Summers Pryce: Prologue

A Dream of Might-Have-Been

Reality has many facets, Slayer — like a gem within a gem, faceted and layered. Come, and I will show you one such facet . . . and a thing that might have been.

Why are you showing it to me? the Slayer asked. Why now?

Because you need to understand, the voice answered. You need to see — that you may do what needs done. It will take courage. Courage, audacity . . . and the strength to change the world.

You can change the world . . . if you can be made to see. And if you can find the courage.

See. Know that we cannot tell you directly what needs be done. We can only hint, for even we are constrained by rules from above us.

See . . . and understand.

"Dawn, the hardest thing in this world . . . is to live in it," Buffy said. She touched Dawn's cheek, there on the lopsided gantry above Sunnydale, and smiled at her little sister for the last time. "Be brave. Live . . . for me."

Buffy turned, charged down the extended plank that stood out from the gantry before Dawn could stop her — and leaped into the Hell Gate, refused to simply fall, dove in and accepted her fate like a Slayer.

"BUFFY!" Dawn screamed — and started down the gantry with reckless speed, not caring about her blood-slicked feet, not caring about falling, only hoping that somehow Buffy would defeat death —

Out of the corner of her eye, Dawn saw the Hell Gate close, saw it collapse back to nothing, saw Sunnydale return to what passed for normal . . . and her heart broke.

Buffy lay broken and bloody on the ground — and her friends stood around her, staring and weeping.

Dawn started crying, and remembered nothing but crying for a long time after.

Inside the girl, as she wept for the only family she had left, something . . . changed. Energy that had been awakened by Glorificus flickered and died, and Dawn Summers became truly human, completely human, as the energies that she had been made from winked out of existence, left her a girl, no longer a mystical key.

Then other energies flowed into her, changed her — but in her grief, her pain, she never noticed.

"He's . . . not coming," Willow said, staring at the phone in disbelief. She put the handset down, looked up at Tara, tears starting to stream from her eyes. "He says . . . he says that this part of his life is over, and that he's staying in Spain."

"But . . . but he's their father!" Tara said. "H-he can't just . . . can he?"

"I don't know," Willow said. "I don't know, but . . . I can't see any way to make him come back."

"But . . . doesn't he care?" Tara asked. "Buffy's dead, and Dawn needs him!"

Willow stared at the phone again, trying to wrap her brain around the offhand tone of voice that Hank Summers had replied in when Willow told him that Buffy had died, and Dawn been left a virtual orphan.

"He said . . . he said, he was sorry, but that his new wife is pregnant, and he can't . . . he can't endanger his relationship with her over girls from a family he stopped being a part of years ago." Willow shook her head and said, "What an asshole!"

Then she tried to figure out what to say to Dawn.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Giles, but I can't approve your application," the woman from Social Services said. "You aren't even an American citizen, I can't give you custody of Dawn Summers."

"Well, what — what about Willow Rosenberg?" Giles asked, trying not to sound desperate.

"A twenty year old college student with no job?" the woman said. "Who isn't even related to the girl? Please, Mr. Giles — don't be ridiculous.

"I'm afraid that Dawn Summers will have to go into foster care, since her father is refusing to accept his responsibilities towards her."

Xander took a run at it — but he was dismissed as too young. Even Spike tried to figure out something (not that Giles would have allowed that) — but nothing would work. Buffy had been the last thing preventing Dawn from entering the California foster care system . . . and with her gone, there was nothing that any of them could do.

"Okay, well . . . Dawn, you be good, okay?" Willow said, trying not to cry and failing. "I'll email you, and we'll write, and maybe we'll come see you in LA, if your foster parents will let us."

"Sure," Dawn said, her voice dull and lifeless. "Bye, then."

Willow and Tara both hugged her, both wept — but Dawn didn't weep, and only barely hugged back. She felt dead inside . . . and couldn't make that go away.

Anya didn't weep, and seemed embarrassed by Xander's tears. Dawn didn't react.

Giles . . . he almost got through. His own reserve would not let him cry, though his voice was rough and his hug very tight. Had he set free his tears, Dawn might have reacted, might have broken — but he couldn't and she didn't.

Dawn got in the car with the social worker, and rode off to her new home with an affluent and childless couple in Los Angeles.

Don and Karen Thorpe tried, they really did. They were kind, and gentle, and generous — and Dawn, lost and trapped in her own pain and sense of abandonment, was surly and sullen and intractable. Her grades, once A's and Bs, dropped to C's and D's, and she spent all her time at the Thorpe's in her room, clutching Mr. Gordo, Buffy's old stuffed pig, and staring blankly at whatever happened to be on TV. She didn't even check her email for so long that by the time she finally remembered to, the account had been shut down for inactivity. The letters she got from Willow she read — but never answered.

After three months of this, the Thorpes asked her point blank if she wanted to stay.

"No," Dawn said — and told them the bald-faced truth, gave them a compliment of sorts. "You're good people. You deserve to have someone who can care back. I should go."

The next foster home was in a less affluent neighborhood, with less affluent people. She lasted another three months before they asked her to go. She didn't argue, she even apologized for being so hard to deal with — but she went.

The next pace belonged to a couple who were barely in the middle class. Dawn lasted four months with them, despite the ardent dislike of the other girl the had custody of. But when the girl stole Mr. Gordo, Dawn snapped — and took Buffy's stuffed pig back by force. In the process, she accidentally broke the other girl's nose — and that was all she wrote. She moved out and on to the next foster home the next day.

There, oddly enough, she felt almost at home.

Reggie and Donna Garson lived on the northern edge of recently-renamed South Los Angeles, formerly South Central Los Angeles, a crime-ridden area with wide ethnic diversity — and a serious crime and gang problem. They both had blue-collar jobs, Reggie driving a bakery truck and Donna working in a convenient store as assistant manager. They had gotten into foster care only for the money — most of which they drank away, both being borderline alcoholics.

But they did feed her, didn't make her work, didn't care about her comings and goings. They left her to herself, told her they'd do that so long as she pretended to be getting along well when Social Services paid a visit — and didn't get in trouble with the police.

And the damned dreams backed off some. Since Buffy died, Dawn had been having weird, monster-filled dreams, sometimes waking herself up covered in sweat and breathing like she'd just run a marathon. At the Garson's house, the dreams started to . . . fade.

Dawn started school in late August, and did keep her grades at C's, not wanting to get taken out of this place where people left her alone.

Then came the day in early October when she ran afoul of a gang.

The Crips and the Bloods were a huge presence here, but at school, there were smaller gangs — all drawn along racial lines. And Dawn, being Caucasian, was in the minority at her school, which was mostly African American and Hispanic, with some Asian Americans and a dash of Caucasians thrown in like spice in a stew.

She left school one afternoon in late September, and started for her bus stop. She came around a corner to find a small Asian girl being harassed by a group of six Hispanic guys in the colors of the Aztec Kings, a gang that largely dominated her school.

One of the guys had the girl's long hair wrapped around his fist, and he was shouting in her face.

"Bitch, you don't cough up, we goan cut you!" the boy snarled.

"Hey!" Dawn said, all unthinking. "Leave her alone!"

The boy — Dawn had seen him around, but didn't know his name — turned to her and said, "Fuck off, puta — or you're next!"

"Bite me!" Dawn said automatically. "I said let her go!"

"Diego, kill this bitch," the boy said, and turned back to his victim.

From behind her, Dawn heard the click of a switchblade opening, and turned to face the knife wielder, thinking, Oh, shit — what am I doing? I can't take on all these guys — I'm not Buffy!

That thought barely had time to flit through her brain before Diego lunged at her, knife reaching for her gut.

But . . . he was moving so slow — almost like slow-motion! She had all the time in the world to step back and sideways — and then something inside her caught fire, and she brought her foot up, cocked at the knee, and kicked Diego across the gut, foot passing neatly under the extended arm and the knife.

Diego flew backwards, hit the wall of the little Asian market they were outside of, and crumpled to the ground, gasping and wheezing.

"Holy shit," Dawn said aloud. "How did I . . . ?"

Then came a torrent of angry Spanish, and Dawn snapped back to reality. Even as two more gang members stepped forward to try and grab her arms, Dawn grabbed the nearer one by the arm, pivoted, and slammed him into his friend, sending both crashing to the ground. Another came at her with a knife, and Dawn let the instincts that had taken over her have their way, let them move her closer to the boy, inside the arc of his knife swing. She pivoted her upper body, slammed the edge of her left hand into the wrist of the gang-banger's right hand, making his hand spasm open and drop the knife. At the same time, she popped him in the nose with the back of her right fist, breaking bone and sending him staggering backwards to fall to the ground.

The last unoccupied gang member looked at Dawn, saw the feral grin spreading across her face — and turned and ran.

Dawn turned to the gang leader, who stood there staring at her like she'd grown two more heads and four more arms, his left hand still tangled in the Asian girl's hair.

"I told you to let her go," Dawn said, her voice low and menacing. "Do it!"

The gang-banger opened his hand, shook it free of the girl's hair — and took off running.

Dawn watched him go, a feeling of excitement and accomplishment ripping through her, and grinned. She looked at the Asian girl — pretty little thing, and that waist-length hair was gorgeous — and said, "You should probably get home, okay?"

"I — yes," the girl said. "Yes. Thank you!"

Dawn watched the girl go, then turned and went to catch her bus, her mind awhirl.

"I'm . . . I'm a Slayer!" she said as she sat down on the graffiti-covered bench to wait for her bus. "How did . . . ?

"Oh. Oh! Of course!"

Her mind flashed back to Buffy's twentieth birthday, her last birthday, the day that Dawn had found out she wasn't human, but some sort of mystical key. She remembered Buffy's words that awful night — words that had made it less awful.

"It's blood," Buffy had said, pressing Dawn's hand to one of her own wounds. "Summers blood. It's just like mine. It doesn't matter where you came from, or how you got here, you are my sister."

Then forward to Buffy swan-diving diving into the Hell Gate, her blood, so close to Dawn's, making the Gate close, shutting it down.

"And if Buffy's blood was close enough to mine to fool the Hell Gate," Dawn said softly, "then mine would be close enough to hers to fool the Slayer power!

"I really am a Slayer!"

She went back to the Garson's with her mind tumbling through the seemingly infinite possibilities.

An hour after dark, armed with a backpack full of stakes and wearing the cross that Angel had given Buffy when they first arrived in Sunnydale, Dawn went looking for vampires to slay.

As she went through the living room, Reggie glanced up at her, said, "You gonna be gone long?"

"Probably, yeah," Dawn said. "Got some stuff to do."

"Grab me some smokes," he said, handing her a ten. "Two packs, Winston one hundreds. Leave 'em on the kitchen table, and keep the change."

"Okay," Dawn said. "Thanks."

"Just don't forget," Reggie said as she left.

She grabbed his cigarettes at the closest convenient store, tossed them in a hard-sided pocket of her backpack, and caught a bus for downtown LA and as much trouble as she could find.

She found vampires. She killed vampires. It was work — but the same instincts that had told her how to handle the gang-bangers that afternoon told her what to do, led her through the fights — and she let them. Three dead vampires later, she headed back to the Garson's, arriving at a little after three in the morning. She put Reggie's smokes on the kitchen table, went to bed — and actually got up for school.

For almost two weeks, she kept it up. Her grades slipped a little she got D's on a couple of tests, and on a paper — but she kept going, kept her head above water. Somewhere else, with someone besides the Garsons taking care of her, she might not be able to do this, might not be able to fight the fight that had come to mean everything to her.

Then, late in the evening on Sunday, October twentieth, she ran into one of the last people she would have expected to meet — and maybe the only one who could help her do what she had to do, learn what she had to learn, if she wanted to do the job right.

Dawn later remembered that night as the start of her truly becoming a Slayer.