| The Dragon Author: Juliatheyounger Disclaimer: Joss Whedon and all the talented people at Mutant Enemy etc own these characters. I am just playing with them. Spoilers: Season 5. The Gift. Rating: G so far. Summary: Dawn has been living with her father ever since the Gift. Seven years later she returns to Sunnydale and finds that things and people she no longer believes in are still very real. D/S Author’s Note: I know, there’s something verging on the not right about Spike/Dawn ships, but I was always loved stuff like the Ghost and Mrs Muir, Beetlegueuse etc, where the little girl is friends with the supernatural creature. I wanted a grown up Dawn to come back and find her magic dragon. ****************************************************** The Dragon It had been seven years since she’d been back. Sunnydale had changed so much. Different shops, different houses, different people. Dawn wondered if they were still there. She thought she remembered their last names. She’d try to look them up. There was so much of the time she’d spent at Sunnydale that Dawn didn’t understand. Her therapist had explained that she had rationalised the tragic loss of her mother and sister by creating a fantasy world of monsters and demons. One of the first things Dawn’s father had done when he took her to live with him was to place her in counseling. Dawn had been seeing her shrink for seven years now and she pretty much had everything sorted out. She knew now that there had been no Hellmouth, that there were no vampires, that her sister’s best friend hadn’t been a witch, that her sister hadn’t been a Slayer. She knew that she hadn’t been something called the Key and that a deity hadn’t been trying to kill her. Dawn understood that these ideas were the work of a fertile imagination faced with traumatic events she didn’t want to comprehend. At the time fantasy explained it better. With the help of her therapist she had been able to piece together the reality behind the events she remembered. Her sister had not jumped from the tower to prevent a hell god from causing an apocalypse. Her sister had jumped from the tower because she had been a twenty-year old faced with the loss of her mother, the care of a younger sister and deep depression. Her therapist had explained how she was not to blame, that her existence was not a cause of her sister’s death. Dawn felt very centred now, as a person. College was going well. She was doing an English lit course. Her therapist had encouraged her to write. He explained how her imagination was a gift she should use. Her issues with her father were also accepted and resolved. Dawn accepted his failings and understood that these failings did not make her less of a person. Besides he tried very hard. He tried very hard to be family to Dawn, to compensate her for the loss of her mother and sister, to atone for not being there for her and for Buffy, when they needed him the most. Her therapist had explained this too. Dawn felt now was the right time to come back, to see Sunnydale, the real town, not the dark hellmouth of her imagination. To place everything in perspective. As she drove through the town memories assailed her. Her old school. The place where the Magic Box used to be. Dawn was filled with disappointment to see that it was now a convenience store. She had imagined the owner had been a Watcher, guardian over Buffy. She would try and find Giles while she was here. She found their graves and placed flowers on them. She almost laughed when she saw the epithet she had insisted be inscribed on her sister’s tombstone. "…she saved the world a lot." Her therapist had explained that, to Dawn, Buffy had always been saving the world for her, Dawn had just replaced that knowledge with more tangible evidence of heroism. Dawn smiled softly, looking at the inscription and remembering Buffy. It was fitting. Walking back through the cemetery, memories came flooding back to Dawn. Suddenly she saw it, the crypt. She had almost laughed. She had never been sure whether she had made the crypt up, whether she had just imagined that her secret hiding place had been in a graveyard. Smiling and curious at the discovery, Dawn walked over to the stone building. Just how she remembered it. She pushed on the door. Unlocked. It swung open a crack, enough for her to squeeze in. Wow, thought Dawn looking around in the dim light, it’s all still here. The few pieces of old furniture, a battered television, the tomb in the centre. She recalled the imaginary friend she had invented. He had been a vampire. He had lived here, in her hiding place. She used to imagine she was going to him when she ran away, that he would protect her against all the evil in the world. She was impressed by how imaginative she had been back then. She had made him unable to hurt people, only demons, because the government had put a microchip in his head. He had been so cool, she thought with a smile. Her therapist surmised that this person had been a friend’s older brother, someone who Dawn had admired and had transferred to her fantasy world. Dawn thought it amusing that one of her first crushes had been for an imaginary friend. She suddenly had a very clear memory of sitting here on the tomb with him one night. He was telling her scary stories. Buffy had found her and had been angry. Obviously she had imagined it. She would have to tell her therapist when she returned. An old blanket was lying on the battered couch. She shook her head. In order to have her friend visit her in the day she had imagined he’d used this blanket to protect him from the sunlight. Her fingers ran over the worn rough fabric. She gazed around the poor, sad old crypt. It seemed smaller now. No longer the vaulted hall of a vampire master. "Buffy?" The voice startled her. It came from the shadows. It was vaguely familiar. Dawn peered into the darkness, trying to see who was there. "No, I’m Dawn. Buffy was my sister." "Nibblet?" The word was at once unreal and like coming home. Dawn reeled. "Spike?" her voice was a squeak. He came forward out of the shadows. He looked just as she remembered him. Bright white hair. Black, clothed completely in black. Slim, strong, deadly. Dawn felt her carefully constructed world begin to crumble. Spike looked at the tall, brunette woman in front of him. She was so much like Buffy. Her features, her movements. But it was Dawn, the Nibblet. He could see the nervous, gangly child in her. He drank in her face, barely daring to believe it was Little Bit. Little Bit come back to him. "You’re real," she said the thought aloud. Or maybe the visit had been too much for her, maybe her mind was retreating to the imaginary world again. Dawn suddenly turned and ran from the crypt. Out into the sun, out into the real world. ********************************************************************** End of Part 1 (possibly to be continued) |