The Caliban Chronicles: Act I, Scene i
Pairing: Spike & Dawn friendship for now, with Spike/Dawn romance down the road eventually.
Rating: PG-13. For now.
Episodes: Starts directly after the final scene of The Gift, and goes off-canon from the middle of Bargaining, Part 2. What if Buffy's resurrection wasn't successful...?
Summary: Dawn lost a lot more than her sister on top of that tower, and Spike fell a lot farther than 50 feet. A brand new Big Bad wants a piece of all that shiny green energy. When a secret society sets their sights on Dawn, their struggle to handle Life After Buffy turns into a quest to keep their promises to her alive. From Sunnydale to Tokyo, it's the journey that counts, not the destination. Chapter 1 of a much larger piece.
Author's Notes: I'm a new fan who just finished both BtVS and AtS about six months ago, and this is the very first chapter of my very first go at any Whedonverse fan fiction. This isn't going to be a short piece - I've already finished most of part 1, which will be about 8 or 9 chapters long; if all goes as projected, parts 2 and 3 will be even longer. I'm having fun writing it - but whether I continue posting it here will depend a lot on whether people want to read it. I'm new; be kind, but be honest. Any and all constructive feedback is appreciated!
Chapter Warnings: Profanity. Mild violence. Garden variety teen angst. Also, I like Shakespeare. Fair warning for future chapters.
Dedications: For Paola, who broke me of my irrational prejudice and created a monster. Team Spike Forever, girlie; this one is all for you.
Act I, Scene i: after the fall
Afterwards, they all try to be strong for her.
Willow calls an ambulance. Giles calls the morgue. Tara holds her through the initial, blinding shock of denial, shelters her as the world comes crashing down around them and her sister's corpse cools on a pile of rubble. Xander cares for Willow and Tara and Anya and Dawn put together; despite all his day-to-day bluster and complaints, he is always the calmest of them all in the face of great tragedy.
Nobody notices what happens to Spike. One minute he's there, sunk to his knees and sobbing like a lost child, and the next minute he is gone without a trace.
The first night, she spends at the hospital; the cuts only take thirty stitches to close, but she's lost a lot of blood, and the doctors insist on keeping her overnight. All of the Scoobies stay with her, bound together by grief; if they go home now, real life will start again. Houses and apartments will look just the same as they did the day before, and her things will be in them – a sweater tossed over the back of a chair, a mug she didn't get around to washing, that DVD that she keeps forgetting to pick up from Xander's or Willow's or Giles' – but she will not. Life without Buffy begins the second that they disperse, and so for the first night they do not. Xander and Anya sleep in the waiting room. Tara and Willow sleep beside her, crammed onto her narrow hospital bed. Giles wanders between the two, staring into shadows and looking far too calm to truly be calm. They huddle together through the darkness like kittens from the same litter, lost in the face of the inevitable dawn.
Nobody knows how Spike passes the night. Nobody even thinks about it, Dawn included. She lies awake between the two witches and watches her sister die behind her eyes, again and again and again.
The second night, everyone talks. Drinks hot chocolate or Giles' best bourbon, and talks about their feelings. They philosophize, commiserate, tell the jokes that Buffy would have wanted them to tell to keep each other strong. One by one, they all take her aside.
"It's okay to cry," Xander tells her, as Dawn leans tearless but so very tired against his chest in the kitchen.
"It's okay to feel numb," Tara tells her, with the soft, unimposing wisdom that only Tara can offer. Then she takes Dawn's hand in hers on the porch steps, and they watch the stars together in silence for a while.
"It's all right to feel a little lost right now, Dawn. I daresay that we all do," Giles tells her, and when he puts his hand on her shoulder, she covers it with her own. "Leave the technicalities up to me; I'll take care of everything." And he will. Of course he will. Giles is the one who guided Buffy through insurance policies and funeral arrangements and all the other finite details of their mother's death; he will do the same for Dawn. She has no real decisions to make right now.
After all, she's only fourteen.
Just a kid.
They will not really grieve until she goes to bed. They will not show her the parts of their pain that don't feel fit for a child's eyes. Because she isn't a child, Dawn knows that, and because she is still very young, a part of her hates them for it. With her mother and sister both gone and her father never really there to begin with, the Scoobies are her family, now – and as surrogate families go, she couldn't ask for better.
But right now, what Dawn really needs is a friend. She goes upstairs long before she is tired, turns off her lights and sits on her bed and imagines breaking Glory's neck with her own two hands. Imagines downing half of Giles' whiskey and putting her fists through the walls. Imagines torching the house, hitchhiking to the beach, casting a spell to bring her sister back to life. She is not thinking anything that the others aren't thinking, but because she is fourteen and Buffy's little sister and a mystical key from another dimension who everyone just gave up everything in order to protect, she has to sit up here and think these things by herself. There is no one to spill her guts to who won't be scared or sorry or somewhere in between about what's going on in her head.
The third night, when it all gets to be too much for her, Dawn does what her sister would do.
She goes and punches Spike in the face.
The night air is a relief as she climbs out her window and down the trellis, cooling the tears on her too-hot cheeks and brushing her tangled hair back from her face. She storms through the dark streets of Sunnydale like a reckless drunk, fully aware that anything could jump out of the shadows to eat her at any moment – and that this time, there would be no Buffy to save her. She'd be just another stupid girl dying in a gutter somewhere – another stupid, dumb, pointless victim of the Hellmouth. By the time she gets to the graveyard where they buried Buffy this morning, she feels like what she really is – a deadly, crackling ball of poison-green energy, outfitted with teenage hormones and carrying the weight of the world on slender, useless human shoulders.
She doesn't even bother stopping by the crypt. She knows exactly where he'll be.
Spike hears her coming. How could he not? She's making enough noise to wake the dead, half sobbing through gritted teeth, stumbling over urns and tree roots and batting aside foliage with angry fists. Buffy's grave is under a willow tree in the prettiest part of the graveyard, all dappled with California sunlight during the day. At night, though, it's just like any other grave – cold and dark and lonely and a piss poor substitute for someone you love. He's sitting with his back against the headstone, dried blood still spiderwebbing one side of his face and a bottle of whiskey between his knees. He doesn't speak a word as she stumbles to a halt over him, but when he looks up at her his eyes say it all.
Dawn cocks back her arm the way that people do in the movies, and swings for all she's worth.
The first blow probably hurts her more than it hurts Spike; her knuckles glance off his skull, wrenching her wrist with the force of it. She nearly loses balance – kicks him as she stumbles and nearly apologizes, then rocks back and hits him again. This time, she connects clean and solid with his cheek, and his head snaps aside with a sharp crack against the gravestone. Spike doesn't even flinch. Doesn't cry, isn't shocked. Doesn't try to make it better. Spike is a soulless demon who survived the fall her sister didn't, and compared to him she really is just a weak, stupid little girl. She can hit him all night, and it won't hurt either of them. She imagines Glory, imagines that creepy doctor, imagines her own face. Swings again, and again. Screams, cries, bloodies her knuckles on his teeth and pulls all the muscles in her own arm before she falls sobbing into his.
Spike never once lifts a hand, until he has to catch her.
He smells like leather and whiskey and blood, and there is nothing warm or safe about his embrace. Like everything else in this cemetery, he is dead – but he clings to her as fiercely as she clings to him, hurting her a little because he is as strong as any other demon, but the chip doesn't fire because Spike isn't trying to cause pain, and because Dawn doesn't care. She loves him for hanging on so tightly, for needing her back and hurting with her. They sob on each other's shoulders and bleed in each other's arms, and it is really brutal and brutally real in the way that both teenagers and vampires need life to be, sometimes.
When they are both calm enough to breathe, they breathe. They don't talk about it. For a very long time, they don't talk about anything. They just hold on to each other in the dark, and Spike listens to Dawn's heart beat while she listens to his not beat. After the initial shock of it, the silence inside of him is strangely soothing.
"You're lucky you're dead," she finally tells him.
"Why's that?" Spike's voice is hoarse – whether from disuse, screaming, or a combination of the two, Dawn can't be sure.
"You fell off a fucking tower. If you weren't already dead, you'd be gone too."
"Yeah. Lucky me."
"I'm serious." Dawn tightens her grip on his neck. "Don't go. I'm not ready for you to not be here."
"Okay," says Spike, like it's her words and not something else that convinces him, in the end. Right now, she'd like to think that's true, so she lets herself believe it.
They lapse back into silence, and Dawn doesn't know when she falls asleep – one minute she's lying against his shoulder and watching the willow branches wave in the wind, and the next she's lying in a surprisingly comfortable bed, with a sore arm and no concept of time. Spike's crypt is always dark, and the makeshift bedroom beneath it is darker still; there is no sun here to tell her if it's morning or night.
Buffy is dead. It's the first thing that occurs to her, every time she wakes up from sleep or snaps back from her own thoughts or doesn't have a task to distract her. Waking up in the house she grew up in, it hits her in the gut like a ton of bricks – but here in this place, it doesn't seem so bad. There is still no meaning for it, but at least there is context. Sleeping under the same ground where her sister is buried, Dawn knows peace for the first time in days.
Spike's here, of course. He's curled up comfortably close beside her, like a big brother or a best friend or maybe even a boyfriend, though she's never had one of her own to know for sure about the latter. He breathes in his sleep, just like anyone else. For a moment Dawn wonders at that. What makes him do it?
What makes him do anything?
He's a master vampire. He's a lost soul. He's the monster who loved her sister with the passion of a thousand men and the common sense of a goldfish. He's something older than it looks and younger than it thinks and only half what it seems to be, just like her – and just like her, he has no idea how to handle this.
Dawn turns over, shuts her eyes, and snuggles back against him – and Spike just sighs, throws an arm over her like he does it every night and curls around her like a temperate but affectionate comma. Sleepily, she wonders if this is how he slept with Drusilla, or maybe some human woman long since dead. She has no idea who William the Bloody was before he became what he is now. He started out human and now he isn't; she didn't start out human, and now she is. The world is senseless and fucked up and they are both here in it, and neither one hurts by the rules, and both of them just want to rest in peace for a little while. She shuts her eyes again, not really caring whether it is day or night, and goes back to sleep in the arms of a dead man.
This is how Dawn and Spike become friends.