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Buffy looks at Dawn and feels nothing.
She’s joking, saying something — Buffy can see her mouth moving, clicking. There are wrinkles around her eyes and her pupils are large, black. Interested. Happy.
She can make out a faint noise. A laugh, maybe — the tone is high pitched, wheezing. She knows she should be listening, but she just can’t.
Buffy looks at Dawn and feels nothing.
Instead, there’s a black hole in her stomach, her chest. A void. She feels like she’s empty, like all the shelves inside of her has been drained, depleted. She’s a shell, she thinks. Merely a shell.
She briefly wonders if you’ll hear the ocean if you lean in close enough.
"Hey, Buffy, you alright?"
The words pull her back into reality.
Buffy nods and makes her the corners of her lips quirk upwards. She’s surprised she still remembers how.
"Yeah," she says, "Fine."