The funny thing is—and that's funny as in horrifying—that the house feels perfectly normal when Dawn steps cautiously through the front door. Why is she being cautious, one might ask, if all seems absolutely A-okay? She doesn't bother to ponder that, and the why ceases to matter very soon.
"Buffy?" she calls, and almost jumps at the sound of her own voice, piercing as it slices into the not-at-all-eerie silence. She even laughs a little, shaking her head in self-disdain. "Spaz," she chides. But she doesn't call out again.
The kitchen is empty, and fairly tidy for once because Buffy did the breakfast dishes that morning instead of waiting for Dawn to get home from school and nagging and threatening until she grudgingly complied. Dawn grabs a Coke from the fridge and opens it, the crack-hiss of the pressurized can sounding louder than it probably should. She raises it to her lips, pauses, then sets it down on the counter without taking a sip. Cocks her head to the side to test the stillness. It's a vampire thing, a kind of preternatural awareness of your surroundings, a dissection of the qualities and layers of scent and feeling and sound too slight to detect with your regular senses. It's something Spike tried to teach her That Summer. Thought it would serve her well during the few and far-between moments when he wasn't actually glued to her side. Thought it would help keep her safe, if he helped her hone that beyond-the-self awareness.
She'd never really mastered it, much to Spike's frustration (he was many things, her vampire friend, but a patient teacher was not one of them). No difference now; she can't detect anything but the steady hum of the refrigerator and the oddly fuzzy sound of carbonated-drink bubbles as her Coke settles. Ordinary.
Which in itself is weird. Ordinary is a rare visitor to the Summers House of the Paranormal, where the One Girl In All The World hangs her stakes, where mystical Keys take human form and no one knows any different, where there's blood in the freezer and weapons by every door, where bad things happen so frequently that bad is … normal. Dawn realizes she's biting her lip only when it hurts.
Where is everyone, anyway? She'd expected Tara and Willow to still be—ahem—reconciling—when she got home, maybe tired enough by then to finally extricate themselves from the bedroom and offer to take her out for a bite to eat. Dawn had planned to scarf down a cheeseburger (because only Doublemeat Palace fare is blacklisted; at heart she is still a lover of artery-clogging foods of all kinds) and wheedle them into telling her the juicy details … well, not that kind of juicy, because they wouldn't, and while she's really curious about certain hows, and they are the best source of accurate information she can think of in that arena, what she really wants to know is the romantic stuff. How they found their way back to each other. How sure they both are, now, that it is forever. How Willow has really sworn off magic this time and Tara will never, ever leave again. She sighs contentedly at the thought.
So where are they? Maybe they're asleep. Isn't sex stuff supposed to make you really tired? Dawn makes a mental note to double check that with Janice, who claims to have done Everything But with Todd, and who generally gives Dawn a hard time about how clueless she can be with regard to sex, but mostly just wants to show off how clueless she herself is not. So she's a good if often less-than-accurate source for information. Buffy, on the other hand, clams up when prodded for anything more specific than what can be found on any moderately reputable Web site. And once when Dawn made the mistake of asking Spike a question, just to get a male perspective on the matter, he'd blown up and demanded the name of the sodding wanker who'd been pressuring her into things that he'd rip her head off for if she ever even contemplated doing. So. That was the end of that.
She tiptoes up the stairs to avoid waking them in case they are, in fact, deep in some kind of hormone-induced post-coital nap. But the door to the bedroom is wide open.
"Willow?" she calls, just in case. Her voice comes out higher-pitched than usual. And weak. "Tara?"
So they're not here. No one's home. It's the middle of the day and no one's home and there's absolutely nothing weird about that. I should just go back downstairs and watch TV and veg out like any normal fifteen-year-old would do on an ordinary afternoon after school.
Even as the thought forms, she's stepping into the room that was her mother's a million years ago. And part of her—not the part that screams, but something deeper—isn't even shocked to see what she sees. Horrified, yes … distraught, sick, angry, hysterical. But not shocked, because that part of her has already guessed.
As she drops to her knees next to Tara's prone, too-still form, not quite willing to touch her and hating herself for that weakness, she wonders if Spike's awareness training wasn't more successful than either of them thought.
xXxXx
One more chapter … I think?