Daydream Believer by Amy
The thing about it was, when you got right down to it, Dawn wasn't quite okay with Buffy being dead. Like, no one really expected her to be? But they didn't really know what to expect. There weren't really any books on it, she guessed. No guidelines for how to handle a fifteen-year-old girl when her mom was dead and her sister died to save her from a big intergalactic god dragony thing. It wasn't in the rules.
It wasn't in the rules because it shouldn't have happened. But she was not (was not WAS NOT) going to think about that.
Willow and Tara and Giles and everyone kept saying it wasn't her fault, which was sweet, if a blatant lie. She knew the truth, though. So it was okay.
And the stupid robot. The stupid robot that was always there. Which wasn't exactly helping with the grieving process. Not that she believed that it was Buffy or anything; she wasn't stupid. And the Buffybot... well, she was about as much like Buffy as that vampire Willow was like the real one. But sometimes it was hard to remember that she was hugging someone who was definitely not her sister.
She'd asked Willow why they had to keep it going all the time, and Willow had told her, but it hadn't made sense at the time, and it didn't now. It just meant that whenever Dawn was home, there was something that looked an awful lot like her sister, and sounded an awful lot like her sister, who was not her sister. Who was always. in. the house.
So Dawn made it her personal mission to get out of the house as much as possible.
It wasn't easy. All of Buffy's friends had formed the Keep Dawn Untouched As A Baby Society. Which meant that they didn't let her out of their sight, unless they knew where she was going and who with and for how long and, Dawn suspected, their criminal records, after Willow called them up on her laptop.
They so didn't trust her.
Tara had told her that she was wrong, that they trusted her, Dawnie, but not the rest of the town, not the vampires and demons and horny teenaged boys and girls. Which was annoying to Dawn, because really, when they were her age? Buffy and all her friends were totally dating football players and getting home way after curfew and who covered for them? Baby sister Dawn, of course. Of course.
But Dawn had known her strengths, and she'd known their weaknesses. Fourteen games of Scrabble, seventeen of Clue, and a Britney Spears CD on repeat at top volume later, they started to let her go out whenever she wanted, "within reason".
Except they weren't grow-ups. They weren't very good at Within Reason.
So Dawn was free.
It was summer, so it was pretty easy to find things to do. There were always kids from school going to the pool or the movies or sometimes, when she was really lucky, the beach. But a lot of her friends had family vacations or camp or work, and Dawn had... a dead mom, a robot sister, a father who wouldn't acknowledge her existence, two lesbian witches, an old British guy, a carpenter and an ex-demon.
And a vampire.
That too.
Sometimes they'd talk about their families, and Dawn never knew what to say. Because everyone thought she had a sister, and Dawn knew better than to tell the truth. Everyone else would complain about their parents, and she would be like "Um... sometimes Buffy makes me order the pizza and doesn't let me get anchovies."
She must have sounded like her big sister was the most lenient parent-figure ever. Which she was, on account of being dead and replaced with a robot.
She would have given anything for a few signs of life in the parenting department. Instead she got... well, sometimes they asked her to not eat the last of the mint chocolate chip without letting them know.
But her stories were good. They were so good, so believable, that they became ingrained. Like, if you asked Dawn, she could answer totally without thinking, giving a half-dozen stories about what she and her sister had done that weekend. She almost believed them herself.
Unlike Janice and Lisa and everyone, who had strict curfews, Dawn didn't have anything, aside from a general "if you're out after dark and get killed, we're going to resurrect you just to kill you again," which Dawn didn't listen to, like, at all, given that Willow and Tara had shown her how totally opposed to resurrection spells they were after the disaster with Mom last winter. In her efforts to not go home, where there was quiet and anger and fragments of Buffy surrounding her until she suffocated, she'd found herself, more and more often, going to Spike's.
Okay, so she had to... twist the truth, a little. She didn't actually lie. Saying that she was at a friend's house was valid, since she considered Spike a friend, even if he saw her as Buffy's Annoying Little Sister. And saying that there were totally other people out this late was true too, since Dawn knew for a fact that the Scooby Patrol was out until twelve or one AM nearly every night.
Besides, so what if she lied? No one caught her, and she got to do what she wanted.
Namely, hang around Spike.
She thought he'd be really really annoyed to have to deal with her, and maybe he was, but at least he was decent at hiding his feelings. Unlike the rest of them, she thought darkly; if they were irritated with her, they wouldn't say a word, they'd just do all these tiny things and little gestures that would be ten thousand times worse than if they'd just told her to leave them alone for a bit.
Spike didn't play games like that. Some nights he didn't want her there, so he'd just say "Nother day, Niblet?" and she'd say sure and leave. No big deal.
Sometimes it was quiet when she walked in. Others, he was blasting music from the stereo system he'd set up, the one that Dawn spent hours trying to figure out how he mystically engineered to work THAT LOUD in a crypt with one single power cord. Probably magic.
She wondered if she could get Willow to make her Discman stop needing batteries. Then she shook her head and walked farther in.
Normally he played punk rock, the type he'd told her was the reason that eardrums were invented. At the beginning of the summer, Dawn hadn't known Billy Idol from Billy Madison. Now she even knew individual songs, and could tell which album they were from.
She still liked Britney's stuff better, but at least Spike said she was gaining culture.
This wasn't his usual, though. Wasn't even his unusual. This was... something she'd never heard him play before.
Weird.
She knew he'd sensed her, and waited for him to tell her to go away, but he didn't, so she walked farther in. "Hey," she called, shouting above the song. "You busy?"
He shut off the music, and her busy echoed. She blushed a little bit and waited for him to speak.
When he didn't say anything, she swallowed audibly and walked over to him. "Hey."
"Hey," he said.
"I know that song. It's on the Dawson's Creek soundtrack, right?"
Spike snarled, and if he weren't, like, totally housebroken, Dawn would have been terrified. "You're fifteen years old and you've never heard of the Monkees?"
"That was a TV show, right?"
Spike sighed. "You truly are a child of the nineties. It's disgusting."
"Am not. I just happened to know the song first and foremost because it was on TV recently."
"Whatever you say."
"Well, it's true." Then Dawn grinned. "So. Spike likes pop, hmm? Never would've guessed it."
"I do not."
"You so do! You're blasting the Monkees like they're the new... the new..." Dawn gave up. "You like pop! That is so cute!"
"I'm not cute."
"You are. It's so great." Dawn grinned more. The whole bravado thing wasn't something she'd done much before, but she kind of liked it. "Like, if you weren't, you know, evil?"
"Thank you for that, at least."
She'd been totally lying, since Spike was the equivalent of a newborn kitten who drank pig's blood, but at least the compliment worked. "Right. But I'd totally have a huge crush on you for the Monkees factor alone."
"Why are you in my crypt?"
She shrugged. "Boredom?"
"Cute."
"I try." She flounced a little, then frowned. "Hey, Spike?"
"Mmm?"
"Can I ask you something?"
"You just did."
"Funny." Then she bit her lip, swallowed, and spoke. "Do you miss it?"
"Miss what? The music? I have the remote right-"
"Not the music. The- being with her. Being near her."
"Your sister."
"Buffy." She swallowed. "Do you miss her, ever? Like, so much it hurts? Like- like here." Her hands fell over her chest. "I mean, I know you don't have a heart, but-"
"I have a heart," he said.
"I didn't mean-"
"It hurts. Of course it hurts. Of course I miss her."
"You really love her, don't you?"
"Didn't I," he corrected gently. "She's dead, Dawnie."
"Spike, stop it."
"She is."
"Don't say it like that. Don't do that."
"Dawn, look at me."
"Spike." And her voice was high-pitched and hysterical and this wasn't what she wanted to be in front of him, but she was and she couldn't stop. She was wailing, wordlessly, just wailing.
And William the Bloody, deadliest of deadlies, evil vampire from England or whatever, held her, until she stopped, and the silence was deafening, and her bones felt like rubber bands.
"I should go home," she said finally.
"You going to be okay getting there?" he asked.
"Sure. No big bad's going to go after the sister of the Slayer, right?"
"Sure," Spike said, like he didn't believe her, which made sense, because she didn't totally believe herself either.
"It'll be okay," Dawn said. I'll be careful."
"Good luck," he said, and she thought he really meant it.
As she stepped out of the crypt, she felt the cool nighttime air hit suddenly, and wished she'd brought a jacket. She shivered a little bit.
She could just barely hear the words to Daydream Believer, blasting from his stereo as she walked away.