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Now: Saturday, 1:30 a.m.

Dawn is aware, finally, that she is an odd sight. A slightly trashy, trendy `grrrl' in black hip huggers and a scrap of cloth that barely covers her breasts. Except there's blood. And glitter.

She imagines they can smell the sex on her and that he was blonde, tall and lanky. All lips and hands and somehow it was over before it even really began. Stickiness between her thighs and the flavor of rum mixed with man leaves a film on her tongue that isn't unpleasant. She licks her lips and still the flavor is there, a reminder of her ability to be alluring.

Dawn has dangerous sex in alleys.

The memory is a hazy recollection that flares bright in odd moments. A pause in thought and she can almost feel the press of fingers on skin or the slick pressure of a tongue against her throat, in her mouth.

Dawn has never been naive about the succulence of her lower lip.

Tonight Dawn laps up the leftover taste of man clinging to the corners of her mouth and remembers the flash of platinum in the broken window across the alley. She opened her eyes for a moment and was surprised by the wanton image burning into her brain. Legs lifted and sprawled. Hair, her hair, everywhere. Drifting and obscuring, sticking and trapped. She could have been a painting: The Magdalene in Ecstasy.

And him. Afterward he didn't look as familiar as she might have thought. It's the same story. His eyes are a little less blue, his cheeks a little less etched. Maybe he's really not so very tall. But he is blonde. They all are. Always. There are reasons for why that could be wrong. Now, it's wrong for other reasons; reasons that lie on the other side of the window in the Trauma Room door.

Staring through the tiny pane of glass Dawn can see the curve of one cheek reflected back at her and Xander lying on a table in the center of the room. He's as limp as one of Drusilla's forgotten dolls; except that isn't something she could ever truly remember. The chrome equipment scattered around the room recalls real memories, true memories. It bleeds into an impression of scaffolding and that's a remembrance tainted with fear.

Dawn stares harder into the glass and realizes that she's eaten off all of her lip gloss.

"He's flat lining." The door muffles the doctor's urgent shout. There are others, on either side of the table, working to stop the blood draining fluidly from the gashes in Xander's wrists. They are like ants to sticky sweet, massing and writhing, undisturbed by the high-pitched whine indicating that his heart has stopped.

Maybe you should just let him go, she wants to say. A heart can only take so much. But then again, he's all that she has left and besides, he is the Animus. She knows that about him.

Then: Friday, 10:05 p.m.

"Where're you going?" Xander's voice is only slightly slurred.

Joan has that look in her eyes. The sliding sideways look that says she knows that Xander is drunk. Dawn is uncomfortable, sad for him and a little embarrassed for herself. Joan blushes so prettily, she thinks as the blood rises in her face.

Dawn shifts slightly and gazes hard at her reflection. Sometimes she wonders about pretty little Joan. A little thin and she wears far too much make-up. Big eyes, full lips and lots of hair. Not for the first time Dawn wishes for better light. In the corner of her eye Xander fills up the edge of the bathroom mirror. She wonders if he'll grab her if she doesn't answer. Her top is sleeveless and bruises tend to attract the wrong sort of attention.

"Out," she replies, finally.

Joan shrugs. It's a carefully studied gesture and Dawn loves the seamless role of one ivory shoulder accompanied by the barest tilt of her head. She looks cunningly indifferent. Joan knows it's a lie. There is a tenseness around her mouth that suggests fear. She has seen the look before. As Dawn leans in over the sink she thinks of all the shadows in those pretty blue eyes. Her hand shakes slightly around the eyeliner pencil and she has to pause to readjust her grip. Dawn likes to think her eyes look wicked rimmed in black.

"You look like a whore."

Xander has moved further into the bathroom, his reflection lounges, menacing, in the doorway. His silhouette is surprisingly lean, the glass in his hand gleaming dully in the fluorescent light. Xander's customary evening drink has once again turned into a steadily increasing declaration for `one more.' Another delicate shrug and Dawn reaches for the Rum and Coke sitting on the toilet tank. She warns Joan to only take a sip but isn't surprised when she swallows a healthy gulp. The beautiful amber liquid warms her belly and steadies her nerves. A little more and she won't even feel the cold.

"It doesn't matter." Dawn wishes her words slurred a little more. Maybe than she would break the glass over his head if he grabbed her. In the mirror, Joan smirks. She's the honest one and she knows that would never happen. After all, he is still Alexander Harris.

Dawn watches Xander's reflected hand tighten around the tumbler. "You think I don't know?" His voice is somehow deeper when he has been drinking. "Where you go? What you do?" She knows he isn't really asking a question and that some things are just better left unsaid. That is a lesson The Scoobies ingrained in her from the day that she was made.

Joan looks a little stricken by the thought. Creation is a subject she avoids.

Dawn rolls her eyes so she doesn't have to try and meet his gaze. Sometimes, when she does, she feels compelled to fervency. Besides, this way Joan can't laugh at her for being such a coward. For a moment she even disappears.

When Xander moves, he's faster than Dawn could have anticipated. The slap of his hands against the wall echoes sharply. His breath, hot against her cheek, reeks of alcohol. They're only ever this close in bed and his nearness is beginning to feel like claustrophobia. There's no room to move and nowhere to look except into the mirror. Joan doesn't do anything more than return her desperate gaze.

"Answer me," Xander demands sullenly.

Dawn flinches but keeps her eyes trained on the mirror. Xander is a blur of tan encompassing Joan. He reaches for her, holding her terribly close. Dawn is almost sure that he wants her.

Once again her eyes spin heavenward and again Joan is deprived of the opportunity to laugh. "It's no big deal. One of the girls from work wanted to go dancing. Burn off a little steam. It's no big." Light and shaky voice, Joan's lips are trembling. She's working so hard not to tell everything she knows or maybe she's trying not to cry. Dawn can't be sure.

"Come on, Dawnie." Xander's voice is softer and she can feel the subtle shift of muscles as his body relaxes. Dawn knows Xander wants to believe her. He wants to trust her. Xander always wants to trust the women in his life. That has always been his tragedy.

"Stay," he whispers into her ear. The calluses on his palm scratch lightly as he smoothes his hand down the curve of her back, and for a moment Dawn softens, too. But in the end she shrugs her shoulder a little less casually. She hates it when he gets maudlin. It's sad and she's too young to really be this pathetic.

"Can't. I promised I'd be there." Her voice is brittle as she finally looks up. Leaning into the mirror Dawn smears her mouth with gloss. Joan has cherry stained lips. It's the same shade Buffy used to wear.

Xander shoves away from her and staggers only slightly. Joan, she notices, looks lonely without him. For a moment Dawn can't meet her gaze. Instead she takes a deep gulp from the glass still in her hand. Her eyes water and Dawn tilts her head back to keep her carefully applied mascara from running.

On her way out the door Dawn snags a slightly tarnished ID case. It's just big enough for her driver's license, a few bills and a condom. It's all she really needs.

She never looks back. Usually.

Tonight there is a flash across the surface of the case and Dawn turns to see Xander in the living room, slumped in the broken, stained armchair. He stares at the blank TV screen, his drink seemingly forgotten in one slack hand. Dawn thinks of the couple in the mirror and for a moment she pauses.

"Xander?"

"Have fun, Dawnie." Dawn is surprised by the thickness in his voice. "I'll see you later." When Xander turns his head there are tears in his eyes.

Dawn never manages to say his name. The heart in her throat crushes the sound into a whimper that could mean many things. Instead she wrenches open the door, stumbling into the night before his tears have a chance to fall.

Later: Saturday, 1:03a.m.

Dawn is alone because Xander couldn't take the accusing imprint of Buffy's eyes on the inside of his head. Three years of sleepless dreamlessness and he slit open his wrists and watched his life spill out onto the stained linoleum of the bathroom floor. That is what she wants to tell the paramedics huddled around his body.

"I'll never be able to get all of the blood out of the cracks," is what she says instead. "Not that it matters. I'm not sure if I'm staying here, anyway."

They look at her and then at each other before bundling her and Xander into the back of the ambulance.

It's been a long time since she's been in a hospital. They avoid... have avoided... them in the last four years. Blood always looks too movie-fake-bright on white hospital floors. She doesn't remember being in one since Joyce died, not even for her sister. Even after the car accident she insisted Buffy fix her up at home. And Spike was good at stuff like that, too.

Xander keeps saying her name as if he could apologize for what he has done. He stares at her, unblinking, and gets her name completely wrong. It's impossible to apologize to people who are dead. She's tried it a million times. They never answer.

For Future Reference: Saturday, 2:25 a.m.

Dawn remembers how strong the curve of his shoulder looked in the mirror. But that isn't what the doctors seem to be interested in. They ask her questions about family and insurance, depression and drugs. Alcohol? Abuse?

"Was there a weapon? Were there pills?"

She remembers how the bathroom mirror hung on the wall before she left -- No, not a medicine cabinet, just a piece of glass attached to the wall really -- and how it was broken when she got home and that there was glass all over the floor.

Shattered. Yeah. That's how you say it. Shattered. Fist. Knuckles.

She isn't sure. "There was just a lot of blood."

They look at her curiously. I was there, she wants to scream. I found him. But in the end she doesn't.

Dawn tries to explain about the feel of his breath whispering across her cheek when she tried to get him to stand. She had jammed one shoulder beneath his arm for leverage. It was a useless attempt and all she got for her trouble was blood all over her brand new jeans. They nod at her and pat her arm, but they're not interested in that either.

"Is there somewhere you can go? Someone you can call? Just for tonight? Maybe a couple of days? Friends. Family..."

Part of her wants to tell them: He's all there is. He is what she knows. He is her first. He should have, maybe, been her last. Or maybe he really shouldn't have been hers at all. She isn't a real girl and he is the heart for all of them. It's never really been about her.

She is accidental.

"Joan, is there anyone you can call?" They touch her hair to get her attention.

Joan isn't a real girl, either, she wants to say. Just her face on the other side of the mirror. But that is another secret she keeps to herself.

Dawn is a made-up girl with made-up names, one of which really isn't hers, and now the heart of her is lying taped and tubed and bandaged, alone, on a table in the ER.

Maybe not her heart.

"Sometimes, I'm not sure I have a heart." The doctors look uneasy. They stroke her hair and pat her arm until she could scream. But this is a hospital and that would be rude. People are sick and dying in here. The thought makes her giggle and then she's crying, looking around for a tissue because her nose is beginning to run. All she really needs is a god-damned tissue and is that too much to ask? You can't even save people in here. Joan does not help matters.

"You. People. Are. Clueless," Dawn shrieks. That was not her intention, but like many things, her voice rises out of her control.

Their arms are restraining and not as comforting as she knows they'd like to think. Hands. Hands everywhere and they're the wrong kinds of hands. Not a blonde among the lot of them and no calluses to speak of. There is a redhead but Willow is not someone Dawn really wants to think about. They shush her and make soothing noises that clash like sharp edges in her head.

They don't know who they're dealing with, she thinks.

Dawn learned things once upon a time. Things from her sister and her sister's lovers about ways to hurt people - the preventative and the lethal. She learned in the name of self-defense, and what is this now if not defense? They came at her first and there are needles and people everywhere and the shrieking whine of machines and finally there is blood. But she isn't sure who's besides Xander's. The thought of anyone else's blood on her hands is more than Dawn is willing to handle and she is running.

Dawn thinks of Xander on the floor in the bathroom, a jagged piece of glass beside him in a sea of red that won't come out of all of the cracks if she scrubs until Doomsday. Blood stains deep and it doesn't matter because the Apocalypse came and went without them.

The memory is scarlet-near-black and Dawn isn't sure if that's what really happened or something she made up. People don't see in one color. Giles taught her that. She remembers the conversation that never really happened because it was before she was made. She might have been twelve, but she remembers that Giles told her. He said that people see spectrums of color. Light refracting.

Prisms. Rainbows. Rainbows are a promise that God made to the world. And that girl, Dawn, isn't really real so it doesn't apply.

She is a made-up girl with an affection for blondes and no heart. Xander is all she has left and he prefers the thought of Heaven and a girl that didn't want him the way he needed to be wanted.

But neither does she, Dawn supposes, want him as he needs to be wanted. As he wants to be loved. And she is only a convenience. Habit. A promise broadly kept.

Dawn is running and there is Joan racing to meet her. Everything will be okay.

Shiny.

Dawn extends her arms to be received...

Shattered. That's the word. It's like the sound of glass breaking.

Staring up at the white-white ceiling with its rows and rows of lights, Dawn hears the muffled thump of footsteps. Her eyes slide closed, briefly, stinging from the salt that could be tears and the infinitesimal prick of glass like tiny diamonds. Hands swarm, again, but she cannot protest. Concerned eyes stare deeply into her own before she is effectively blinded. The quick flash of the doctor's pin light painfully bisects her brain. Somewhere overhead someone is calling her name. It could be the wrong name. She could be the wrong girl.

She doesn't want to remember.

They may never know.