Title: Horde Against Horde
Author: smolder
Disclaimer: I own nothing. Joss owns Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Walking Dead is by Robert Kirkmen. I repeat, I own nothing.
A/N: Reviews are Good. This has been a subtle hint from the author - Please return to your regularly scheduled reading.
The first few entries she wrote felt wrong. She shouldn't be the one doing this. It wasn't her place.
But there was no one else.
And Dawn knew that recording this – what had happened, how they lived, the way the world now existed - was vital. Keeping their history was vital.
And that made her vital too.
That might seem self-centered but Dawn was able to quickly recognize that she would not be able to fight with the others. That had been a bitter pill to swallow – she had so long struggled to be recognized as physically capable by her sister only to see that here, here she was left in the dust.
Because this sort of fighting was nothing like the way they used to fight vampires. This was a berserker fighting style – no one really looking out for anyone else, but somehow instinctively knowing where their sister slayers were on the field. Swords, knives, magic, bullets, and arrows flashing in a spontaneous dance of annihilation.
She was just in the way.
Lying on her stomach and watching from under the shield Andrew had created, Dawn knew she had to find a way to make herself useful to the group. She refused to simply be one who was protected because she was Buffy's sister or the Key this time around.
She might not be able to fight with them, but she would prove that she was necessary to them.
She observed, she recorded – every city re-taken, every death of one of their own, every new custom – the building blocks of this warrior society that was being created before her eyes.
Dawn talked to the girls, got a translator when there was a language barrier. She asked about their lives before this - family, school, what music they liked, places they went to once on vacation, how the African savanna looked in spring, seeing the aurora borealis for the first time, stuffed animals they had since they were children, how it had felt when they had first been called. She made sure she had a clear record of everyone.
They were all important. Everyone would be recorded. Everyone would be remembered. Written by hand, in her careful scratchy writing, with promotional No.2 pencils from some random bank in one of the many composition books they had found a bulk supply of in that warehouse in Phoenix.
It wasn't her place, she still felt that way (just a bit less every day) but Dawn hoped Giles would have approved.