Three dollars and some change

I love your essay. Times a million.

Okay, firstly, creepy. No good can ever come from the phrase, "well, I started by waking up in a pool of blood..."

Dawn has really reverted into the emotional state of her physical age.

Exactly. She is truly five now, with the intellectual knowledge of a teenager, but the emotions of a child and the neediness of a very young, very abandoned little girl. She doesn't see it herself, but everyone around her sees the child.

And she had started to finally get settled in her new life, and then boom. Ceiling Buffy is watching her sleep.

Anita's reaction to Dawn's desperate desire to reunite with Buffy is heart breaking. I feel that it rings true with how some foster/adoptive parents feel when the child they grow to love and connect to still wants to be with their birth family. Or believes that their parents are going to "come back and get them".

Yes, yes, a million times yes. Anita wants to be supportive of Dawn, but that doesn't really extend to warm and fuzzy feelings towards a sister who (to Anita's POV) mistreated Dawn. I really need to write that Anita POV piece after this little debacle.

Nathaniel's freak out is also very much the fatherly/big brother type too.

This is the first time that Nathaniel has anyone looking up to him, and as has been explored in previous chapters and stuff, he's falling into the role quite nicely, but then the trauma happened, and Nathaniel is a master at trauma. For better or for much worse.

And Micah. Oh,Micah. He seems so calm and held together. On the outside. I could only image what he's really thinking and feels about finding Anita and Dawn, with Dawn all covered in blood.

Micah has been a bit of an enigma in this story, with most of the action between Dawn and Anita (the maternal relationship as mostly focused in the Buffy show too) but he's there in the background, just having tripped into Anita's life and ending up being defacto father figure when Dawn doesn't know how to deal with such and then something came and bled all over Dawn while Micah was supposed to be watching/protecting her and all over woes. (I really need to write that reactionary piece)

And it seems that I write essays in my spare time, too, only with more ramble.