On Lockdown

[madimpossibledreamer]

Main Points:
Buffy/Yakuza AU (Slayer's Mad Whelp)
Chapter Summary: Dawn feels like a prisoner.  It's not entirely teenage angst.
Word Count: 1104
Rating: Teen
Warning: some transphobia from Joyce and Hank Summers.

        Dawn isn’t allowed.  That might sound like a particularly angsty teenager thing to say, to cut it off there, but it’s true.  It’s easier to count and requires less fingers to count the number of things she can do.  She’s allowed to go to school and do homework.  She’s allowed to eat the meals her mom prepares for her, and she’s allowed to wear the clothes she picked out.  That’s it.
        At first, it felt like she had this nice big space to play around in that just keeps getting tighter and tighter until she’s in one of those tiny isolation cells.  The first changes had made sense.  No more shopping on her own, and then more generally just no more shopping trips in general.  That had been about the shoplifting, and specifically the getting caught of the shoplifting.  Most of that was imposed by the shopkeepers.  She got that, though she suspects that’s also what kicked off the ‘control what Dawn wears’ thing.  She’d gotten a few goth outfits.  Buffy threw a fit.  She’d gotten a few punk outfits, and no Mom, they’re not the same thing, but that wasn’t allowed either.  She was to dress like a good girl, a normal girl, like any of them are really anything like normal.
        She’d also gotten in trouble for piercing her ears without permission, even though she’d saved up her allowance and been safe about that one.  Tattoos like Xander’s are preemptively banned.  Tattoos in general are preemptively banned.
        She’s also not allowed to become a Slayer.  Like, duh, it’s not a choice.  She doesn’t have the superpowers.  Of course she’s not gonna be a Slayer.  But she’s also not allowed to help out anymore.  Mom found out that Mr. Giles had been letting her translate some of the texts, something she’s good at, and they’d argued about that.  They’d argued about a lot recently.
        She’s supposed to make school friends, but no, not those friends.  She actually gets along with Andrew, who understands her.  They both could have gone really wrong if not for Xander.  And there’s others, others who know about what Sunnydale really is and want to learn to protect themselves, but she’s just supposed to shove her head in the sand and that’s somehow supposed to keep her safe.  Warnings and trying to get teachers in on the act can only go so far, though, and some of her friends can buy clothes for her and let her change sometimes.  Though the teachers do snitch about that one.  But she is allowed to be herself there, at least.
        And just to show how…off…Mom’s priorities are, the Allowed Babysitting group now only includes Buffy, Willow or Tara, or Spike.  Don’t get her wrong, she loves Spike, he’s great, but he’s still a vampire.  Mr. Giles isn’t allowed because Mom thinks he’ll just ignore her instructions and let her translate again (get real, he thinks it’s a terrible decision but it doesn’t mean he’d just ignore it), and Xander or Ria are very carefully Not On The List.  Which, a vampire being more trustworthy than the Giles?  Just because Mom likes him and he’s nice to her.  That’s all.
        And okay, she’s a little less angry knowing part of it is that Hank is applying pressure and threatening to take them with no actual intention of following through, just trying to freak Mom out, but still.  It sucks.
        Because they’re ‘bad influences’.  Mom carefully doesn’t say it, but it’s because of the whole genderfluid thing.  That, and the crush.  She doesn’t want to come across as a bigot, which is why she trips over herself to be suffocatingly welcoming and show how okay she is with the lesbian couple, because she just doesn’t know what to do with them and that’s better than the disapproval she tries to hide.
        Mom really doesn’t like anything outside of ‘normal’, is the thing.  Which is why she struggles so hard with Buffy, and why there’s suddenly all this pressure on Dawn.  She gets it, but it doesn’t make everything okay suddenly, either.
        Because Dawn knows.  Xander and Ria treat her like a little sister.  Because Spike treats both Dawn and Xander or Ria the same way, too.  They’ve actually actively talked about it, Xander surprisingly picking up the courage before Ria and hesitantly apologizing, but “…I don’t like you the way you like me.”
        She’d promptly insisted on still being friends, because duh, that’s a no-brainer, just because Giles Junior doesn’t like her back isn’t a reason to cut them out of her life, they’re amazing.  He’d looked surprised, but hey, it went well.
        It’s just that everyone around them—Mom, Buffy, even Willow—keeps thinking that they’ll change their mind, or that Dawn will keep pushing.  Honestly, sadly, she gets the feeling she’s more mature about relationships than all of them combined.  There’s more to relationships than romance, and they really should’ve figured that out by now.
        She does feel a little special, in the way that she can pick out whether it’s Xander or Ria almost immediately.  It’s something about the stance, the word choice, a little of the pitch.  Spike’s great about it too.  Mr. Giles is trying and has a higher batting average than the rest, climbing ever higher, but that parallels his parenting, probably, and his child doesn’t seem to mind, so that’s fine.
        In return, they understand her.  Like, “the problem with the shoplifting bit is in the getting caught.”  Okay, so there might be a little truth in the ‘bad influence’ bit, but still, the way Mom worded it and the timing was pretty suspect.
        “Sure, but how am I supposed to practice, then?” she asks, frustrated, and Xander replies with an exaggerated blink that’s probably supposed to be a one-eyed wink.
        “You’re a smart girl.  You’ll figure it out.”  He fiddles with one of the clip-on earrings, and that does, in fact, give her ideas.  She swipes them when he takes them off later, getting her to bed, and wears them almost for a straight week.  And then, with the limited places she’s allowed to go and people she’s allowed to see, she doesn’t get the chance to return them, and she’d give it to, say, Tara, to pass along, but Willow’s almost always there too and she’d insist on Dawn explaining and that would just be really awkward and probably get them both in trouble.
       At least it's easier to practice and it's almost too easy, because they're too busy lecturing the her they think her to be to pay attention to who she actually is.