The crush of people at baggage claim was suffocating, the jostling and the "excuse me"s that really meant "get the hell out of my way, jackass" and the loud, echoing voices all melding and weaving and bleeding into a headache-inducing cacophony and she had to get out of here. There. She spotted her bag—okay, Buffy's bag, but what's one more strike against her at this point—and ducked down between two ex-fellow passengers to grab it from the conveyor belt before it could slip past her.
Escaping the luggage mob, she made her way over to a bench next to a window wall and sat down to fumble through her carryon for her cell phone. She felt as though she hadn't breathed since leaving Rome, since the rending shock of revelation had turned her into a thief and a liar and a runaway-slash-fugitive in the instant it took for the words (Spike is alive) to penetrate her just-fading grief. And suddenly here she was, the first part of her not-really-a-plan complete, the next part looming huge and frightening over her head like a giant black question mark, and holy crap she couldn't lose her nerve this late in the game; she was here now. Good old California. Home, sweet home—now with less Hellmouth.
But first things first. A little damage control was in order, something along the lines of "Hey guys, I'm not dead, don't try to find me." She found her cell, flipped it open, stared numbly down at the keypad. Okay, so who to call? Buffy would kill her through the phone, Dawn had no delusions there. "27 missed calls," the words on the little screen informed her accusingly, and if that didn't confirm how screwed she was, nothing would. She couldn't bear, just now, to check her voice mail.
The "borrowed" Platinum Visa tucked away in the zippered side pocket of her bag precluded her from calling Giles, the always-dependable adult figure in their lives. She flinched guiltily when she thought of it, of the revisiting of the stealing thing, of how the action, necessary though it had been, had seemed nothing at all like the times she'd done it out of a warped sense of wronged-ness and enjoyed some cold comfort at the thought that she was punishing them—her—in some obscure way.
Willow? Okay, better, but Dawn was still somewhat leery of the witch's powers, those that Willow herself wasn't so gun-shy about anymore, and it wasn't entirely out of the realm of possibility that she would take it upon herself to try to magick Dawn back to the fold. And that? Sounded a lot cooler than it would probably actually be. Sure, Will had recently channeled some megapowers and turned what seemed like half the female teens and 'tweens in the world into Slayers, but it wasn't so long ago that she couldn't do a simple locator spell right nine times out of ten and Dawn knew better than to get on the wrong side of Willow's rapidly re-inflating ego. Been there, done that, almost spent eternity as a ball of energy for her troubles.
Xander. He kept saying he was leaving Rome, that there was no reason for him to be there with them, that he needed to get back to the States and try to scrape together some sort of life for himself, by himself, and they all sensed the fear beneath the assertion. Who was he, without Buffy? Who was he, without Willow? He'd spent so long being an extension of them, being indispensable in his own average way, that the thought of going it alone was blatantly terrifying. And they didn't want him to leave any more than he wanted to. They needed him. They needed his normality, even if that was just a farce these days.
Xander was probably Dawn's best bet. She scrolled down to his name in her phone list and clicked "send" and waited for the call to connect across an ocean that might as well have been an abyss, as far removed from it as she felt. Tapping her boot-clad foot on the tile and trying to pretend she didn't notice the tall skeevy guy standing by the bank of pay phones and picturing her topless. Xander's voice, thick with sleep and maybe too much of some beverage or other, was like a warm blanket, fuzzy slippers, a hug in audio.
Mostly taken for granted, the things he gave them.
"Xand, hi. I need you to do something for me," she said, deciding that cutting to the chase was wise. Maybe she could take care of this before he'd fully regained his senses. "Tell Buffy that I'm sorry, but I'm okay and I'll be home as soon as I take care of this … thing … and, and tell her not to be mad. Okay?"
A pause, static filling the space. "Dawn? 'zat you?"
She sighed impatiently. "Yes, it's me. Listen, I don't have very long. I've got to go. Just … will you please tell Buffy—"
"Wait, Dawn, where the hell are you? We've been—"
"I know, and I'm sorry I had to cut out like that. There's just something I've gotta do, and then I'll be back good as new and you guys can feel free to lecture me for the rest of my life. Deal?"
Even with the fuzzy connection, Dawn could hear a faint rustling as he sat up in bed. "Hang on."
"No! Xander, I don't have time to—"
"Dawnie, hold tight. She'll want to talk to you. Don't hang up."
"Xanderrrr." A whine—ick, she'd resolved to work on that—but forgivable, under the circumstances. "Just give her the message, please. I'll call you again when I get … where I'm going. I love you guys."
She snapped the phone shut on his protest and winced belatedly. Then she turned it off and stuffed it into the bottom of her bag. When all else fails, avoidance can work wonders for the conscience.
xXxXx
Okay, so here she was. What now? How about going inside, for starters?
One way to make yourself look like a big loser, Dawn thought, is to stand a few feet from a city curb as your taxi pulls away, clutching a flower-print canvas tote in your sweaty hand, gawking up at a high-rise office building as if you've never seen anything of the sort before and are waiting for all the answers to the universe to come raining down on you from its countless sun-glazed windows.
Wolfram and Hart. The words etched into the stone on the side of the building confirmed that she was in the right place, according to her pieced-together information, but wow. Far cry from the digs at the Hyperion, shabby but comfortable, big but somehow cozy almost—if she hadn't hated it on general rebellious principle. It had been her temporary home for dribs and drabs of time during the endless post-Glory summer, when one of them—Spike, usually—insisted on stowing Dawn away under the watchful eye of Angel as the scarred troops of a dead Slayer's ragtag army waged war against some new threat back in Sunnydale.
This was no Hyperion. Angel and company had moved on up, it seemed. She couldn't even see all the way to the top of the building, because the sun's glare made her eyes tear up and she didn't want her mascara to run because if she walked through those doors and happened to run smack into him he'd think she'd been crying, and that was totally out of the question. She shuddered at the thought.
Seriously, though, enough stalling. She'd come this far, she might as well suck it up and at least douse the acidic anticipation that had set her stomach on fire.
He was here. Alive. Or, well … as alive as he was before, which technically wasn't really alive but still. The fact that she only knew this because she'd turned eavesdropping into an art form while living in the Revello Drive House of Secrets was beside the point, now. Giles' clipped, whispered words to whom she could only assume had been Angel was simply confirmation of what she'd sensed for almost two weeks before; some weird knowing combined with some really vivid dreams that never faded when she woke up like normal dreams do, and just like that, the world went spinning on its head.
Spike was alive, and that changed everything.
Squaring her shoulders and trying to look more capable than she felt, Dawn pulled open one of the double glass doors of the Wolfram and Hart headquarters and stepped inside.
At first she didn't even register the piercing, high-pitched whine that met her ears as an alarm. Then the electronic voice kicked in, a calm but ominous computerized woman's voice repeating "Security code one, uncategorized entity, security code one…"
Uncategorized entity.
The men (well, they looked mostly like men but one of them had horns and the other one focused on Dawn with a pair of blood-red eyes and if she could've found her voice she would've screamed for all she was worth) came from either side of what she vaguely registered as a security checkpoint like at the airport. She had time and presence of mind to take one step back toward the doors before they grabbed her. Buffy's travel bag slipped from her suddenly slack fingers.