Title: Key to the Universe

Summary: After Buffy dies, Dawn escapes Sunnydale, only to become stuck traveling with no way home. But she's the Key, so if she keeps going then eventually she's going to figure it out. That's, like, the law of averages. Right?

TW: Some mention of self harm, implied threat of starvation

This first chapter will have multiple crossovers, but the majority of the fic will be pure BtVS/Honor Harrington. See the note at the end for the crossovers.

It's another beautiful day in California, the sun is once again shining down on the town of Sunnydale, Dawn has no school for the rest of the month, and Buffy is gone.

Dawn is the Key, and Buffy is dead.

Buffy is dead because Dawn is a fake, a manufactured human made to stop the universe being ripped apart.

Being the Key is what got her sister killed. It's also the only way Dawn can think of to get away from it all – the quiet, the house, the mornings after nights no Slayer was patrolling where she sees missing reports. Well, that and picking stuff up, but that's more the fix of a temporary thrill than any great escape. Besides, if she keeps collecting necklaces she'll have to start getting rid of them too, and that is like so not going to happen.

The knife doesn't hurt, not like the first time she carved into her arm. All she needs to do is get a small trickle flowing, wait for a ripple in the air to form, and she's gone.

In retrospect, going somewhere specific would've been a good plan.

This place, wherever this is, is not hell. It ticks a lot of the same boxes – a whole bunch of caves, it's crowded, stuffy, and the air is almost blue with profanity – but hell would be hotter than this. Dawn's pretty sure of that, even if there are a whole lot of demons around. Sunnydale isn't, technically, hell, and that's got loads of demons too. Most of the swearing is coming from the demon frogs - or is it toads? - in the corner near one of the tunnels.

She's picked up by short, human looking ... fairy? She's got wings, even if they look metal. The part Dawn pays attention to is the shiny gun. It's really very shiny.

The person behind (and below) the gun identifies herself as short. Dawn Very Carefully doesn't say that that part's obvious, because the space gun is still pointed at her face. Short people don't like being told it. Buffy doesn't – they don't like it being pointed out.

The sheer familiarity of being kidnapped – Officer Short's words exact words are 'taken into custody' but what she's saying to Dawn is ritual sacrifice and dissection, or dissection followed by ritual sacrifice – is enough to calm Dawn right down. She knows how to deal with kidnappings.

Finding a way to draw blood in the cell is tricky – they even took her jacket - but they're talking mind wipes just round the corner. It's incentive enough for Dawn to get her nails through skin, even if it stings like hell.
That's more than enough excitement for one day.

Going home doesn't work, not exactly.

The portal works. That part is fine. It's green, it's glowy, and Dawn has zero problems getting through it. Hell, she could've back-flipped through it, from sheer relief if nothing else, only she couldn't do back-flips.

No, the problem isn't the portal. That worked, but it didn't work right.

Dawn supposes this place could be home, if she was a cow. Maybe a horse. Or a sheep. Some sort of herbivore.

She's standing in the middle of lots and lots of grass. There aren't quite hills, but the ground isn't flat either. She's nowhere near Sunnydale. All the grass is green all the way to the green horizon. Dawn can tell.

It doesn't register as another planet. There's green grass, blue sky, and a whole bunch of insects not bothering anyone. The two moons are safely hidden from her sight on the other side of the planet.

Dawn looks around for a bit, but there's not much to see, besides lots of grass in every direction. Above the grass, the sky is as blank as a blank piece of blue paper. Below the grass is probably some kind of dirt, but Dawn doesn't bother checking. That's too much like work, and she'd get grass stuck in her hair, and that is so not worth it.

Dawn moves on. Finding food sounds more and more like a good idea. Nothing to worry about. She'll get home eventually, and there's half a packet of jelly babies hidden in the back of the cupboard.

Her fingers are getting itchy.

A low wind plays a susurrus in the long grasses.

A ship appears over the horizon and diverts from its course until it hovers over the trampled vegetation. It circles the spot for a moment. Anakin senses something, reaches out with the Force. There is a disturbance, but feathery and indistinct, slipping through his grasp. The sensation fades from the fabric of the Force even as he strains to touch it. Padmé shifts in her sleep beside him.

He banks and moves on.

Sometime later, Dawn steps into a huge cave. It's huge. Like, a hollow mountain, huge. That big. A whole mountain full of bigness. But bigger. She can't see the ceiling. There's no sky, not indoors, but no matter how hard she strains her eyes the walls just keep going up until they disappears into darkness. What she can make out, but the light of what looks like some sort of glowing moss is piles and piles of treasure.

There's gold coins, and gold cups, and silver chains, and jewels the size of her fist. She hasn't seen any pearls, but there's probably a couple somewhere in here she could find is she spent long enough searching.

It's a pirates cave, a dragons hoard, a kleptomaniac's dream. She half expects Smaug to emerge from one of the glittering piles. Dawn grabs a few of the more pretty things to slip into her pockets, and makes a note to come back when she isn't so hungry. It's not the thrill of taking something or getting away with breaking the rules, but some of the stuff she sees is very pretty.

This time, she makes a point of concentrating before making the cut to open the portal. A dragon's hoard is nice, sure, but not really immediately useful. She wants to go home. 1630 Revello Drive, Sunnydale. It's that place with humans. Human people. Where they occasionally fight off the end of the world and there is pizza. Even if some people – ugh - insist on putting pineapple on it.

The metal donut incident is not something Dawn thinks bears repeating.

For one thing, it's loud, and screechy, and she trips over empty air, because some decided a ramp was exactly the sort of thing that needed putting right where people coming through portals would arrive expecting to land on a level surface.

She can see the donut reflected behind her without looking. It's less queasy then when she was seeing both sides of it at once, but that is definitely still weird. So much weirdness. Too much weirdness. She has had enough of weird for today, and yesterday, and the rest of the week.

Then there are people – human people - pointing guns at her, and shouting.

Then her flailing hand catches the railing, opens the cut – and she's getting so good at making ones that close almost immediately after she steps through -

And she's falling through a portal again without taking more than two steps in wherever the metal donut is.

All in all, it's Dawn's shortest, most literal trip so far. Zero out of ten stars, would not recommend.

Dawn likes the library. She likes the books and the overstuffed chairs and the dusty, polished shelves and the hush made by hundreds and hundreds of books. It feels safe, like the memory of visiting her grandparents and spending what seemed like afternoons being read to from huge books of fairy-tales. She thinks it likes her too, or at least the vague happy hum she swears she can just about catch at the edge of her hearing gives her that vibe.

She can't find the exit though, no matter how many hallways she wanders down. Dawn does, at one point, come across a vending machine. The glass is too dusty to see more than the vague shapes of its contents, and there's no power, but there is a bag of something in the tray that tastes like stale chocolate. It leaves the inside of her mouth sticky and there's nothing to drink, but she doesn't want to leave, not yet.

Two corridors and five rooms further on, Dawn gets a paper cut as she reaches out to catch a falling book and it splays open. It stings. Most of her hand hurts, honestly. She sets it down safely on a side table and steps through and away. The dark droplets shimmer in the diffuse lighting for a moment before being soaked into the carpet.

The library takes notes.

Dawn finally finds something to eat in a huge semi-transparent dome structure. It sort of feels like a greenhouse, like the one on school trip at the botanical gardens, but there's no way building something this big is humanly possible. Not out of glass.

She still isn't back home.

The sky outside isn't the wrong colour, the very same black and the white pinpricks of stars faintly visible between clouds, but it still looks alien to her. Dawn has never been able point out any of the constellations, no matter how many times Tara takes her out at night and shows her the pineapple, but now there's absolutely nothing she recognizes in the stars above her. She is very, very far from anything she's ever known, more than she was even in dragon caves or demon dimensions.

But the air is breathable, and the fruit she picks is edible and the grass is soft between her fingers.

Dawn doesn't notice the six legged creatures scurrying into the undergrowth as she gives in to exhaustion and falls asleep on a bench, nor the pinprick sparks of nuclear detonations far beyond Grayson's atmosphere.

She wasn't expecting a six legged tiger cat thing to wake her, or to look up and find herself surrounded by a ring of men in green. Green like a military uniform, not like Men in Tights.

"Um. Hi? I come in peace?"

They speak English, but ... weird. Not weird like Giles speaking English sounds weird – he says his word like he's fancy, but theirs are more ... soft? Or something. It's not demonic, at least, no scent of sulfur in the air – although what she's smelling is mostly herself, 'cause she hasn't had a bath in days. She's pretty sure she's still got grass in her hair from who knows how many portals ago.

They're wearing guns, but their hands are empty, and they look more concerned than angry about finding her. They give her food – actual hot, cooked food, some sort of bread and soup, and it tastes so good she thinks she might cry. Then they ask her about her parents, and Dawn does cry. And then the cook starts to fuss over her and that's even worse, but she has food and a hot mug of coco to drink and a lap full of (potentially demonic, but for the moment nice) cat with a purr that feels like its trying to shatter her rib-cage.

So she decides she can afford to stick around until she's figured out what she keeps doing wrong.

A/N: The crossovers are Artemis Fowl (the city of Haven and LEP cells), Star Wars (Naboo), Treasure Planet, Stargate SG1 (the gate room), the Carmilla web series (Silas's sentient library) and Honor Harrington (Greenhouse, Harrington House, Harrington Steading, Grayson, Yeltsin System).