My heart is pierced by cupid; I disdain all glittering gold

[simplestgift]

Who: tothelibrary and noprevaricating.
What: Stretching Dawn's legs after her mallynap.
When: July 11, early morning, before it gets hot.
Where: The forest path, not far from town.
Summary: Archie wants to make sure Dawn has lots of sensory experiences after being kept in a cell for a few weeks. And by "sensory experiences," we mean "intentions here are totally chaste please Buffy do not kill me."
Rating: It's flipping Dawn and Archie. Inevitably it will end up so disgustingly sweet your teeth will rot just from reading this form.


Archie wants Dawn to see the morning the way he sees it.

She was bleary-eyed and sleepy when he came by her apartment to pick her up, holding a bouquet of brightly-colored daisies, but it's the perfect time of day for this. Right now, the sun is barely up, not quite hot enough to burn off the mist but bright enough to turn it to gold, and to edge the leaves of the forest in gold, and cause the dew to glimmer. The air is damp but a perfect temperature, with the promise of heat later in the day. It's nothing like morning on a ship, with voices slowly building up and the seventh bell ringing and that last moment of warmth before swinging out to begin a new day. Still, it doesn't have to be--he loves everything about morning, wherever it takes place. This one is a bit more like mornings on his family's estate in Lanarkshire, misty and green and gold before the sky turned blue and the sunlight turned silver. All bright, all fresh, shedding the shadows of night for long shadows of its own, deepening the woods and making the leaves shimmer.

He carries a bag with breakfast in it, along with a rolled-up blanket they can spread out in the woods somewhere to keep off the dew.

Comments

[tothelibrary.livejournal.com]

"Oh my god, Archie." The words are quiet, and Dawn shudders a little. Two years, locked away. Archie doesn't have to say the details for her to get the picture; if he was already in prison, locked away means more. Means worse. Solitary confinement is bad enough in the prisons she knows about, it doesn't take much imagination to piece together what it would have been like before prisoner rights.

[simplestgift]

"I'm all right now," he says softly. "It's...strange, how I used to believe I could never go back to living day to day, with a normal life. Now, I think...I think they're not even the most...the most important years I've ever lived, exactly. I've had some distance from them now."

[tothelibrary.livejournal.com]

"I know exactly what you mean, I think." Not about Tara, but the summer Buffy was dead; the months after she came home.

[simplestgift]

"It gets better. Sometimes it gets worse again after, but it always gets better. I don't think anything can go in one direction too long."

[tothelibrary.livejournal.com]

"It's cyclical." Sighing quietly, Dawn looks over at their stash of food. "So, I think we just earned ourselves some post-serious face stuffing."

[simplestgift]

Nodding, he takes two bowls out of the bag and begins to fill them with strawberries. After, he pours a little carton of cream over them and hands one to her with a spoon. "No more melancholy. We'll enjoy the morning."

[tothelibrary.livejournal.com]

"This is why you get to be the idea-guy for today. I'm just going to eat--" she takes a bite, then one more for good measure-- "Really really delicious strawberries and let you be the boss of me."

[simplestgift]

"As it should be, at least for now." With that, he pours her hot chocolate and simply enjoys her company.