![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
choco_cherries: Suns of a Thousand Worlds
Fandoms: Buffyverse/Doctor Who
Characters/Pairings: Dawn/Ten
Rating: PG
Timeline: post-"Chosen"/post-"Doomsday"
Challenge entry:
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif){kind=small}
choco_cherries Wordcount: 500
Prompt: Unrequited
Summary: "She'd gotten used to the shadows, but she'd never accepted them. The suns of a thousand worlds and times? So much better."
Buffy used to drone on and on, those last months in Sunnydale, about instinct. Her epic motivational speeches—which usually ended up scaring the Potentials more than inspiring them—seem to Dawn to be the soundtrack of that last year: Buffy, arms crossed, feet shoulder-width apart like Riley used to stand, touting things like teamwork and courage and duty, a new lecture every day (Dawn had prayed that Spike would rub off on her—he’d always had the ability to take five words of startlingly distilled truth and hurl them at you like a brick, which would have been much more useful to the Slayer-wannabes than Buffy’s not-exactly-St.-Crispin’s-Day speeches). But always she spoke about the importance of instinct.
Dawn could have told her that. She’s been running on instinct for years now, and it’s only when she doesn’t listen to it that she gets in trouble.
(She’s still not sure about the whole Key-thing, if she’s even still the Key or if she wants to be, but something tells her that her instincts are thousands of years old green-shiny-Keyness, not eighteen-year-old Dawn Summerness.)
--
So when she sees him, lounging against a ridiculously out-of-place blue box, a kind she’s never seen before, and she feels the tug, she walks toward him.
(He isn’t her type at all. She’s all about these Italian hunks, dark eyes and dimples and waves of dark hair, tans and muscles and romantic accents. He’s way geeky, and the tennis shoes-with-a-suit look? Her
(Also? Nobody has to explain to her about bigger-on-the-inside.)
--
Their worlds don’t quite match up, though they’re close enough that she’s rarely really scared and he appreciates how she stays calm in a crisis (there are lots of those. Nothing new). But there are differences: other than that Queller demon that tried to kill Mom, Dawn’s never seen an alien, and he stays pretty far away from vampires, though his story about Queen Victoria and the werewolf is one she files away to tell Willow. Eventually. When she goes back. If she does.
(For the first time she feels like she has something of her own, something that’s good and not causing destruction to everyone around her. She’d gotten used to the shadows, but she’d never accepted them. The suns of a thousand worlds and times? So much better.)
--
He takes her to the world without shrimp.
She squeals that she loves him, like teenage girls do.
(She means it.)
--
Sometimes she thinks he might love her, but other times he’ll remind her, suddenly, jarringly of just how alien he is, and at those times, she thinks he doesn’t love like humans do at all.
Somehow, that makes her feel slightly better.
(That way it isn’t about her.)
--
She knows it will end. Not the adventures because, after all, this is her life.
But him. The “with him” part will end.
(For the first time, she’s petrified.)
.
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
It was my first Doctor Who-y one, so I was a bit nervous.
no subject
no subject
no subject
dfkjd ♥
sorry it took me so long to reply--i've been hiatus-ing
et it kind of fade to black, which is just so perfect for traveling with the Doctor Oh, good! I wasn't sure about the ending. I thought it was fitting, but I wasn't sure if anyone else would think so. You've eased my mind.
And have I made you speechless? *blushes* I was a bit nervous as this was the first time I've ever written Doctor Who, so it's so gratifying to know that you enjoyed it.