Title: You Do What You Have To
Author: Troll Princess
Rating: PG
Archive: Sure, just give me a heads up.
Summary: Yeah, it's yet another "what if 'The Gift' ended differently?" story. Sue me.
Feedback: Sure! I loves me some feedback. I can be reached at [email protected].
Spoilers: Up to and including "The Gift".
Disclaimer: Not my show, not my characters, not my idea. Story's mine, but Joss Whedon owns Buffy and the rest. (And I'll bet that thought makes him giggle like a schoolgirl.)
Author's note: I had this thought, and it wouldn't leave my head. It's probably been done before, but no one ever said I was original. (Well, they did. But play along, would ya?)

Dawn.

Her name is an exhaled sigh of relief in Buffy's head. Just seeing her there, terrified, tearful and struggling against her bonds, settles warmth in Buffy's chest. Another time, another place, and she would have thought about how cute the ceremonial dress looks on her baby sister, or how much prettier she'd look with her hair up in ribbons and dangling curls.

But this isn't either that time or that place. This is a tower that wasn't here last week, on an early morning ripe for opening portals.

And this is her little sister, being bled for the sacrifice.

The scent of blood hangs heavy in the air as she unties Dawn, as she leads her whimpering, injured sister away from the end of the platform. And she can ignore the copper scent, but she can't deny the crackle in the air around her, the energy sizzling along her skin and teasing her hair up from the roots.

"Are you okay?" It's a stupid question, asked after her fingers have drifted over a dampening bodice and Dawn has hissed back pain at the subtle touch.

She's trying to head Dawn off at the pass, when she feels it. Slayer sense on high alert, as she spots eerie, twisting light reflecting off the metal struts in the tower. An uneasy sensation dancing through her stomach, as nearby buildings shift into dark dens of howling creatures.

Dawn tries to get past her, can't make it past the big, bad Slayer. Dawn says something about it already starting. She points to a ball of streaming light and quivering energy swarming to latch onto the reality around it.

Both girls flinch as a dragon born of the darkness on the other side of the light wails his grief at being thrown into this world.

Dawn tries to convince Buffy to let her go past, something about her being the only one who can stop it, the only one with the power to close the portal.

Buffy thinks about it for a second, puzzle pieces clicking together in her head.

It's all the time Dawn needs.

The Slayer's fingertips brush across fine velvet as a scream tears from her throat. A banner of brown waist-length silk drifts past her, whipping in the maelstrom of apocalypse. Buffy reaches out from Dawn ... and grabs thin air instead.

The split second it takes Dawn to fall into the chasm lasts centuries ...

... and then, silence.

Buffy falls to her knees, the clang of metal ringing out in the vacuum of silence around her. There are whimpers, and straining cries of pain, and Buffy can hear none of it. Her gaze catches on the vision of beauty before her, and her eyes refuse to look away.

"Buffy?"

She turns, glances at Giles through a thick curtain of blond hair that's draped over her hazel eyes. The tears won't stop, but for the life of her, she doesn't know why.

Years that weren't there before show on his face, in his eyes, in his slow, deliberate steps. He moves toward her. "Don't jump," he says.

She flinches, looks at the ground then at him again. "I'm not ... I came up here to see ..." She points at the horizon. "Look."

Giles raises his gaze to the sky, to vivid, unreal streaks of orange, red, pink and purple blending together behind a golden sun. He thinks briefly of checking on Spike, of making sure he's out of the sunlight, but focuses on the girl in front of him.

"How bad is it?" she asks.

She doesn't look at him, still staring at the visual before her. It helps him when he finally speaks. "The demons are all gone. The humans ... they're all disoriented, but otherwise all right."

A ragged sigh of relief rips through her. It feels far too familiar after the past few weeks, after yet another apocalypse on the horizon, after her mother's death, after the Beast came to Sunnydale with fanciful dreams of armageddon. New and vivid images bleed together in her head ... her mother on the slab, Spike's beaten body stained with blood spilled in her name, Tara's mindless gaze. The pure, numbing terror of facing the Beast, and the fear-tinged thrill of knowing this would be her last battle.

Giles pauses and takes another step toward her. "Everyone else is all right, mostly, but ... there's two dead humans."

Her fingers work the edge of her sweater as her gaze drops to the ground. She sees a pair of bodies on the ground, both in dark robes, both eerily still.

Another step from Giles. "One of them is a young man, badly beaten. Willow thinks the demons got to him before we could."

Buffy nods. Keep going, she thinks, but doesn't say. The tears won't stop. Why won't she stop crying?

Another step. "The other is a girl, about fifteen. We don't know what happened to her. She looks ... almost peaceful."

A girl.

About fifteen.

Why won't she stop crying, damn it?

"Any idea who she is? Why the demons wanted her? What they did to her?"

She can almost feel Giles shake his head. "No clue," he says softly.

And then he's behind her, his arms wrapped around her, holding her close, and just like that --

The tears stop.