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

Part 3 – Labour Pains

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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She stood in the midst of a vast courtyard. Weird towers formed of opaline spiraled endlessly upwards all around her, their geometry defying her eye's ability to follow. The angles were wrong in a way that she couldn't define. The ground was utterly dry and crisscrossed with cracks. Above her, an endless maelstrom hung suspended where the stars should have been. Here, Dawn Summers was alone.

Almost alone.

Even as she stood beneath the psychic remains of Illyria's cyclopean and many-columned fortress, gazing up at the whirling sky, Dawn knew that she was not alone. She caught a flash of movement out of the corner of her eye, and she turned towards it.

There.

A strange little man who hadn't been there an instant before shook his head sadly. "These won't protect you anymore," he said, holding up a platter of green cheese.

With a flash of lightning and a crack of thunder, he was gone.

Dawn blinked repeatedly, trying to get rid of the lightning's afterimage. This place, whatever it was, was seriously wigging her out. "Hello?" she called, "Is anybody here?" and immediately she regretted it. The sound echoed strangely, bouncing off of unexpected places, and a sense of attention swirled around her awareness. She'd caught something's attention. Although it wasn't cold, she shivered.

'OK,' she thought, 'Don't panic, Dawn. Don't panic. This is a dream. It has to be a dream. I just have to wake up, and I'll be OK.' She pinched herself to no avail. She blinked. Her body didn't look right, and her center of balance was off. When did... her eyes widened. "When did I grow breasts?" she wondered aloud. And it was so: even here, she was no longer twelve, but now for all that she could tell at least a full twenty years old. She went into full blown panic mode.

A kindly female voice with a Texan accent spoke, then, "You've got bigger things to worry 'bout than what's happened to your body, Dawn."

Dawn's heart nearly rose up into her throat. She jumped into the air, let out a very undignified shriek, and then whirled around to face the source of the voice.

A lovely young woman, twenty-something, perhaps, stepped out of one of the non-Euclidian towers, seeming to emerge directly from the wall. She had long dark hair, big brown eyes, and was as naked as the day she was born. "'Course," she went on, "What's happenin' to your body is the thing you should be worryin' about, but I meant it in a different sense. You being older ain't the problem. You being prepared is."

"Who," Dawn trailed off, unsure of what to make of the sight of this woman. "Who are you?" she managed, once she had recovered from her surprise.

The woman smiled sadly. "I'm Fred."

"Fred?"

Fred nodded. "At least, I was. I'm what's left of her."

A cold fear began to grow in Dawn's heart. "What do you mean?"

"You know. The part that's still..." she paused, looking for the right word, "Undigested."

That answer certainly didn't do much for Dawn's state of mind. "This is impossible," she whispered.

"I thought so too, back when I could say 'I' without saying it through Her," Fred replied, her smile growing sadder, fading towards a frown. "I'm sorry, Dawn. This never should'a happened to you. I'm glad I at least got the chance to meet y'all, though, before the end."

Terror seized her then, and for a moment, she saw herself as she was; vast channels of dark power coursing through her, hollowing her out, searing her very soul everywhere they touched.

Dawn began to scream.

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Buffy looked up from the book she was looking through and shuddered. Dawn had aged again. She didn't understand why this was happening. Her sister, her twelve year old little sister, was lying in that bed looking for all the world like she was twenty years old. They'd been researching this for the past two hours. Visiting hours were over now, but the nurses seemed content to let them be. Nobody really liked to talk about what had happened at the hospital the previous year, but ever since then, the staff had afforded Buffy and her friends a healthy amount of preferential treatment.

This hadn't been how she'd wanted her mom to find out about her being the Slayer. Not by a long shot. But it was actually sort of comforting to know that she didn't need to keep it a secret any longer. Comforting in that 'waiting for the other shoe to drop' sort of way that big revelations tend to be immediately after they've been made, that is. She kept sneaking surreptitious glances at her mother, but none of them did any good. She couldn't figure out what her mom was thinking. She was just... sitting there, paging through the books with the rest of them, a shocked expression on her face.

Her mom was well on her way towards becoming a Scooby. ... Now there was a scary thought. Mom, a Scooby? No way. She couldn't become involved in all this, this mess that had become her life. She was too normal. She was... Mom.

A knock on the door derailed her train of thought. A moment later, Jenny Calendar walked into the room, a bundle of papers in hand.

"I found it," she said as she entered, shuffling through the papers as she walked. "It took some doing, but I found it."

Giles looked relieved at that, but Buffy just felt confused. "So, what's the what?" she asked.

Giles glanced towards Buffy. "I asked Jenny to find an incantation to place a person in a kind of magical stasis. If it works, it should buy us some time to find a more permanent solution."

Buffy raised an eyebrow. "What, so you're just gonna put my sister on ice indefinitely?" Most of her was horrified at the thought. A small but loud part of her wondered why they would ever want to take Dawn out of stasis. She tried very hard to ignore that thought, and grew angry with herself for thinking it, which did nothing to improve her mood.

Giles shook his head. "No, of course not. The spell doesn't work that way. It will, however, put her 'on ice' as you said for a day, perhaps two. In this situation, that might be the difference between saving her life and..." he trailed off uncomfortably.

"Watching her die?" Joyce asked quietly.

Buffy flinched visibly at that. "Dawn is not going to die," she said, her voice filled with vehemence.

Giles didn't reply, and neither did anyone else.

"Honey," Joyce began.

Buffy didn't give her a chance to get any further than that. "NO," she said, sounding just shy of hysteria, "We are not going to let Dawn die just because she happened to pick a bad costume. We are not going to let that happen."

Xander nodded faintly. "'Course, Buff. It might be hard to see a solution right now, but we'll find one."

"Right," Willow chimed in. "We always do. 'Cause, you know, it's what we do."

Joyce said nothing, but just looked at her daughter sadly.

Giles stood up suddenly, and all eyes went to him expectantly. Had he found something? ... He collected his coat and began to put it on.

"Giles?" Buffy asked.

"I may have a lead, but I need the rest of you to stay here and continue looking through the books. I take it you can cast the spell without me?"

Jenny nodded, putting her hand on his shoulder. "It shouldn't be a problem. I'll have Willow help me."

Willow brightened visibly at that.

Giles nodded curtly, and departed.

As Willow and Jenny prepared to cast the spell, Buffy steadfastly refused to meet her mother's gaze. She'd already called Angel earlier, and he'd said he'd look into it. If they didn't find something, he would. Dawn was not going to die.

She wouldn't let her die.

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Ethan's costume shop stood abandoned now, but that would only stop Giles for so long. He had come prepared for this. He hadn't wanted to have to resort to this, but at this point, what was another black mark on his soul, especially if it saved the life of an innocent? Grimacing slightly, Giles produced a small talisman and chanted briefly.

The talisman began to glow.

If a sorcerer who had not known Ethan or his methods had tried this, they would likely had gotten nothing at all. For Giles, however... within a few minutes, he had pinpointed Ethan's precise location within Sunnydale, and was walking at a brisk pace in that direction.

He found Ethan in a ratty little hotel room on the bad side of town. He burst through the door and immediately used his talisman to deflect a bolt of fire into the wall.

Ethan was ready for him, it seemed.

Giles chanted a few phrases in Latin, strengthening his connection with the talisman, and moved in. He would show that miserable git exactly why they'd called him 'Ripper' in his misguided youth.

Giles ducked beneath another bolt of fire, and then thrust forth his right hand, clenching the talisman in his left. Ethan's next fire bolt struck Giles's outstretched hand, coalesced into a ball, and then rebounded with a terrific flash. Ethan dove for cover, barely managing to get out of the way before the tiny fireball splashed violently against the far wall of the hotel room, leaving a black spot and the smell of burnt plaster in its wake. Neither man spoke except for what was needed to cast their spells as the fight continued.

Ethan's next attack was more subtle. Even as Giles strode forward, he felt as though every movement he made required more and more effort; Ethan's will was set against his own, and though he could not directly control his movements with this particular spell, he could make controlling his own movements a living hell. Certainly enough so that he would not stand a chance for the rest of their duel.

Or would have, had he not brought the talisman with him. Calling upon the additional power it brought to his disposal, he shattered Ethan's spell, and the backlash of magical power sent Ethan flying into the far wall.

Two minutes later, Ethan was bound hand and foot and lying face down on the carpet. Giles shoved the bed aside to clear some space for the work that was ahead.

At last, Giles spoke to his old friend. "Hello, Ethan," he said.

"Rupert," Ethan replied, sounding as casual as he could manage while breathing heavily and bleeding from his nose and ears. "Something the matter? You're usually a bit more polite when you come to visit me."

Giles reached up and slowly unscrewed the light bulb from its socket overhead. He considered the bulb for a few moments. "Yes, quite," he replied, "But I'm afraid that when innocent lives are in danger, I tend to get a bit more testy than I might otherwise."

Giles smashed the bulb against a wooden nightstand that lay against the wall and held up the jagged remains. "I said earlier that if you broke the spell, you'd get to live. I'm afraid I may have exaggerated that a bit. That was, after all, before I'd learned of some of the aftereffects of one of the costumes you sold that night." He seized Ethan by the throat with his free hand. "We're going to have a little talk about that, Ethan."

Ethan grinned. "Are we? I think you're going to bluster, and I'm going to laugh at you."

Giles went to work.

END PART THREE

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I know I said that this one would probably be the last one, but my inspiration for this story is apparently unwilling to come to me in anything but bite-sized chunks, hence the annoyingly small chapters. Ah well. At least it's coming.