characters/pairing(s): maleka/harth, dawn/illyria, dawn/buffy, river/simon

rating: pg-13

spoilers: for Fray comics, Buffy comics (AU after The Long Way Home arc), Ats (non-comics compliant), Firefly (up to Safe, small BDM foreshadowing)

warning(s): Whedoncest, man. Lots and lots of whedoncest.

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Mel talks to herself.

Wacky Slayer side effect or maybe just the headcase in her finally coming out, but either way, walking the warrens is not the easy task it once was. Distractions abound.

She keeps stopping for puddles.

"Melaka," she says gravely to her reflection, tracing the watery imprint of her face with decisive fingers, "We need to talk. Ever since you got the shit kicked out of you by a vampire who turned out to be your own flesh and blood, you've changed."

Moonlight stains the water gold as she stands, and for a second, she feels impossibly strong and lithe in the pale starlight. Haddyn hasn't seen a tree in, oh, say, a hundred years but Mel knows all the names from the nature vids and Mama used to tell her she was strong like an oak but white like a birch. Mel pictures reaching for the sky, spreading her arms like branches, waiting for lightning to come crack her down the middle.

"Strong like an Amazon," she decides and it doesn't even matter anymore that she has no clue what that even means. Sometimes words that aren't her own come from someplace deep in her belly, someplace rich and musky and dark like history. Big guy with horns came along and gave her a destiny and now all she can do is take what comes with the territory. Trawl for lurks and wonder if she's more than the measure of her own fists, more than a sum of all those prophecies that are ingrained in her very blood.

(Harth got the dreams, but Mel got the tingle at the back of her neck, the sense-memory and the sickness when vampires get too close.)

Not like Mel ever really knew what her measure was, even before s