Thank you! The dream sequence was one of those odd things that just sort of came together in one piece - if anything, probably the rest of the chapter organized itself around it. I'm not even sure why the mermaid/selkie image came to me the way it did, but it really seemed to fit the water imagery.
The Latin quotes are "memento mori," "remember that you will die" (the description the Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_phrases_%28full%29) page has some nice nuances flagged for that one, and "veini, vidi, vici," a Caesar quote, "I came, I saw, I conquered." Those particular quotes were chosen to be little subconscious hints from Buffy's own mind, trying to tell her something about Spike and Angel, the sort of thing she might have registered in the back of her brain somewhere from school. Although which quote applies to which character, if either, is where interpretation comes in.
I really feel for Dawn. I think one of the goals of this story was to come at a lot of this from her point of view.
no subject
The Latin quotes are "memento mori," "remember that you will die" (the description the Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_phrases_%28full%29) page has some nice nuances flagged for that one, and "veini, vidi, vici," a Caesar quote, "I came, I saw, I conquered." Those particular quotes were chosen to be little subconscious hints from Buffy's own mind, trying to tell her something about Spike and Angel, the sort of thing she might have registered in the back of her brain somewhere from school. Although which quote applies to which character, if either, is where interpretation comes in.
I really feel for Dawn. I think one of the goals of this story was to come at a lot of this from her point of view.