Title: Gone
Fandom: BtVS/Ats
Character/Pairing: Dawn, start of some Spike/Xander, some mentions of Willow/Tara
Genre: Dark
Rating: PG-13
Warnings (highlight to see): **disturbing themes, zombies, dead people who don't die during the story**
Disclaimer
Summary: Dawn's mother is dead, but Dawn's going to make sure she doesn't stay that way.
Word Count: 1,781 words
X-Posted: _dbdawn_, all_fics_btvs, buffy_fanfic, gen_storyteller, all_things_btvs, ETA: btvs_lightsout.
Beta: Yay for snowpuppies! She had a blahs attack but helped me out anyways. Wish her well, yes?

A/N: Ooh, another Dawn piece! And a Season 5 AU. Definitely doing something different next time, cause as much as I love Dawn, and will hopefully have fun writing her in the future? I wanna do something different now.




Gone


Dawn goes searching for spells.

She’s quit school; there’s not really anyone around to make her go anymore.

Buffy and Giles are too dead to care, Spike ran off towards the end of the summer, Willow’s out running a creepy super-coven of black-haired mega-witches, and Tara?

Well, she’s just too nice to say anything about it.

So Dawn spends her days looking for new resurrection spells. She couldn’t finish bringing her mother back the first time, and then all the crazy stuff with Glory and scabby leprosy minions and crazy people happened, and she didn’t really have the time.

But now it’s all over. Buffy jumped off the tower and out of their lives. Giles killed himself with an overdose of pain medicine because he couldn’t deal with having no purpose after his Slayer left. Willow went off the deep end and did way too much magic. Anya became a vengeance demon again, and Xander went to Kentucky or Illinois or Missouri or somewhere not-Hellmouth-y like that.

She guesses he really did want to be normal after all.

Now it’s just her and Tara. Tara does whatever she does all day and Dawn tries to bring her mother back.

***

The first time she tries again, Spike is still around.

They go back and get another Ghora egg, and they try the same spell again, this time without consulting the creepy demon-type Grandpa guy.

And it works, in that Joyce comes back, but…

…the thing that comes back isn’t exactly Dawn’s mother.

It’s Stepford Joyce. Or maybe Joycebot. It runs around baking cupcakes and smiling too big and robotically patting Dawn on the shoulder, but whenever Dawn turns to it for comfort, it obliviously turns away and keeps trying to be the perfect mom who cleans and cooks and does dishes and laundry.

The perfect mom who doesn’t care about its daughter.

It doesn’t have any feelings or memories. It doesn’t remember that it had died and then had been brought back.

It doesn’t remember anything about Buffy, or Willow, or Xander. Not even Giles, and she remembers Buffy saying they had some weird thing one time.

It doesn’t remember Dawn’s name until she prompts it.

Sometimes, even after that, it still forgets.

So one night, Dawn puts a pillow over its mouth and smothers it.

It doesn’t even struggle. It just lies perfectly still while she kills it, eyes wide open and mouth stretched in what should have been a smile.

It isn’t really her mom, so she isn’t really killing anybody.

It isn’t even a person, really.

But months later, she still remembers how it closed its eyes and went still with a quiet shudder when it died. And it still makes…something inside her cringe.

***

The next time she tries, Spike doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t ask her why they have to try again, why it still hasn’t worked.

At first she thinks maybe he’s cool with it, but then she thinks maybe he just doesn’t want to know.

They go after another spell, something from some far-off country. Apparently Spike has a lot more demon connections than she thought, because they only have to go as far as Los Angeles to get the ingredients.

She wonders if she should stop by and see Angel. She doesn’t really remember if anyone told him that Buffy died, but he never seemed too good for her sister, anyway.

She thinks someone probably told him.

This time, she goes to her mother’s grave. She chants and circles the headstone, and consecrates the ground by throwing around a sacred potion. All while Spike watches her, restlessly moving around, waiting for her to finish.

Then she waits. It seemed like hours, but her Timex tells her it was really 18 minutes.

Finally, something comes up.


A hand.

Then another.

Then a head.

And when the whole body rises out, she stumbles back in horror, seeing that this thing is not her mother, either. It’s all putrid, rotting flesh and exposed bone. It’s like a zombie from some cheap horror flick, and the whole thing is so defiling to her mother that it makes her want to puke.

So she kills it.

This time she has an ax ready, and with Spike’s help, she cuts off the head. She keeps going, too, cutting it into little bits until she’s sure it’s really gone.

Then Spike holds her while she cries.

***
She has to try again, though.

She knows Tara thinks it’s insane from the way she looks at her—like she’s about to give a lecture—but then she seems to feel so bad for her that she can’t help letting her try to find her mother.

She doesn’t like it when Tara looks at her like that. It makes her feel dirty, somehow.

Like Tara thinks it will never work, and is just not saying anything out of pity, or to teach her a lesson, or something.

But that’s all she’s doing, really. Trying to find her mother.

And she will find her.

She’ll bring her body back time after time, until finally her mother comes back, and then together they’ll get Buffy and everyone else back, and everything will stay the same as it always was before. Before brain tumors, before Keys, before hell-gods, before all the death that polluted her life.

This time, nothing will ever change.

But when she asks Spike again, he just sighs and puts his hands on her shoulders to make sure she’s really listening.

“Bit, this is useless, you know that? You’re never really gonna get your mum back. And that’s—that’s sad, and useless, and unfair, I know, but that’s the way it is. You’re never gonna get over her properly, any of them, if you keep trying to drag her back up again.”

“What, is it because you think I’m just a kid? I know I can do this, Spike. I have to try. She needs me. She’s lying there, in the ground, and no one will try anything but me. Everyone else has run away and left me, and I’m—I’m not just going to let her be away from me when she could come back.”

Tears come unbidden and run down her cheeks, where she wipes away at them furiously. “I’ll get them all back, but you have to help me, okay?”

He looks away from her, and when he looks back, she knows he’ll be gone by morning.

And when he is, when she wakes up and finds a shaky note of apology scrawled on the back of a grocery store receipt, instead of the usual cranky, about-to-go-to-sleep vampire, she knows she still has to try again, no matter what he thought.

Because what everybody does is leave her, and what she does is try to bring them back.

***
She finally finds another spell in History of Witchcraft, the book that Willow pulled off the shelf for her.

The spell promises to bring back the dead fully restored, body and soul, and that’s what she needs.

So she gathers the required item of her mother’s—the fuzzy blue bathrobe from when she was sick, because she wore it so often—and covers it in dirt from her mother’s grave. She encircles it with lit candles, and begins her prayer to Osiris.

Then she takes out the knife, and slits her palm, squeezing the blood over the circle.

It hurts, but it makes her feel more alive, more important.

Her blood, her pain, her work will bring back her mother’s life.

And this time, she really feels her mother coming back. She knows it’s worked, deep inside of her.

But when she rushes excitedly to open the door…it’s some sort of demon. With claws, and tentacles, and slime, and no part of it is her mom except the hair, exactly the same, blond and slightly curling on the top of its head. And it’s just such a cruel mockery of everything Dawn is trying to do that she almost sobs.

And Dawn is so, so tired of getting it wrong that she just closes the door. She turns around, and slumps to the floor, crying quietly.

She thought she’d had it this time.

She wonders how many more Joyces she has to kill before she gets to the real one, the soul or whatever that makes her her, hidden under all these robots and zombies and demons and non-mom things.

She wonders if by killing all these other Joyces, she’s really been destroying her mother.

Tara comes running down the stairs just as the demon forces its way through the door and into the house. They both jump back and scream, then run for the weapons chest.

They hack at the thing until it’s dead.

This time, it’s Tara who holds Dawn while she cries.

And now Dawn knows she has to stop trying to find her mother, because her mother’s not really there to find anymore.

***
Eventually Spike comes back, and Xander’s with him. Spike claims to simply have run into him on the way somewhere, but Tara’s giggles, and the way both of them seem so jumpy and newly aware of each other, tell Dawn that it must have been something else.

Which makes both her and Tara smile, and occasionally squeal.

And it’s almost like normal, having them around.

Spike and Xander do an incredibly cute, awkward sort of dance around each other. And while part of Dawn loves seeing them so adorably in denial, part of her wants to push one of them on top of the other and lock them in a room together to see if they’ll start making out already.

Tara thinks she might try to help Willow, so she can get out of the coven and learn some of the magical ethics she never really acquired.

And it looks like it could work. After all, it’s Willow and Tara.

Spike and Tara do most of the vampire and demon hunting; she uses magic to slow them down while Spike stakes or beheads them. Dawn’s pretty sure he gets relationship advice from her while he’s out there, too.

Xander’s back in construction work, and Tara’s trying to find someone to run the Magic Box with her when she’s not trying to help Willow. Dawn goes to school, and Spike…

…well, sleeps. During the day, at least.

She’s almost used to the way things are becoming. None of it’s really quite settled yet, but she’s developing a routine in her life, and she likes that.

It’s never the same as when they were around, but it’s as close as she’s going to get.


END