Title: Lost Haven
Author: Athenewolfe
Fandom: Buffy
Rating: PG
Character: Spike/Dawn
Warnings: Character Death
Word Count: 445
Table: Prompt 05 Lost Haven Guilt 50 Dark Fics

Author's Note: Pressie for Vladt for being the November 2006 Reviewer of the Month - unbetad sorry! I was going for dark and ended up with sad so I may try again!

Summary: Dawn is lost when everything has been taken away from her.

~~**~*~*~*~

She wept silently.

Everything she was, everything she had ever known, everything she had craved in her short life had been taken away from her.

Her identity, the very essence of what made her “Dawn” had been stripped bare. She wasn’t normal, wasn’t really Buffy’s sister or Joyce’s daughter. She was the Key, energy made human, memories fabricated, she wasn’t even real. A tool to be used and then discarded.

They tried to deny it but she knew the truth. She had known when Giles ordered Buffy to kill her, overheard the whispers that the wrong sister had died. She had known the truth all along. Silently screaming as even her false family was stripped away from her.

First her mother was taken away by a tumor. She always wondered if that was her fault as well. Perhaps the false memories had inflicted the condition, or perhaps just made it a little worse. Regardless it was her fault that Buffy died. Jumped to save the false sister, the energy housed within her mortal body. No one ever forgave her for the sin. Not for the death of their chosen one, not for telling Giles what they planned. To yank her sister from hell? Please, even she knew that she would have gone to heaven. Where else would a champion go?

They turned against her then; silently without words. They retreated and simply stopped caring. Giles had stopped Willow from the resurrection, and they blamed her for that to. In Xander and Willow’s eyes she killed Buffy a second time, denying the world their Buffy. But what good would a fallen angel have done?

The third loss was too much. She found her solace in the arms of the only person who cared as much as she. The only person who could truly see her, the only person who would let her be.

Spike saw her as Dawn. Not Buffy’s sister, not the reason why Buffy jumped, or the reason why Giles stopped the ceremony. She was real.

Their relationship was forged in shared grief and grew into so much more. She knew it was forbidden, knew that others would see it as wrong, but she never cared. She loved him. She should have known that it wouldn’t last.

Her memory flicked over their last moments. The outrage as the Scoobies discovered them, the horror as they screamed. Before she could truly react, before she could say anything they staked him. Saving her from a monster that they thought he was.

Her last haven, lost to her forever.

Slinging her bag over her shoulder she walked out into the night.

This was no longer her home.

~Fini