I don't own Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Facsimile: Or five times Dawn being the key actually meant something.
I.
She makes the decision to leave moment she opens her eyes – and isn't it something, to see, not just feel the worlds fluttering around her.
The Summers seem like nice enough people; fake memories swim around her head. But she's seen what's knocking behind Glory's door and a thousand doors just like it.
Slayer or not, Glorificus is a God.
She'll come back one day, after she's sure that last sliver of the Beast has faded beneath vulnerable, mortal flesh.
Being human is a novelty she wants to experience beyond pain and the death sure to follow on swift wings.
II.
She's starting to come apart at the seams.
The Key was never meant to be flesh and bone, power stuffed ingloriously into a mortal meat pack. She sees how it will end, streaks of other worlds tearing the sky open…
such a pretty green
Giles tells Buffy it was a vampire attack.
A believable lie; this is Sunnydale after all.
He'll have killed him of course; the murderer now nothing more than dust and air.
Dust and air and that last bit tethering her to Sunnydale. She's lost too many, too fast, so now they lose her.
III.
Today is Buffy's birthday. Dawn isn't real.
She's always suspected she was different but her sister kills demons for a living; it's not strange that she's odd too.
She cuts her arm; a test. The blood comes. The pain, like always, does not follow.
She feels nothing.
This is a lie: she feels- pulsing and green and it's growing stronger behind her eyes.
She-. No, not she, she tells herself, it. It wraps its bleeding arm and wipes false tears away and slips back into the party like it's always been there.
It's not like it hasn't done it before.
IV.
At the end Dawn jumps instead of Buffy.
She's the modern day princess, rickety tower and all. She remembers the day she learned fairy tales weren't always Disney nice, her mother stroking her hair lightly and Buffy curled gently around them. It seems so long ago. A place far, far away.
she smiles
Buffy's blood didn't open the portal and her blood won't close it.
She is not the Key.
There is no body at the bottom, only the last whispers of shimmering green light. There is nothing at her end as there was nothing at its beginning.
V.
Dawn feels her come back. She's felt a billion souls dance around her but she'll never forget this one.
She tastes of despair.
Dawn thinks that somewhere in her heaven-addled mind Buffy must understand or it would be Dawn's blood splattering the bathroom floor. Later, after she's scrubbed the tub clean and wrapped the body in Buffy's favourite bed sheet,she waits for everyone who made her do this awful, beautiful thing.
("Death is your gift." she whispers to Buffy before her sister slips through the cracks for the second time. Or third. Or fourth. She would lose count except that-
"Death is your gift."
And finally, eternally, it is.)
