
Home Sweet Gone
Dawn opened the door into what had once been the sitting room between hers and Buffy’s bedrooms. Now it was a
combination sitting room-slash-crumbling ruins of the 100 wing of Sunnydale High.
Dawn didn’t quite know what to do with that. She had opened a door from here to there to enter Andrew’s mind. She didn’t
know that she would make it manifest as real, so that was kind of a surprise, but if she needed to close all of the doors, as
Tara said, she’d have to find a way.
First, though…
Dawn found her sketchbooks in a clutter on the sitting room desk. She found a lighter – not the Zippo, but effective enough –
in the pocket of a pair of Spike’s jeans in the laundry hamper. Crouching in the place where carpet turned to dust-frosted
linoleum tile, Dawn held up her sketchpad like a flag of surrender. She set the first page alight, hands steady at first, but
beginning to tremble as the flames caught the page, crisping it brown, then black, then to curling ash. She let the book fall
to the ground with a thud as the fire consumed every picture – the demons, the little glass church, the portrait of Connor.
As they burned, Dawn remembered with a sickening tightness in her belly how most of them came into being. How she
tempted the boys into alleys behind coffee houses and in the storeroom of McBride’s Heroes, how she teased them into
touching her – the more public the place, the more thrilling she found it. And then how she left them, flushed and unfulfilled
once she was done, so that she could commit images to the page. Didn’t matter what the boys wanted. Sometimes she didn’t
even learn their names.
Dawn hugged her body as the sketches burned, the lurid faces blackened and contorted, as if they appeared to be in agony.
Who knows, she thought, maybe they are?
There is hope in one who knows mercy? That’s what Tara had said. Dawn uttered a thick chuckle at the thought.
Dawn had gotten good at spotting the needy ones. The boys no girl ever paid any mind. Boys like Augie whose experience
with girls amounted to a kiss at Christmas from their Great Aunt Maud.
Dawn had wriggled into Buffy’s clothes, too small for her own long, amply-endowed body. She coerced her eager, puffy, acne-
blasted schoolmates – the ones she never would have looked at in class. How she hated their foggy breath on her shoulder as
she had them pin her against anonymous walls. How she hated the grateful expression in their glassy eyes as she encouraged
them to touch her. But, oh how she loved the upwelling of pictures that flickered in her brain, triggered by the spikes of
hate and guilt and adrenaline and whatever other kinds of hormonal reaction it sparked in her.
Then came Brodie. Dawn had forgotten him in her haste to fall for Andrew. Willingly, gladly forgotten Brodie, whom she had
hurt, whom she had forced to go further than he’d wanted…
But that wasn’t all she had done to him. Dawn had drawn on him. She’d made him a door.
Dawn doubled over, suddenly sick with grief. She knelt shivering on the floor beside the guttering fire of her sketches and
thought of Andrew.
Guess what else opens doors? She had asked him. Dawn remembered when they had gone exploring in the hidden archive
beneath Stonehenge. It was her blood that opened the sealed corridors, her blood, so dark and sweet in those closed
spaces, which had been the key. It had made such simple sense to her then. She could open doors! Of course!
Turns out, she could close them too.
Dawn walked the few paces into the Sunnydale High part of her sitting room before the light gave out. She found what she
wanted lying within inches of the cold, dead hand of a Bringer – a ceremonial knife. With the weight of it balanced against
her palm, she returned to the few flames of her sketchpad. She knelt beside it, steeled herself against the pain, and drew
the bright blade across her palm.
The pain of it was like a slap that woke her from her self-loathing fest. The pain made it suddenly real. Dawn shook her head
and hissed through her teeth. Tears pricked her eyes, but she didn’t cry.
Instead, she squeezed her palm, squeezed hard until beads of blood like pomegranate seeds dripped sizzling into the yellow
licking flames. A scent bloomed in the darkness – dark earth and honeysuckle.
Dawn shut her eyes.
She imagined the walls of Sunnydale High growing thin and powdery around her, then turning to smoke as her blood burned
on the pages that had once been doors.
This was the beginning. This was the end.
She was the Key. And the doors were closing, at last.
While Xander and Giles stood there, mutely wondering what they should do to pass the agonizing moments between now and
the end of the world, when Willow and Maya straggled into the hall from the kitchen. In the seldom-used parlor, which was
much more used of late, Connor and Faith listened in.
“Xander,” Willow said, visibly relieved. “What happened?”
Xander glanced back at Rachel as if to include her in the conversation. He pressed his palms together and shrugged. “Where
should I begin: the insanity that was the drive across town, the pursuit and near-killing by armed security guards, or Brodie
the Exploding Boy?”
This produced the appropriate expressions of shock in Willow and Maya. Xander responded with a nod and a tight-lipped
grimace. “Yeah. Apparently he was a Brodie-shaped doorway to Kostzchie Demon Land, and Dawn… undid him.”
Maya pressed a hand to her lips.
“Poor Brodie,” Willow whispered, looking a little green. “Poor Dawn.”
Giles stared at the disheveled group of them, standing in an anxious knot in the entry hall of their Victorian house –
misnamed The Flat, because Buffy had thought it was funny to call something three stories high “flat,” even though Giles had
at first much belabored the point that each of the house’s six suites was a separate apartment, a flat, but had finally given
it up as one of those things – a Buffy-ism, he recalled with an aching little pang.
Giles remembered with sudden stunning clarity, the day he first showed them The Flat, having just signed the final
paperwork in the barrister’s musty fourth-floor office that smelled of dog biscuits and pipe tobacco. He remembered as they
swanned in – Dawn in a ridiculous floppy hat of yellow straw, Buffy’s eyes shielded behind enormous glimmering shades, and
Andrew, dressed in a charcoal pinstripe suit, looking like a miniature version of Wesley Wyndham Price.
“This is ours?” Dawn had asked, peering up into the cavernous three-story foyer.
Giles smiled at her. “Equal shares,” he’d said. “Buffy, Xander, Willow and, well, me. All of our names are on the deed. With
money invested from the insurance claims after the disaster Sunnydale, I managed to buy the place. And here we are.”
Dawn stopped spinning long enough to stare into his face. “We can all live here?”
“Well, Xander is still in Africa, and Willow said Kennedy might need some convincing, but yes. It belongs to us. The flats are
ours,” he said.
“Flat?” Buffy had said, pulling her sunglasses down her nose. “You English types are so strange, Giles. You call this flat?”
And even as he rushed to correct her, she and Dawn had darted into the back room, what would later become the TV room.
He could hear their voices bouncing in the hollow rooms, and he knew then, that after all their frenetic trips across the U. S.
and Europe in the last year, they were finally, inextricably… home.
He returned to the present with a weighty shrug. For a moment, the all stood, each lost in the separate orbit of their own
thoughts, as if waiting for the sun to return to make some sense of all this mess.
“Dawn said we should be ready,” Giles said, finally breaking the brooding silence. “Willow, Maya, have you all of your
preparations?”
“We’re set,” Willow answered.
Xander nodded. “Then we should suit up. Connor: weapon’s chest in the parlor. I’m thinking load up on pointy things, those
nifty silver-tipped stakes Angelica made…”
“Which will come in handy against the Wights,” Giles said. “Silver weapons are the only ones to fend them off…”
At that, they were in motion: Connor, Giles, Xander. Connor kicked the lid of the weapon’s chest open. Xander doled out
weapons – daggers, a pair of two-handed broad swords, a canvas bag filled with silver stakes that tinkled like chimes. Giles
hefted a battleaxe in his good hand.
As they handed the weapons around – one broad sword to Rachel, daggers for Willow, Maya, and Connor – Thellian appeared
at the base of the stairs.
Everyone froze. He cocked his head as if listening to the tune of a far away song, then said, “I smell smoke.”
In a blink, Connor sprung across the entry hall, vaulting Morna’s crate, to crouch beside Thellian. Before he could fly up the
stairs, he watched in stark horror as the stairwell grayed to ash, as if suddenly drained of color. Connor craned his neck to
follow the tracing paths of ash that streaked in broad swathes up the walls in winding, twisting bands.
The others gathered around him, equally gawking, mouths open, wordlessly watching, as the veins expanded and interlaced,
transforming the pale faded flowered wallpaper to flakes of ash that showered down on them in endless spirals that broke
apart into delicate motes and drifted down, a few at first, then many, and then great chunks that caved in on them in a
cascade of sparkling, diaphanous dust.
“Not again,” Xander moaned.
“Again?” Willow cried. Understanding a moment later, Willow called up into the filling darkness: “Dawn!”
She appeared on the landing, the walls and floor dissolving around and beneath and above her, the breeze of the icy night
swirling ash into her hair. She looked down into the faces of her friends, so distant, so afraid, so… in awe.
Dawn leapt from the edge as the banister and rail disintegrated. Xander and Giles ran forward to catch her, but they really
only provided men-sized not-so-cushiony cushions to break her fall. They landed in a tangle, but had little time to complain as
the Flat eroded around them.
Connor pulled Dawn to her feet. At the same time, Thellian and Rachel helped Giles.
Faith hauled a sputtering Xander up and shoved him at Willow and Maya. “Run!” she shouted. Faith and Thellian ran to
Morna’s crate. He tore open the lid in one swift, fluid motion. Inside, Morna slept in her excelsior packing, red curls like
captured flames around her porcelain face. On her chest, a tiny black kitten purred, a circlet of silver on his neck.
Thellian stroked the kitten with one white finger. “Time to fly, my raven, my Scout,” he said. He unhooked the silver ring
from the kitten’s throat, and both cat and girl revived. Morna’s seawater eyes flickered open.
Meanwhile the others had darted down the hallway toward the backyard and escape, when Dawn called out, “Wait!”
The tiles under their feet silvered to ash. But they listened; they turned to face her.
Behind them, they witnessed as Faith and Thellian helped the tiny vampire in her emerald silk taffeta dress from the wooden
crate.
Thellian pulled a parcel wrapped in heavy linen from the pocket of his white suit and passed it to the girl.
Smiling enigmatically, she unwrapped the package to reveal a silver thorn shaped dagger resting in the soft folds of cloth.
At the same time, Dawn remembered the Bringer’s knife in her own hand. She turned to Willow. Urgently, she pressed the
dagger into Willow’s hands. She leveled her tired, burning eyes onto the witch’s.
“I need you to do it,” Dawn pleaded. “When we arrive at Triumvirate, you have to…”
Willow snapped her head in a violent nod. “No! I can’t. Dawn, not me! Don’t ask me!”
They could hear the quiet shhhhhing of the Flat slowly fading, of ash mixing with snowfall. The walls of the seldom-used parlor
thinned to powder, as did the books in the library, and the chairs in the dining room, and the tendrils of computer cords, all
silvered to dust that fell away to nothing.
“Dawn!” Xander said.
A tear fell from Willow’s eye. “Buffy will never forgive me if I…”
“Willow, you must,” Dawn begged, her voice entreating. She glanced around at the destruction around her, destruction she
authored, and into Willow’s face came the light of understanding. Dawn continued, “No one person should have this much
power.”
Willow tried to speak, but could not. She nodded instead, lowering her gaze to the crumbling floor between them.
Dawn touched Willow’s shoulder, lightly, then turned to face Thellian, who, with Morna, Connor and Faith, had joined them in
the narrow throat of the hallway.
Addressing Thellian, Dawn said, “Then I need you to describe to me in detail the rooftop of Triumvirate.”
As he spoke, his tone rushed but reverent, Dawn drew open one final door for them as the remaining walls of the Flat fell in
on one another and finally vanished.