TITLE: The Hardest Thing in this World AUTHOR: Aurora DISCLAIMER: I own nothing, Joss owns all. I think that this is unjust. RATING: PG PAIRING: Dawn SPOILERS: Season 5 IMPROV #35: wild – tear – charm – fault SUMMARY: "She wonders if the monks had some sort of contingency plan for this. A 'what happens when the Slayer succeeds in protecting the Key, but dies in the process' plan B sort of deal." DISTRIBUTION: it's yours if you have the say so; otherwise an email is the way to achieve your desires… FEEDBACK: shall be devoured, and possibly framed for posterity's sake. Just send it – girl292@hotmail.com AUTHOR'S NOTES: Takes place directly after the events of 'The Gift' AN2: This is one of my few attempts at exploring the minds of other BtVS characters. I tend to stick to viewing things through the Buffy lens in my writing, so all comments, suggestions, and constructive criticism are most welcome. ** ** The Hardest Thing in this World by Aurora ** She exhales and watches absently as the smoke exits her lungs to crawl toward the ceiling in random wispy patterns. Her body feels heavy, slow, like the air that's pressing down on her, making it hard to breathe and making her chest ache when she forces another mouthful of burning smoke past her lips. She holds her breath and waits to feel it, that growing tightness in the center of her chest, that twinge in the back of her throat, her body's frantic attempts to pull in air to feed starved lungs, to keep her alive. She holds on past the point of dizziness, waiting until the darkness invades the edges of her vision before exhaling once more, stifling the cough that surfaces in protest of her new pastime. She doesn't know how long she's been lying on her back on the kitchen rug, listening to the swish-swish sound of the water churning in the dishwasher. It feels like years, each beat of her heart, each intake of breath, stretching out to cover ages. In reality, it's probably been more like fifteen minutes. Whatever it is, it's not long enough. It's never long enough. Twenty-seven hours and counting. Just a little over a day really, yet a lifetime's worth of pain. Still not enough time for things to seem real. Is anything really real when she's not… real? She coughs on her next drag and it sends a surge of pain spilling down her frayed nerves to spread cruelly through her ribs, aggravating the still-not-healing cuts on her stomach, and she quickly abandons that train of thought before it dredges up things she'd rather not be thinking about. No, it's better not to think, not to feel. Better to be numb. Numb. Cold. Dead. She wonders if Buffy's cold now. Before, when Buffy fell, her skin was so warm, like it was on fire. It seared her fingers when she reached out to brush Buffy's hair back as Xander and Giles passed by, carrying the body back to the house. It felt like she'd been burned up from the inside out and Dawn suddenly felt like shards of ice had lodged in her chest, knowing that it should have been her falling from life to death to land in a broken heap on the unyielding ground. It should have been her body they lifted off the cracked cement. Her purpose. Her death. Her fault. She couldn't concentrate through the haze of tears and the echo of Buffy's last words in her ears, so lost in disbelief that it seemed to take just mere seconds for them to arrive back home. She watched as they laid her sister's limp form down on the couch, but they wouldn't let Dawn in to see her. Instead, Spike herded her immediately upstairs and into the bathroom to tend to her cuts, and then forced her to stay in her room, standing guard at her door like some demented vampire watchdog. Well, he didn't really stand so much as he leaned back against the doorframe smoking, his fractured leg unable to bear his full weight without long strings of curse words she's certain she'd never heard before. Even from him. Spike remained upstairs with her, the heavy silence between them more reassuring than any hollow words she could have mustered in an attempt to fill the sudden void hovering around and within them all. So instead, she just laid there in the false dark, watching the smoke from Spike's cigarette drift toward the ceiling to mix with the shadows cast by the light in the hall. Her mind felt empty then, incapable of all but the most trivial of thoughts, and even the smallest thing became utterly fascinating. She studied the way Spike held completely still, eyes focused on some unseen point in his mind. His gaze never-wavering, like a statue, except for when he'd shift slightly to search for another cigarette. She stared in rapt concentration as he slid the cigarette out of the pack and placed it with shaking fingers between his lips. The click of the lighter drew her gaze from his lips back to his still shaking hands and she waited until he exhaled his first drag to turn her attention back to the patterns that swirled wildly within the rising tendrils of thin smoke. She didn't sleep then. None of them did. She heard the others pacing, their voices muted as they drifted upstairs, never still, never silent. As if keeping busy would prevent the reality of the day's events from settling over them, would keep it from being true. They were all just suspended in that moment, pacing in endless circles, waiting for nothing, for anything. Waiting to wake up from the nightmare, for it to stop being real. But it never did and they didn't rest. No, instead they buried her. Twenty-seven hours ago they put her sister in the ground. No actual funeral, just a grave dug by hand and a small group of battered mourners. No crowds, no fanfare, no acknowledgement from the world she died again to save. Buffy didn't even get to be next to Mom. She remembers the thought surfacing as a scream in her mind, but rather than letting it out, she dug her nails into the palm of Spike's hand and clutched his arm all the more tightly when they turned to leave. Buffy's all alone. They buried her sister all alone. And now she's alone too. All alone in the world and all alone in the house for the first time in twenty-seven hours. No one hovering over her, trampling her in their need to do something, to keep moving. No longer surrounded by their obsessive tendency to try and anticipate her needs, as if by drowning her in care and concern it would somehow dull the raw edge of pain that plagued theirhearts and permeated the stale air around them. But now, with everyone gone, the overbearing warmth and constant noise of so many bodies in the house was suddenly not, and she couldn't help but feel the loss of her once hated distraction as the silence steadily closed in on her. Just one girl and the morbid silence of an empty house. She'd thought she couldn't wait for them all to leave, to give her some space, but twelve minutes after Willow and Tara left to get the things that they would need to stay over for a while, she ran out of tasks to keep her hands and her mind occupied and the house suddenly seemed way too empty and foreign and… dead. She'd turned on the dishwasher to keep the silence from driving her mad, staying in the kitchen was a survival tactic, pure and simple, the cigarettes… that was spur of the moment, really. She'd lifted the pack from the inside pocket of Spike's duster last night when it was his turn to play 'keep the Key', not entirely sure why she was taking them at the time, she'd just needed something to hold onto. Maybe she was going insane. It wasn't entirely impossible given the facts of the situation: she wasn't real, not in the 'really-real' sense of the word. She'd just watched her not-sister trade her 'fate of the world rests on my shoulders' life for her 'manufactured by monks' one, only to be buried under cold, hard ground in return for her sacrifice. And now here she was, hiding in the kitchen of her own house, chain-smoking cigarettes she stole from a neutered vampire, welcoming the virgin buzz of nicotine in her blood, and desperately trying not to think about the fact that she can't even make a cup of tea without losing it. Since the burial, she'd tried to stay out of the way. Tried to be helpful the night before, when Giles and Willow and the others were all huddled around the dining room table, trying to figure out what exactly to do with her now. She'd felt completely out of place and awkward being in the room while they spoke about her, so when Giles had mentioned needing some tea to help him concentrate, she'd been the first to volunteer and quickly left before anyone could look at her with pity heavy in their eyes. It had seemed like a good plan at the time: boil the water, take down the tea tray, ready the cups. The routine was soothing, a welcome escape, something she'd seen done innumerable times in her short life. Everything went smoothly, until she'd reached for the tea tin. She leaned against the cabinet to grasp the can of cinnamon apple tea leaves that sat waiting patiently in its spot on the second shelf to the left, but as soon as her fingers brushed the label, she froze, unbidden memories washing over her in fragments, echoing in her ears, and making her chest tight with pain: crying on Buffy's shoulder as she spilled the details of her humiliation at the hands of her latest junior high crush, the way that Buffy could always make her laugh through her tears, the sisterly bickering while Mom made them all a cup of tea. 'There's nothing that a nice, hot, cup of tea can't cure.' Her mother had said, and Buffy had smirked and called her 'Mrs. Giles' which made her mom blush and change the subject. Dawn never finished making the tea. Her hands wouldn't stop shaking and she couldn't seem to get them to behave. She must have been gone too long as Willow appeared behind her in the kitchen, gently led her over to the barstools, and sat her down. She didn't say anything, just watched absently as Willow completed the task she hadn't been able to bring herself to finish. 'There's nothing that a nice, hot, cup of tea can't cure.' Except death, she thinks bitterly, her mind returning to the present. Except the remains of this life that she can't quite seem to piece back together. No matter what she does, there's always a gap, or a crack. Always a gaping hole that aches to belong to something, anything, once more. She knows that it's pathetic, hiding in the kitchen from the ghosts in her mind. But it's better if she stays in one place. She learned that lesson with her mom's death. Moving around stirs up memories, wandering through the house provides way too much room for some random thing to dig up a recollection long since faded. Everything reminds her of Buffy or her mom. Every room she goes into screams of their presence. Everywhere things are just waiting to leap out at her with some long forgotten memory that digs into her skin like small shards of glass, making her chest constrict with bitter loss, and forcing her to stop and suck in deep gulps of air to keep from passing out. Like the gold chain with the thin heart charm Buffy had given her for her tenth birthday. She'd found it in the bottom of the bathroom drawer that morning. She'd forgotten she even had it, and seeing it there, tangled in knots amongst old hair ribbons and rubber bands, stopped her cold. She just froze and stared at the necklace as if it was an illusion, lost in her not-really-real memories of growing up the kid sister to the Slayer, until the sting of the mint toothpaste against the back of her throat reminded her that she had been in the middle of brushing her teeth. That was four hours ago. Things had only gotten worse as the day progressed. Giles forgot her name twice over the breakfast that no one ate. Each time it happened, he just sat there staring at her as if he was surprised to see her sitting at the table with them, while Anya kept stealing glances at her like she had suddenly grown a third eye or something. Willow and Tara would forget she was in the room and call out for her when she still was right there, standing next to them. The only one who hadn't completely wigged around her yet was Spike, and she found herself wishing that night would fall so he could come back. She felt safer with him around, even though Giles still didn't trust him and had been the one who made him leave just before sunrise this morning. She could tell that Spike had wanted to argue, saw him set his jaw in preparation for battle, but she'd stopped him. She'd placed her hand on his arm and told him it was alright, that he could go get some sleep and come back later. She could see the warring emotions in his eyes before he clamped down on them and left with a simple 'See you later, 'Bit' and a quick ruffle of her hair. She's not worried about Spike forgetting to come back, before Giles kicked him out, he hadn't let her out of his sight for more than five minutes at a time since Buffy… since the battle ended. She does worry that the others will forget she even exists now that they have left the house. She knows that she's probably being paranoid, but the whispers of the 'what ifs' running through her mind drown out the little rational voice that's telling her to stop fretting over nothing. She closes her eyes and exhales slowly, not wanting to see the way the smoke has form when it's just left her body, yet steadily disintegrates into nothing the longer it's exposed to the air. She wonders how long it will be until she disappears too. If not physically, then figuratively at least, especially if the others' current tendency to draw a blank in her presence is any indication. She is a Key without a lock now. A girl without a family. An orphan among the living. She wonders if the monks had some sort of contingency plan for this. A 'what happens when the Slayer succeeds in protecting the Key, but dies in the process' plan B sort of deal. She knows that she is – no, *was* – tied to Buffy. That the monks bound them through Buffy's flesh and blood, but now, Buffy's flesh is still and her blood is silent, so where exactly does that leave the Key? 'The hardest thing in this world, is to live in it.' Buffy's words swirl around the edges of her consciousness, muted through the rush of nicotine in her blood and the haze of smoke in her eyes. She knows what Buffy wanted her to do, but it's not as easy as that. She didn't ask for this, didn't ask to be made to feel these things. She wants to scream it at the top of her lungs, wants to yell at Buffy for leaving her like this, wants to hurt someone until they feel as bad as she does. 'Live. Live for me.' How exactly is she supposed to just go back to living a life that doesn't need her anymore? There's nothing for her to go back to. Just an empty house filled with false memories, and a group of people who aren't sure what to do with her in one moment, and aren't even sure she exists in the next. She can't really blame them for being uncomfortable around her; she'd crawl out of her own skin if she had the chance. She can read their feelings in the way that they never settle in one place when she's in the room. The way that Giles nervously paces back and forth, the way that Willow anxiously babbles and won't look her in the eyes. No one wants to be around the girl-who-wasn't-and-shouldn't-still-be. The cause of their Slayer's death. She knows they'd never admit it, but she can feel it just the same. The guilt, the anger, the accusation in the gazes that brush against her sore skin whenever she enters the room. She would be indignant about it if she didn't know it was the truth. She can feel the hot sting of tears forming at the edges of her vision and harshly stabs the butt of her cigarette out in the coffee cup she's using as a makeshift ashtray. She refuses to let the tears come and instead reaches for the cigarette pack, frowning when she sees that only two cigarettes remain. She'll have to find another distraction when they're gone, but for now she seeks her solace in the thin paper wrapper and the tang of tobacco as it brushes against her dry lips. She swallows hard and takes a solid drag on her next to last cigarette. She knows that if anyone walked in on her right now they'd think she'd lost her mind, well, that is if they remembered who she was in the first place. She closes her eyes and concentrates solely on the sting of the smoke pushing against her chest, its warm swirl within her lungs, feels it spreading out inside her veins and taking over. The hum of the nicotine combined with lack of oxygen makes her throat burn and her limbs sting with the first semblance of life she's felt in twenty-seven hours. She blocks it all out and holds onto the smoke, knowing that when she lets go she'll be left with nothing once more, and wishing she knew how to build a life out of manufactured memories that are disappearing faster than the smoke spiraling towards the ceiling from the tip of her cigarette. ** end FEEDBACK: girl292@hotmail.com