She can feel the emptiness of the house from the
sidewalk.
Dawn stops walking and gazes at the house, mentally chiding
herself. She can’t feel an empty house, and anyway, Willow should be
home.
She walks up the driveway and twists her key in the
lock.
"Willow?"
The house sounds eerie in its quietness; the
silence almost sounds like little whispers. And Dawn knows she is truly alone
when those whispers start to hiss sweet nothings into her ears.
There is
a note on the front table. It is light yellow with a daisy border, covered with
Willow’s flowing handwriting.
Dear Sweetie, it starts out. Damn
Willow and her pet names.
I’m out working on (there is a scratched
out word here) some stuff. I won’t be home till later, and neither will Tara.
Spike will be coming over as soon as it gets dark. I’m so sorry that no one’s
here right now, Sweetie. There’s some turkey in the fridge, make yourself a
sandwich. I rented a video last night; it’s on top of the TV. I know you’ll be
fine. No leaving the house! -Willow"
Damn you," snaps Dawn as she
rips up the note. "You know I don’t want to be alone!" she screams into the
silence.
She glances at the clock. Two more hours until it gets dark and
Spike will show up and she cannot visit anyone. She is trapped in the house,
alone. This is the first time since her death that she’s been alone for an
extended period of time. Willow must think that she is doing better, otherwise
she would have never left her alone.
Almost drawn against her will, she
drops her bag on the floor and starts to climb the staircase. She walks down the
short corridor and opens the door to Buffy’s room. It was still untouched by
their hands; they had not packed anything away.
It was like a shrine for
Buffy, one people visited and paid their respects every once in a
while.
You still miss her, says a little voice she has been
hearing for weeks. You want to see her again, don’t you?
Every
time she has a few seconds alone in the bathroom, at night before she falls
asleep, when she is walking to school, she hears soft whispers; commenting,
questioning, observing and irritating.
They are gentle voices, loving and
kind, and they make her want to do terrible things. She still has half healed
slashes on her arms from the last time she listened to them. She is probably
schizophrenic, but she does not intend to tell Willow this anytime soon. If she
wants to kill herself, and her inner voices are expressing this desire somehow
subconsciously (she got this from a psychology book from the library) she has
every right to do so. Buffy had died for her, it’s all her fault; for being so
careless, for being such an annoying brat sister, for letting bad things happen,
for existing. She feels so empty inside, and why not? All she was made for was
to contain a mystical power and now that power is gone; she’s just a
shell.
She drags herself out of Buffy’s room and heads downstairs to the
kitchen. She switches on a radio to try to drown out the silence and the
whispers.
Dawn takes the turkey out of the fridge and plops it down on
the counter. She searches the drawers for a knife to slice the turkey with. She
is about to take a regular kitchen knife until her eyes fall onto a huge carving
knife. She drops the small knife and picks up the carving knife, entranced by
its sleek silvery sharpness. Then she trudges over to the turkey and begins to
slice. It slices easily, sliding into the flesh like putty. She watches the
knife neatly slice the turkey and her finger.
"I just want to
diiiieeeee," wails the radio, tuned to some death rock station. The music does
not help very much, she thinks as she stares at her finger. It is just a flimsy
cover for the silence.
The blood drips all over the turkey, making it
very unappetizing. She can feel her heartbeat in her finger as the blood gushes
out of her finger with each contraction; it is a very deep cut and she probably
needs stitches.
Doesn’t that feel good, letting all the tainted blood
drip away? murmurs a voice.
"Go away!" she screams at the voices. "Go!"
Then her voice gives out, swallowed by the silence. She throws the radio on the
floor and it continues to play, but it is broken up and filled with static
now.
"Die…for…me," croaks the radio.
She spots a flicker of
movement in the corner of her eye, but when she whirls around to confront it, it
is gone. Then she turns around and Buffy is standing there.
"Buffy!" She
has found her voice again and she screams as loud as she can. Buffy is all
bloody and bruised, the way they found her on the floor after she
jumped-
"Dawnie," murmurs Buffy as she fades away.
"No! No! No!"
she shrilly cries.
How many ways can you find? asks a voice. Do
that; she’ll come back then.
Dawn does not know what the voice is
talking about, but her eyes fall on the drain cleaner on the floor and she knows
what it wants. How many ways can you kill yourself?
She is
crazed and she turns around and knocks over a chair. She finds lighter fluid on
the drier and knocks it over. The matches are back in the kitchen and she drops
them on the floor. She grabs all the knives in the drawers and throws them at
the wall like darts. She scatters pills all over the living room floor and rips
the cord out of the TV.
Very good.
That snaps her out
of it. Oh my god, what is she doing? Her finger is still bleeding and blood is
smeared all over the walls. She runs to the phone and picks it up. Willow, she
will call Willow. Willow will make it stop, it will be okay…
"Willow,
Willow, pick up the phone," she sobs.
"Dawnie, why are you crying?" asks
Buffy from behind her.
Dawn drops the phone and lunges for Buffy. But her
sister’s body is insubstantial like a wall of smoke and she crashes into a
counter.
"You’re a ghost," whispers Dawn.
"Not really," says
Buffy. "I’m just not entirely here." She holds out her hand. "Are you coming
with me?"
"Where?" sniffs Dawn.
"Up there, silly! Coming?" says
Buffy cheerfully, like she isn’t dead and is suggesting they get pizza and rent
some funny movie to laugh to death over. "Aren’t you coming?"
Aren’t
you going?
Buffy disappears as suddenly as she
arrived.
"Buffy, come back!" screams Dawn.
"Hurry up, Dawnie, I
can’t wait all day!" comes Buffy’s voice from thin air.
She tries to run.
Anywhere, somewhere, nowhere but here. But she trips over the bag she had
dropped on the floor and the TV cord twists around her ankle.
She drags
herself back up and limps into the kitchen, the cord still wrapped around her
foot. She unwinds it and holds it up.
"If you’d like to make a call,
please hang yourself and try again," says the dead operator’s shrill voice from
the hanging telephone.
It is a good idea. She grabs a chair and stands on
it so she can reach the fan. Then she drapes the cord around it, tears streaming
down her cheeks and her hands shaking spastically as she ties a tight knot the
way the voices tell her to.
"Come on!" says Buffy’s voice again. She
finishes forming the noose and drapes it over her neck.
But she can’t
jump. The floor looks so far away and she is scared of heights. She remembers
the tower, how high it was off the ground and how Buffy jumped and fell a long
long way down.
Buffy jumped for you, reminds a voice.
But
Buffy jumped for her, and she should jump for Buffy too.
The soft voices
all blur together in their urgings for her to jump and end it all, to be with
Buffy.
Dawn is just about to take the noose off when Buffy appears again,
right underneath her.
"Jump Dawnie, I’ll catch you, even though you
couldn’t catch me," she says.
It will be all right; Buffy will catch her,
she dimly thinks.
And so she jumps.
Buffy disappears the moment
she steps off the chair and in the last brief seconds she hears the voices
rejoicing. Buffy is rejoicing along with them.
"You told her to die. Good
job guys, she's going to be dead soon." says Buffy.
