I Tempted Fate - August 4th
Twisted Shorts August Fic-a-Day Challenge - Day 4
Title: I Tempted Fate
Author: hermione2be
Rating: PG/FR13/K+
Crossover: BtVS/Lucifer
Disclaimer: I do not own any of BtVS/Angel or Lucifer people, places, or ideas. This fiction is done simply for pleasure and I receive no profit.
Summary: Dawn suffers a sudden crying fit, worrying her friends.
Notes: Part 14 of Lucifer and Dawn - Links Page
Seasons: Post-Series/Season 4
Word Count: 2385
Warning: May need tissues.
Dawn walked down the stairs into the LAPD bullpen. She could see Chloe and Ella talking next to the coffee machine. Everything looked normal.
Someone hit something. Bang!
“Enough!” Dan yelled. “Stop calling me!”
Curious, Dawn took two steps to look over the railing. Dan sat at his new desk, glaring at his phone. She glanced at Chloe who gave her a quizzical look.
“Is everything okay?” Chloe asked Dan as she approached.
“Everything’s fine,” Dan snapped, ignoring the vibrating of his cell phone.
Dawn moved to stand at the bottom of the stairs.
“Are you gonna answer that?” Chloe demanded.
“Absolutely not.”
“Dan, it could be important.”
He handed her the phone. “Be my guest.”
Chloe answered the phone. “Dan’s phone.”
A growling sound emitted from the phone.
She hung up. “What…what the hell is that?”
“I’ll show you,” Dan stepped back and pulled a poster off the wall. “That’s my phone number.”
Dawn looked at it. There was a Wookie on the paper and it was asking for people to call with their best Wookie impersonations. She chuckled at the same time as Chloe.
“Lucifer has been putting these all over the precinct,” Dan snapped. “It’s not funny. I swear, he only exists to…torture me.”
Dawn stepped in front of Dan. “Better you’re angry at him than yourself.” She gave him a wobbly smile. “He can take your anger better than you can.” Her breath hitched and tears fell quickly down her face. She was crying and trying to laugh.
“Dawn?” Dan said in alarm.
“What’s wrong?” Chloe asked.
Dawn shook her head, too overcome to speak.
“Why don’t we take her to my lab,” Ella suggested, a large mug of coffee in her hand.
Dan wrapped an arm around Dawn and guided her to the lab. Ella took care of the blinds.
“Did something happen to Lucifer?” Chloe asked softly.
Dawn shook her head, unable to look at them or find her voice to explain.
Chloe let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding and pulled out her phone. She sent several texts and waited.
Dan stepped out. Ella went about her work and Chloe excused herself after a time.
Dawn lost track of time as she blubbered. Her mind caught in a storm of grief. She had not been kidding when she told Connor it would happen over something that didn’t even involve their names. And so it had. For whatever reason, Dan being mad at Lucifer had reminded her of Spike and Angel.
She thought of Spike’s beaten and bruised face as he tried to save her from Glory. The quiet assurance Giles had given them all that Glory was dead. The thing she had not learned - or maybe not understood - until years later was that Giles had killed a human to destroy the hell-god.
She thought of their love. Love of Buffy that had been affection for her, and friendship when she was no longer a child. Giles’s writing. Spike’s voice. The habit of taking off his glasses to clean them. The huffy way he tried to pick an argument. How much they had done for her…for the world. And no one would ever know.
A hand taking hers startled her a moment. She looked up to find Amenadiel in front of her. Lucifer, Maze, Linda, Dan, Ella, and Chloe were behind him.
“What happened?” Amenadiel asked. “You’ve scared Chloe.”
Dawn didn’t trust her own voice now that her tears had stopped. She pulled her phone out tapped a contact. As soon as the call connected, she put it on speaker.
“Ugh,” Connor answered groggily, “you either aren’t sleeping at all or you’ve become a demon.”
“Connor?” Chloe said.
“Detective?” he replied in surprise. “I’m on speaker?”
“Yeah.”
“Dawn?”
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” Amenadiel replied. “She had some kind of breakdown.”
Connor sighed. “About time.”
“What don’t we know?” Linda asked.
“Any outsiders listening?”
“Yes,” Linda and Amenadiel replied.
“When Dawn went away, things happened. Two people who have been with her sister for decades died. They were like Dawn’s father and older brother…she couldn’t save them. I don’t know all the details, but I do know that she hadn’t dealt with it before she came back.”
Dan realized Dawn had been talking about her own loses, not just him losing Charlotte. She had said things that perhaps she needed to hear as much as him.
Dawn kept her gaze averted, not looking at any of them.
“Is she okay?” Connor asked.
“Well, she stopped caterwauling,” Lucifer offered.
“Lucifer!” Linda hissed.
Dawn scoffed and managed a small grin.
“Yeah, she’ll go through these in waves. I stocked her fridge last week. Someone just take her home, Dennis will take care of her. And I’ll be over tonight,” Connor said before hanging up.
“I’m sorry,” Dawn told them. “I should’ve…” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “The Wookie thing, Spike did something similar to Angel a few years ago.” She wiped her face, feeling foolish. “I think I’ve made enough of a fool of myself today. I’ll just go home.”
Ella walked up and wrapped her in a hug. “I’m so sorry.”
Dawn squeezed her back. “It’s okay. I’m okay…I would just like to get out of this without all of you looking at me like I’ve lost my mind.”
Chloe shook her head. “You lost family. We’ve all been there.”
“Right?” Ella agreed. “You don’t have to bottle everything up from us.”
Dawn let her go. “I just didn’t want it to be true. Spike has a way of just appearing, I thought if I gave him enough time…” She blinked rapidly. “Um, you all have lives to get back to. So, I’m going to walk out of here with a shred of my dignity and I’ll see you all later.”
“Yeah. No,” Linda said. “I’m taking you home.”
88888888
Linda looked around the apartment. It was simply furnished with complimentary fabrics and colors.
“You can come out, Dennis,” Dawn said. “This is Linda, she is a friend who knows about you.”
“Hi, Dennis,” Linda said nervously.
Dawn went to the kitchen and found herself a cup and poured in a large amount of alcohol. She drank it like water and refilled the glass.
“Are you sure you should drink?”
“Can’t get drunk, remember? I can see why Lucifer always has alcohol on him. There’s something about drinking that helps.”
“Right.” Linda took a seat in the living room.
“Can I get you anything? I’ve got vodka or tequila.”
“Actually, I can’t. I’m pregnant.”
Dawn’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “You are?”
“Yeah.”
“How far along?”
“A couple months.”
“Did I miss an announcement?”
“I only found out this week. I hadn’t started telling anyone. Only Maze and Amenadiel knew.”
“Congratulations,” Dawn said. She pulled a water bottle from the fridge and handed it over.
“Thank you.”
Dawn sat with her tall cup of alcohol.
“Do you want to talk about what happened?”
“No. But that probably means I really should. Especially since, once I deal with me, I have to go deal with Angel.”
“What do you mean?”
“Angel hasn’t dealt with Spike or Giles’s deaths either. Connor didn’t know how to approach it. So he asked me to.”
“Why are these men important to Angel?”
“Spike was his childe, they shared a bond that only makes sense to vampires. They spent time as family and enemies and heroes and reluctant friends. I wasn’t kidding that we were just expecting him to pop back up.” She sighed. “Giles…Angel, during one of his bouts of not having a soul, he wronged Giles. And while it’s been twenty years now, that guilt and that…act has always been between them.”
“Why weren’t you dealing with this?”
“I’ve seen a lot of death in my life. A lot. I’ve also seen people come back.” She swallowed a mouthful of her drink. “But, it’s also because…these two men were never perfect, they are flawed and we fought. But they were critical to saving my life - even when they knew I wasn’t real, even when that cost my sister her life.” She stared into her cup. “They may have been Buffy’s first, Giles will always be her Watcher and Spike will always be…just hers. It was Giles who encouraged my love of learning, my seemingly limitless ability to speak and translate. If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t have considered getting my degrees. I can never repay what he’s done for me over the years.
“And Spike…that’s a complicated relationship. Bad guy, good guy. I thought he was so cool when I was eleven. Even when he scared my mother by showing his vampire face, I just thought…why would this guy hang out with my loser sister? Then he started to change.” She chuckled. “I considered myself half in love with him when I was thirteen. I learned how to pick locks from him, even pickpocket. Every bad habit I probably learned from him.” She gestured with her cup. “He would challenge me to a drinking contest to see which of us would be able to walk in the morning.”
“And do you still love him?”
“Differently, but yes.” She closed her eyes. “I think Buffy will regret the years she lost with him. But at least she made up with him.”
“You didn’t?”
She shook her head and opened her eyes. “We were on good terms when I found out he was alive and when he and Buffy started their life together. We were good when he saw me graduate. But when I said ‘fuck ‘em all’ and came to the one place I knew they wouldn’t follow six years ago…He was part of that group, part of the overbearing, overprotective pains in my ass I was running away from. He never forgave me for that. For abandoning my family.”
“What you did, wasn’t abandonment.”
“I know that. I’ve always known that. But that was most of their feelings about it. It took me awhile to get most of them to…cool off, but for whatever reason, he and I never made it back around to being okay.”
“And then you saved the world and he died.”
“He died because I was too late to save him. I should have known something was wrong. But I convinced myself that it was all in my head.”
“You’ve been doing this a long time,” Linda observed. “What made you disregard that instinct?”
“The pain I suffered from Lucifer returning Goddess to the ether. I thought I was just trapped in that helplessness, that…crushing fear. I chalked it up to a reaction to trauma. It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Yet, something finally made you go and check.”
“Yeah. The feeling didn’t fade. So I went back to England. Giles had died and I guess there was a sequence of events that transpired afterwards… end the world type things. Spike was one of the casualties. Along with a couple of Slayers and a Watcher.”
Linda nodded. “And you came home without dealing with what happened?”
“I was in shock, I guess. I thought if I returned, that I’d get a phone call that they were found alive or resurrected or…something.”
“Then something changed.”
“Connor and I started a tradition years ago. We own an empty crypt in a cemetery close to his father’s office. We put up the names of those we’ve lost. His side, my side, and our side. Not long ago, we added Spike and Giles to the crypt. I guess, for me that made it real. And then Lucifer’s prank reminded me of Spike and suddenly he was gone.” She blinked and sniffed.
A box of tissues were passed to her by Dennis’s invisible hand. She took them with a murmured thanks.
Linda stared for a moment before refocusing. “So that’s all today was? The sudden acceptance of their deaths?”
“It’s a side effect of this type of work being part of my life for so long. You don’t mourn when something happens, you mourn when you’re not busy.”
“And you weren’t busy today?”
She scoffed. “Um, waiting for Chloe to come back, setting up this place, it all gave me things to do. Handling the fallout of Amenadiel’s return and Chloe’s and dealing with the Church…”
“All distracted you.”
“I’m very good at distracting myself. Then I had the audacity to consider everything closed, nothing left unfinished.”
“And you ended up breaking down all at once.”
Dawn took a sip of her drink. “I tempted fate and she kicked my ass.”
Linda watched her. “Why didn’t you tell any of us? Connor knew, but no one else.”
“Lucifer wouldn’t care. I’m not really close to you or Maze or Ella. Chloe is already dealing with big things. And Dan hasn’t even addressed Charlotte’s death.”
“And Amenadiel?”
Dawn blinked as tears resurfaced. “I didn’t want to know if they were in Hell or Heaven. Because, I mean Spike’s a vampire with a soul, where would he go? If souls are self-actualized, then down - he went down. And I - I can’t imagine Giles not being in Heaven, but his Ripper phase was…bad and the things he’s done over the years… I didn’t tell him because I didn’t want to confirm that two of the people who helped me the most will spend eternity tortured by their own guilt.” She wiped her face with the tissue and took several shaky breaths.
“And yet, when Chloe sent out her text, asking if anybody knew what was going on with you, all those people came. Me and Lucifer and Maze and Amenadiel. What made Chloe think that any of us would know what was going on with you?”
“I don’t know.” She swallowed. “But it does mean a lot that you came.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s been just me and Angel and Connor since I moved here.” She gave a weak smile. “Connor and I becoming his contemporaries…in time we will bypass him, leaving him eternally twenty-six while we reach forty and fifty and so on. I have spent so much time living in a world that…I protect, I watch over, I guess I don’t know how to live in it.” She finished off her drink and stood to get another.
Title: I Tempted Fate
Author: hermione2be
Rating: PG/FR13/K+
Crossover: BtVS/Lucifer
Disclaimer: I do not own any of BtVS/Angel or Lucifer people, places, or ideas. This fiction is done simply for pleasure and I receive no profit.
Summary: Dawn suffers a sudden crying fit, worrying her friends.
Notes: Part 14 of Lucifer and Dawn - Links Page
Seasons: Post-Series/Season 4
Word Count: 2385
Warning: May need tissues.
Dawn walked down the stairs into the LAPD bullpen. She could see Chloe and Ella talking next to the coffee machine. Everything looked normal.
Someone hit something. Bang!
“Enough!” Dan yelled. “Stop calling me!”
Curious, Dawn took two steps to look over the railing. Dan sat at his new desk, glaring at his phone. She glanced at Chloe who gave her a quizzical look.
“Is everything okay?” Chloe asked Dan as she approached.
“Everything’s fine,” Dan snapped, ignoring the vibrating of his cell phone.
Dawn moved to stand at the bottom of the stairs.
“Are you gonna answer that?” Chloe demanded.
“Absolutely not.”
“Dan, it could be important.”
He handed her the phone. “Be my guest.”
Chloe answered the phone. “Dan’s phone.”
A growling sound emitted from the phone.
She hung up. “What…what the hell is that?”
“I’ll show you,” Dan stepped back and pulled a poster off the wall. “That’s my phone number.”
Dawn looked at it. There was a Wookie on the paper and it was asking for people to call with their best Wookie impersonations. She chuckled at the same time as Chloe.
“Lucifer has been putting these all over the precinct,” Dan snapped. “It’s not funny. I swear, he only exists to…torture me.”
Dawn stepped in front of Dan. “Better you’re angry at him than yourself.” She gave him a wobbly smile. “He can take your anger better than you can.” Her breath hitched and tears fell quickly down her face. She was crying and trying to laugh.
“Dawn?” Dan said in alarm.
“What’s wrong?” Chloe asked.
Dawn shook her head, too overcome to speak.
“Why don’t we take her to my lab,” Ella suggested, a large mug of coffee in her hand.
Dan wrapped an arm around Dawn and guided her to the lab. Ella took care of the blinds.
“Did something happen to Lucifer?” Chloe asked softly.
Dawn shook her head, unable to look at them or find her voice to explain.
Chloe let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding and pulled out her phone. She sent several texts and waited.
Dan stepped out. Ella went about her work and Chloe excused herself after a time.
Dawn lost track of time as she blubbered. Her mind caught in a storm of grief. She had not been kidding when she told Connor it would happen over something that didn’t even involve their names. And so it had. For whatever reason, Dan being mad at Lucifer had reminded her of Spike and Angel.
She thought of Spike’s beaten and bruised face as he tried to save her from Glory. The quiet assurance Giles had given them all that Glory was dead. The thing she had not learned - or maybe not understood - until years later was that Giles had killed a human to destroy the hell-god.
She thought of their love. Love of Buffy that had been affection for her, and friendship when she was no longer a child. Giles’s writing. Spike’s voice. The habit of taking off his glasses to clean them. The huffy way he tried to pick an argument. How much they had done for her…for the world. And no one would ever know.
A hand taking hers startled her a moment. She looked up to find Amenadiel in front of her. Lucifer, Maze, Linda, Dan, Ella, and Chloe were behind him.
“What happened?” Amenadiel asked. “You’ve scared Chloe.”
Dawn didn’t trust her own voice now that her tears had stopped. She pulled her phone out tapped a contact. As soon as the call connected, she put it on speaker.
“Ugh,” Connor answered groggily, “you either aren’t sleeping at all or you’ve become a demon.”
“Connor?” Chloe said.
“Detective?” he replied in surprise. “I’m on speaker?”
“Yeah.”
“Dawn?”
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” Amenadiel replied. “She had some kind of breakdown.”
Connor sighed. “About time.”
“What don’t we know?” Linda asked.
“Any outsiders listening?”
“Yes,” Linda and Amenadiel replied.
“When Dawn went away, things happened. Two people who have been with her sister for decades died. They were like Dawn’s father and older brother…she couldn’t save them. I don’t know all the details, but I do know that she hadn’t dealt with it before she came back.”
Dan realized Dawn had been talking about her own loses, not just him losing Charlotte. She had said things that perhaps she needed to hear as much as him.
Dawn kept her gaze averted, not looking at any of them.
“Is she okay?” Connor asked.
“Well, she stopped caterwauling,” Lucifer offered.
“Lucifer!” Linda hissed.
Dawn scoffed and managed a small grin.
“Yeah, she’ll go through these in waves. I stocked her fridge last week. Someone just take her home, Dennis will take care of her. And I’ll be over tonight,” Connor said before hanging up.
“I’m sorry,” Dawn told them. “I should’ve…” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “The Wookie thing, Spike did something similar to Angel a few years ago.” She wiped her face, feeling foolish. “I think I’ve made enough of a fool of myself today. I’ll just go home.”
Ella walked up and wrapped her in a hug. “I’m so sorry.”
Dawn squeezed her back. “It’s okay. I’m okay…I would just like to get out of this without all of you looking at me like I’ve lost my mind.”
Chloe shook her head. “You lost family. We’ve all been there.”
“Right?” Ella agreed. “You don’t have to bottle everything up from us.”
Dawn let her go. “I just didn’t want it to be true. Spike has a way of just appearing, I thought if I gave him enough time…” She blinked rapidly. “Um, you all have lives to get back to. So, I’m going to walk out of here with a shred of my dignity and I’ll see you all later.”
“Yeah. No,” Linda said. “I’m taking you home.”
88888888
Linda looked around the apartment. It was simply furnished with complimentary fabrics and colors.
“You can come out, Dennis,” Dawn said. “This is Linda, she is a friend who knows about you.”
“Hi, Dennis,” Linda said nervously.
Dawn went to the kitchen and found herself a cup and poured in a large amount of alcohol. She drank it like water and refilled the glass.
“Are you sure you should drink?”
“Can’t get drunk, remember? I can see why Lucifer always has alcohol on him. There’s something about drinking that helps.”
“Right.” Linda took a seat in the living room.
“Can I get you anything? I’ve got vodka or tequila.”
“Actually, I can’t. I’m pregnant.”
Dawn’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “You are?”
“Yeah.”
“How far along?”
“A couple months.”
“Did I miss an announcement?”
“I only found out this week. I hadn’t started telling anyone. Only Maze and Amenadiel knew.”
“Congratulations,” Dawn said. She pulled a water bottle from the fridge and handed it over.
“Thank you.”
Dawn sat with her tall cup of alcohol.
“Do you want to talk about what happened?”
“No. But that probably means I really should. Especially since, once I deal with me, I have to go deal with Angel.”
“What do you mean?”
“Angel hasn’t dealt with Spike or Giles’s deaths either. Connor didn’t know how to approach it. So he asked me to.”
“Why are these men important to Angel?”
“Spike was his childe, they shared a bond that only makes sense to vampires. They spent time as family and enemies and heroes and reluctant friends. I wasn’t kidding that we were just expecting him to pop back up.” She sighed. “Giles…Angel, during one of his bouts of not having a soul, he wronged Giles. And while it’s been twenty years now, that guilt and that…act has always been between them.”
“Why weren’t you dealing with this?”
“I’ve seen a lot of death in my life. A lot. I’ve also seen people come back.” She swallowed a mouthful of her drink. “But, it’s also because…these two men were never perfect, they are flawed and we fought. But they were critical to saving my life - even when they knew I wasn’t real, even when that cost my sister her life.” She stared into her cup. “They may have been Buffy’s first, Giles will always be her Watcher and Spike will always be…just hers. It was Giles who encouraged my love of learning, my seemingly limitless ability to speak and translate. If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t have considered getting my degrees. I can never repay what he’s done for me over the years.
“And Spike…that’s a complicated relationship. Bad guy, good guy. I thought he was so cool when I was eleven. Even when he scared my mother by showing his vampire face, I just thought…why would this guy hang out with my loser sister? Then he started to change.” She chuckled. “I considered myself half in love with him when I was thirteen. I learned how to pick locks from him, even pickpocket. Every bad habit I probably learned from him.” She gestured with her cup. “He would challenge me to a drinking contest to see which of us would be able to walk in the morning.”
“And do you still love him?”
“Differently, but yes.” She closed her eyes. “I think Buffy will regret the years she lost with him. But at least she made up with him.”
“You didn’t?”
She shook her head and opened her eyes. “We were on good terms when I found out he was alive and when he and Buffy started their life together. We were good when he saw me graduate. But when I said ‘fuck ‘em all’ and came to the one place I knew they wouldn’t follow six years ago…He was part of that group, part of the overbearing, overprotective pains in my ass I was running away from. He never forgave me for that. For abandoning my family.”
“What you did, wasn’t abandonment.”
“I know that. I’ve always known that. But that was most of their feelings about it. It took me awhile to get most of them to…cool off, but for whatever reason, he and I never made it back around to being okay.”
“And then you saved the world and he died.”
“He died because I was too late to save him. I should have known something was wrong. But I convinced myself that it was all in my head.”
“You’ve been doing this a long time,” Linda observed. “What made you disregard that instinct?”
“The pain I suffered from Lucifer returning Goddess to the ether. I thought I was just trapped in that helplessness, that…crushing fear. I chalked it up to a reaction to trauma. It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Yet, something finally made you go and check.”
“Yeah. The feeling didn’t fade. So I went back to England. Giles had died and I guess there was a sequence of events that transpired afterwards… end the world type things. Spike was one of the casualties. Along with a couple of Slayers and a Watcher.”
Linda nodded. “And you came home without dealing with what happened?”
“I was in shock, I guess. I thought if I returned, that I’d get a phone call that they were found alive or resurrected or…something.”
“Then something changed.”
“Connor and I started a tradition years ago. We own an empty crypt in a cemetery close to his father’s office. We put up the names of those we’ve lost. His side, my side, and our side. Not long ago, we added Spike and Giles to the crypt. I guess, for me that made it real. And then Lucifer’s prank reminded me of Spike and suddenly he was gone.” She blinked and sniffed.
A box of tissues were passed to her by Dennis’s invisible hand. She took them with a murmured thanks.
Linda stared for a moment before refocusing. “So that’s all today was? The sudden acceptance of their deaths?”
“It’s a side effect of this type of work being part of my life for so long. You don’t mourn when something happens, you mourn when you’re not busy.”
“And you weren’t busy today?”
She scoffed. “Um, waiting for Chloe to come back, setting up this place, it all gave me things to do. Handling the fallout of Amenadiel’s return and Chloe’s and dealing with the Church…”
“All distracted you.”
“I’m very good at distracting myself. Then I had the audacity to consider everything closed, nothing left unfinished.”
“And you ended up breaking down all at once.”
Dawn took a sip of her drink. “I tempted fate and she kicked my ass.”
Linda watched her. “Why didn’t you tell any of us? Connor knew, but no one else.”
“Lucifer wouldn’t care. I’m not really close to you or Maze or Ella. Chloe is already dealing with big things. And Dan hasn’t even addressed Charlotte’s death.”
“And Amenadiel?”
Dawn blinked as tears resurfaced. “I didn’t want to know if they were in Hell or Heaven. Because, I mean Spike’s a vampire with a soul, where would he go? If souls are self-actualized, then down - he went down. And I - I can’t imagine Giles not being in Heaven, but his Ripper phase was…bad and the things he’s done over the years… I didn’t tell him because I didn’t want to confirm that two of the people who helped me the most will spend eternity tortured by their own guilt.” She wiped her face with the tissue and took several shaky breaths.
“And yet, when Chloe sent out her text, asking if anybody knew what was going on with you, all those people came. Me and Lucifer and Maze and Amenadiel. What made Chloe think that any of us would know what was going on with you?”
“I don’t know.” She swallowed. “But it does mean a lot that you came.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s been just me and Angel and Connor since I moved here.” She gave a weak smile. “Connor and I becoming his contemporaries…in time we will bypass him, leaving him eternally twenty-six while we reach forty and fifty and so on. I have spent so much time living in a world that…I protect, I watch over, I guess I don’t know how to live in it.” She finished off her drink and stood to get another.