Sisters
by Gale

There are bits and pieces of her scattered all over the house -- not literally, of course, which is a nice change of pace. A shirt in the laundry pile, six-hundred dollar sandals next to Buffy's fifty-dollar ones in the closet, CD's piled high in random spots. Not carelessly, though. Dawn knows that's probably how it would look to someone else. It's just that Britney's got a lot of stuff -- a lot; Anya's jealous -- and it's easy to misplace things when you have that many of them. And it's not like Buffy minds. They're little pieces of Britney to hold onto when the girl herself isn't there, which is most of the time.

Willow minds, though. Dawn can see it in her eyes sometimes, when no one else is looking. She glares at Britney when she's there, curled against Buffy's side while they watch Lady and the Tramp. The mention of Britney's name makes Willow roll her eyes so hard Giles can probably hear it in England. She complains loudly when Britney uses the last of the orange juice, even though Buffy does the same thing all the time, and plays Eminem as loud as she can stand it when Britney's there, even though everyone knows Willow doesn't like his music. It's petty.

Britney spends as much time in Sunnydale as she can, when she's not on tour or recording or doing promotional, famous-person-type stuff. Buffy doesn't like it, says that it's dangerous, but she knows why. Fame doesn't reach Sunnydale the same way it does everywhere else; part and parcel of living on a Hellmouth. Buffy can walk down the street with her girlfriend on her arm, sneaking sips of her gingerbread latte, and no one will say boo to either one of them. Britney doesn't even have to wear hats when she goes outside to get the mail.

And she's nice, too, a lot nicer than Dawn figured she would be. She helps Dawn with her history homework, and teaches her how to put on makeup without looking skanky -- "I don't get to do this a lot. They like me looking skanky" -- and makes really, really good hot chocolate. Her accent seems heavier in real life, but not so heavy that she sounds fake. She wears comfy sweaters around the house, and shirts that don't show off her abs, and oversized sunglasses with pink lenses.

The cross Buffy gave her on their first date glimmers against the gray of the sweater, like self-contained sunlight.

 

Third time, she'd always heard, was the charm.

Except that it hadn't been, in Spike's case, because while he was really good in bed, and handy when it came to beating things senseless or dead, there wasn't much else there. They'd parted amiacably, if not exactly as friends, and still had sex sometimes.

Until the night she'd seen a blonde girl leaving the Bronze, and slayed the vampire trying to attack her, and fallen in love so hard it almost knocked her over.

Not that it wasn't weird, because it was. She'd had some stray thoughts, yeah, but no more than that, even with Willow and Tara two feet away at any given time. But she'd been strictly for the boys, as Angel and Riley and Spike -- and, yeah, Parker too, and hadn't that been a mistake -- could attest to.

This was better, though. There were no weird plays for power, no shows of dominance: me man, you Slayer, me protect. Britney was perfectly happy to let Buffy go out and fulfill her sacred duty every night, as long as she came back at the end of the night. That was the deal: Britney didn't break Buffy's heart, and Buffy didn't die. Again.

The one time Buffy had tried to explain it, it had come out strange and wrong and a lot like somebody from John Edward. But Britney had just listened and nodded in the right places, and stroked Buffy's hair away from her forehead, and finally said, "No, I get it. It's like singing."

That had earned her a strange upside-down Buffy look, so Britney had gone on. "I've been doing this since I was a kid," she said, scooting back a little. Buffy'd sat up then, scooting to her own side of the couch. "And I can't ever think about doing something else, like going to college or being a mom or something. I mean, I can, a little, but it's abstracts, y'know? But sometimes I just want it all to stop so I can go on and be normal -- go to college, have a girlfriend without the whole world butting in." And she'd squeezed Buffy's hand. "And if I got that, and then got dragged back to this, and didn't know if I could ever have that again...Yeah, Buffy. I get it. It's like singing."

And it was. And she did.

 

She can't really watch MTV anymore. It's weird to hear Carson talking to Justin Timberlake on the phone, supposedly on vacation with Britney, and know that Buffy was on the other line, telling her girlfriend about the vamps she'd dusted the night before. Britney likes to hear about stuff like that. She's very proud of Buffy.

Dawn's actually met *NSYNC a couple of times. She turns bright red when Chris reminds her that the first time she and Tara came across the five of them having coffee with Buffy -- "just wanted to see if she's as cool as Brit says. And she just killed something!" -- she almost hyperventilated. Please. He's exaggerating. It was exciting, yeah, but not that exciting. He's just being a weird old man. Like, not Giles-weird.

Sometimes they stay over, when they're passing through on their way to LA. Willow grumbles and disappears to stay with Amy until they're gone, which is just fine with Dawn. With Willow gone, there's no one to complain about JC taking 45-minute showers or Joey deciding to make lasagna at 3 in the morning.

And when she's sitting around the kitchen table, surrounded by her sister, her friends, and six really, really, really famous people, she realizes that if this is weird, it's not so bad.

 

Justin, Buffy decides, would have made a pretty good Slayer if he'd been born a girl. He moves fast enough, and he's light on his feet, and he's got the intensity. He also sleeps really late and uses the rest of the milk for his cereal, so she'd probably have kicked his ass out of town before he could so much as brandish a pickaxe at her, so maybe it's a good thing that he's not one.

 

The world, Britney realized a long time ago, wasn't a terribly fair place. If it had been fair, artistic merit would have been the sole basis for judgment, and it wouldn't have mattered whether or not she had a girlfriend. She wouldn't have had to lie to the world from the time she was 14 on.

But since the world isn't fair, she dates Justin.

That's as far as the rest of the world knows, anyway. They go to awards shows together, and premieres, and get photographed doing things that most people wouldn't blink twice at: getting coffee, driving down the street. He "happens in" on her recording sessions, and kisses her when the cameras are on, and makes long, flowering speeches about thinking about her when he wakes up in the morning and wondering where she is. It's really very pretty.

And so is her girlfriend.

That's the great thing about Sunnydale, demons and evil witches and vampires aside. That part sucks. No, the cool part is that no one seems to notice anything here. She's not Britney here, she's just Britney, Buffy Summers' little-bit-older girlfriend who lives out of town and travels a lot, and visits when she can. The clerks at the library smile when she comes in, and ask how she's been, and don't seem to notice that the girl they're talking to is the girl on the cover of Teen People not thirty feet away.

When she's on the road, Buffy calls almost every day. Sometimes, she sounds a little tired or achey, and Britney has to drag it out of her: yes, she almost died; no, she didn't actually die; and if Britney wants to write her a song in which the object of her affections is a girl, well, that would be just fine, yes ma'am.

Britney gets worried when Buffy makes those calls. (Not about the song; she's got about seven piled away, ready to show Buffy the next time she's in Sunnydale. Only one, she thinks, is really sucky.) She's only human, no matter how strong she is, and that means something bad's going to happen to her some day. She's going to get sick, or a lead pipe through her sternum, and boom! dead. And not magic-resurrection-spell dead, either. Forever-dead, the kind that makes Britney's mouth go dry.

Because Buffy's not supposed to be dead, ever, even in a hundred years. Even in a thousand. She's supposed to just -- be, and never stop. There should be bodyguards fifteen deep protecting her -- or armies, maybe. Valkyries. Amazons. Big, strong women, armed with spears and swords and maybe some automatic machine guns. Anything, anything at all, as long as Buffy's all right.

But that's not the way it works. Buffy explained it to her on their second date while she was wringing Polgara demon mucous out of her (new!) cashmere sweater: one Slayer dies, the next one is called. Buffy's been dead twice before. Third time probably won't be the charm.

So every time she goes to Sunnydale, it's like it's the last time. Britney hugs Dawn as hard as she can, and goes to Claire's with her, and teaches her to dance. She flirts with Tara, which is harmless and mild because they both know Britney's heart is Buffy's, and besides, Tara likes dark-haired girls. She offers to smuggle videotapes of Justin and JC making out backstage at the VMA's to Anya, who responds with enthusiasm so strong it makes Xander go pale.

And she curls up on the couch, her head in Buffy's lap, and eats low-fat popcorn with her, and prays that this won't be the last time she does it.

 

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