Blue Dawn
A Buffy the Vampire Slayer YAHF
by P.H. Wise

Part 2 – Incubation

Disclaimer: Buffy the Vampire Slayer is Joss Whedon's baby, and belongs to Mutant Enemy. I am not Joss Whedon. No copyright infringement is intended; please don't sue me. I'm not making any money off of this.

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Dawn lay on an uncomfortable bed in a stark white hospital room. The only colour in the room came from her clothing; the nurses had stripped the catsuit from her and reclothed her in a faded blue hospital gown. Her forehead was covered in sweat, her skin was blotchy, and she slept uneasily.

"Mom?" Buffy asked. She stood at Dawn's bedside, speaking into her cell phone. "Something's happened to Dawn, Mom." She paused. "I don't know. The doctors don't know yet." Pause. "We're at the hospital. Room 301. I love you too. I'll see you when you get here." She ended the call and returned the cell phone to her pocket. It hurt her, seeing Dawn like this. Even worse were the ... changes. She wasn't sure how she'd explain this to her mother, but with luck, they'd find a way to reverse what was happening. Giles would think of something. He always did.

Xander had been here earlier. He'd gotten his eye looked at. It was swollen shut now, and had a big bandage covering it, but he'd been here. He'd left about five minutes earlier to see if Willow was all right after her out of body experience last night, and to get Giles. There was nothing she could do now but wait.

She hated waiting. She wanted to do something. It wouldn't be so bad if this was a monster she could fight, but it wasn't. It was just... Dawn.

So she stood, and she watched, and she waited. And life went on as usual all around her.

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When Joyce pulled up at the hospital, her heart was racing, and she knew. She knew it as clearly as she'd heard the fear in Buffy's voice. Her baby girl was dying. Dawn was dying. That knowledge settled in around her heard like an ice-dagger, threatening to freeze her to the core, and a sinking sense of dread encompassed her. She rushed through the front doors in a near panic, very nearly sprinting to the front desk in her haste to get to her daughter.

The man behind the desk was very patient and very kind, but the way he treated this as if it were a very normal state of affairs made her angry. She wanted to slap his mild, pleasant face. Her baby girl was dying!

"Room 301?" he asked. "Up the elevator and then four doors down on the right."

"Thank you," she managed, and then rushed off to the elevator. The ride up seemed interminable, though it really only took a few seconds. The doors opened, and thirty seconds later, she found herself standing in front of the Nurse's station.

"I'm here to visit Dawn Summers," she said, her voice sounding far stronger than she felt.

The nurse paled a little bit, then nodded. "Are you a relative?"

"I'm her mother. Do you know what's wrong with her yet?"

The nurse hesitated.

"Well?"

The nurse looked around, her expression slightly panicked. At last she spotted a nearby doctor. "Doctor Marsh!" The doctor turned. He was a short, unattractive man with a flat nose and eyes that blinked too rarely. "This woman is the mother of the patient in room 301."

Doctor Marsh nodded, and moved to Joyce's side. The nurse immediately relaxed and went back to her desk.

"What's wrong with my daughter?" Joyce asked.

The doctor looked thoughtful. "We're not sure yet. We've run some tests, but..."

"Well, what are her symptoms?"

The doctor hesitated briefly, and then shrugged helplessly. "High fever, excessive sweating, discoloration of the skin, organ failure, and an increased rate of ageing." He shook his head in wonder. "Frankly, Ma'am, I've never seen anything like it. Whatever she has, I'm just glad it's not contagious."

Fear shot through Joyce at that. "... Can I visit her?"

The Doctor nodded. "I don't see any reason why not. But brace yourself, Ma'am. It's bad."

Joyce turned away and walked down the hall. She soon reached the entrance to room 301, and stopped short, a sudden terror seizing her breast. Walking through this door would make it all real. Her normal life would be over, and her life in which her daughter was dying would begin. She took a moment to steel herself, took a deep breath, and then opened the door.

Buffy was there waiting for her, looking at her with fearful eyes. "How is she?" Joyce asked.

Buffy pointed.

Joyce walked into the room, and then she saw her daughter. Her eyes widened. Dawn looked at least four years older than she had when she'd gone out trick or treating. She'd heard the Doctor tell her that Dawn was aging at an accelerated rate, but to hear it from a physician and to see it in person were entirely different experiences. The bottom dropped out from beneath her world. Utterly stunned, she stared at Dawn in shock. After a few seconds, she managed to speak. "What? How?"

At that moment, Giles walked in through the door, with Willow and Xander in tow. "Hello Joyce," Giles said.

"Rupert? What's happening? What's happening to Dawn?"

"We don't know yet," Buffy said. "But I'm sure Giles has some ideas. Right?" she gave Giles a meaningful look.

Xander shut the door.

"Joyce, perhaps it would be better if you sat down for this..."

A few minutes later, when the explanation was done, Joyce finally spoke. "So what you're saying is... Dawn is sick because she was possessed by her Halloween costume which, far from the 80's superhero costume she claimed it was, was actually a costume of some kind of demon?"

"Yeah, that's pretty much it," Xander said with a completely straight face.

Buffy, Willow, and Giles each nodded.

"And Buffy's a Vampire Slayer?"

More nods.

Joyce put a hand to her forehead. "This is insane."

Buffy grimaced, looked at her mom for a minute, and then, with a small amount of effort, tore a metal railing off of the side of Dawn's bed , bent it into a figure eight, and handed it to Joyce.

Joyce stared at the twisted metal in shock, and then dropped it to the floor with a heavy thud. She took a step back from Buffy. "What...?" she stared at her daughter. "I knew you were hiding things from me, but I never dreamed it was something like this!"

Buffy had the decency to look guilty at that. "I wanted to tell you..."

"But I just wouldn't understand?"

Buffy met her mother's gaze levelly. "But the last time I did, you and Dad put me in an asylum."

Joyce winced. "We thought that..."

Buffy interrupted her. "You were wrong."

"We had no way of knowing..."

Buffy cut her off again. "You could have just opened your eyes. Even in LA, the signs were there, but here in Sunnydale, you'd have to be blind to have missed them. How many people have died because of 'Gangs on PCP' or from accidental exsanguination following an 'accident with a barbeque fork in the neck?' Remember the wild animals that attacked Principle Flutie? School kids possessed by hyena spirits. Gangs on PCP at Parent/Teacher night? Vampires. That creepy stalker who was following you around back in LA? Demon. I had to fight him."

Joyce stared at her daughter, her horror mixed in equal parts with pride. "All this time...?" she asked. She shook her head. She was getting away from what was really important here. "What's going to happen to Dawn? She's... aging."

She glanced at her youngest, and shuddered. In the time between her arrival and now, Dawn had aged another two years. She now appeared to be eighteen and in the full bloom of womanhood. If the full bloom of womanhood was sweaty and blotchy, that is. As she watched, faint lines of blue pigmentation traced their way across Dawn's exposed flesh. Her jaw dropped open slightly.

"I don't know," Buffy replied, "But we're going to find out. And we're going to stop it."

And with that, Giles deposited a large pile of musty old books on the room's table, the Scoobies each pulled up a chair, and they started reading, leaving Joyce Summers standing there in a state of shock.

END PART TWO

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OK then. This part is done. The next one is probably going to be the biggest, and if all goes well, the final part. I'm aiming for a total of thirty pages here, so the next will probably be somewhere in the area of twenty. Short story length. I'm probably going to have to go back and revise this all before I'm done, but I keep getting people telling me to post, so here it is.