Title: You Will Never Die
Author: mispel
E-mail: mispel9yahoo.com
Rating: PG
Summary: Dawn didn't turn out to be a normal girl. Starts around season 5 and 6.
Disclaimer: I own no one and nothing
Feedback: Any comments would be welcome
You will never get any older, and you will never die.
Chapter 2
Frankenstein
They were in the back room of the Magic Box. Dawn was helping out, packing up some things for shipping. Willow was sitting at the desk Anya used for bookkeeping. Willow's graduate thesis was on the computer monitor, but she was working on something else that Dawn couldn't see.
Earlier, one of Dawn's teachers had come into the shop. When she saw Dawn, the teacher looked fidgety. She started to say how Dawn looked well. There was a pause before 'well'. Maybe she was going to say 'the same', and she changed her mind. The woman rushed out and wouldn't let Anya give her her change.
"How come no one says anything any more?" Dawn asked Willow later. Buffy wouldn't discuss it - she went all Mom-in-denial.
"It's Sunnydale." That's all the explanation she got from the preoccupied Willow.
"Nice place to live, if you're a freak." Dawn tried to look over Willow's shoulder at what she was working on, but Willow was leaning over the pages. The pages looked a little singed. They had diagrams and things on them.
"It's like when people complain that they miss the change of seasons because they live in a year round paradise," Anya noted as she came through the back room.
"Want to change places?" Dawn asked her sharply. They had this discussion before, sometimes with Xander there to tell Anya to be more sensitive. But Dawn didn't need Anya to pretend to be sensitive. She was bad at it anyway.
"You get to be young and immature forever, and you complain because there are no angry villagers with torches and pitchforks coming up to batter down the castle gate. It's a deal, lets change places. Willow, do your thing," Anya said as she stood with one hand on the doorway. But Willow wasn't listening - she'd heard it all before.
The Shotgun Variable
"What are you? Everyone knows you're not human."
Dawn heard the words on a kind of delay. The shotgun pointed at her middle was kind of distracting. She didn't answer. She just tried to breathe quietly - like being inconspicuous would help at this point. She had been noticed and it wasn't good.
Dawn worked at the coffee shop part time. She had seen the guy with the shotgun come in before, looking a lot better. And without the shotgun. Now he was unshaven in that way that said, 'severe, mental distress'.
"Do you know what happened to her?" he asked, sounding like he was accusing Dawn of something.
"Who? I don't know..." Dawn started to say.
"My niece. She disappeared weeks ago. My brother is a wreck. I pried this thing out of his hands," the man said meaning the shotgun.
"I'm sorry," Dawn said.
"I thought you might know something," he said looking confused.
"I don't. I'm sorry," Dawn told him. She didn't know lots of stuff. Like could she die from a gunshot wound. She could be hurt. She could bleed. But could she die? There was only one way to find out, and she wasn't that curious. She wasn't ready. Too young to die.
"My niece is only sixteen." For a moment, he looked lost in thought. Then his attention was back on Dawn. "Do you remember when you were sixteen," he asked her in that accusing tone again.
"No," Dawn answered. She remembered pretending she was sixteen and everyone pretending with her. The calendar always turned to the same page for her. The clock hands just twitched in place like when the battery is running out. Like that guy's hands on the gun.
Thinking that he might be getting ready to shoot, all Dawn could see was the shotgun. The cops who rushed in were a blur. The gun was lowered and then dropped to the floor. She still looked at it thinking that it could have answered her questions.
When the police took him away, they looked at Dawn kind of funny as he ranted about how she was some kind of thing. The guy who worked the espresso machine had called them from the back where he was hiding. The cops questioned Dawn, and she played dumb. She didn't know what he was talking about. She didn't know his niece. No, they didn't go to school together. The real answers were playing in her head so loud she had trouble playing her part.
"I don't go to school. I don't know what I am. Yes, there is a name for it. I'm the Key. Does it mean anything to you? Does it help you? Does it bring her back? I can't turn back time. I don't have any powers. Willow checked. Who? It doesn't matter."
In reality, she said, "I can't explain anything. He is just one of those crazed guys who hijacks a school bus because of the IRS. Or shoots up an office full of secretaries because he got fired. I just work here."
The cops gave up. They left her alone and she hyperventilated a little.
If You Lived Here, You Would Be Home Now
It was strange to look down on a grave without knowing if one would ever be dug for her. Everyone else knew - one day.
Dawn liked to sit between them. Mom on her left, Buffy on her right. Of course, they couldn't recover the body, but Dawn had watched her die so she hardly ever had that dream where Buffy came back again. Dawn could hear birds and the rush of traffic far away. The grass around the graves was neat, newly mowed and a little prickly under her hands. The markers gleamed white in the sun. Tara was a few rows over. She would go and say hi later.
It was her last visit for a while. Xander and Anya were waiting by the car to take her away somewhere where she hadn't been a teenager for as long as anyone could remember.
To be continued