending and the others be desperate for her to show up, she could be hiding out in the deepest recesses of the library, in some chair deep amongst the stacks, absolutely and totally unreachable. One too many apocalypses will do that to a person.
Dialing the 1-800 number and code for her phone card, Dawn couldn't help but feel grateful for some reason when the automated voice prompted her to dial without giving her any hassle about the validity of it all. Something told her she should be amazed it had worked, and she had to bite back a "Yes!" as she dialed the phone number Buffy had given her the last time they'd talked.
A moment later, her sister's voice carried over the phone lines. "Hello, Buffy Summers speaking."
"Buffy?"
"Yes. Who's this?"
Dawn's heart sank just a little bit in her chest, and her lips moved, but no sounds came out.
"Hello?"
Clearing her throat, Dawn managed a raspy, "It's Dawn." Then, that sinking feeling in her chest getting downright abysmal, she added, "You know, your sister."
Dawn thought she heard a choking sound, but she couldn't be sure. "I don't have a sister," Buffy said. "Sorry, you've got the wrong number."
The next sound that Dawn heard was the sharp click of a receiver being hung up.
Taking deep, fast breaths that she didn't dare call hyperventilating, Dawn thrust the pay phone's receiver back towards the phone, not noticing when it dropped to dangle from side to side by the cord. All she could do was exhale and inhale harshly, a woozy feeling overcoming her. Her roommate didn't remember her. Her sister ... oh, God, Buffy had thrown herself off a tower for her and died for her and Buffy didn't *remember* her.
And then Dawn did the only thing she could think of.
She fainted.