Chapter Text
“I want a brain scan.”
Calder blinked. “Why?”
Dawn paused. There was a reason that she was asking Calder in the first place. Her reasons were... fairly complicated, and not the sort of thing that she felt capable of explaining to her psychiatrist. There was a lot that she couldn’t tell Stirling.
“I... figured something out. About my teleporter. I have an idea, a hypothesis... I think. But I need proof. Because, you know, I seem to be the only person who can actually make a teleporter, even though everyone can use them, and they do some funky stuff and I haven’t quite worked out why...” Dawn hesitated briefly. “I assume you know about that stuff?”
Calder nodded. “I do. But what exactly are you planning to find? You had scans done when you were admitted to the psychiatric hospital, and they didn’t find anything.”
“I know, I know, but a lot of stuff has happened since then. I mean, besides making a teleporter, I’ve been possessed by an artefact, I’ve died, I cured myself with a magic pen... my brain might not be the same.”
“I admit... the fact that you seem to be the only person who can make teleporters is interesting. It suggests that they aren’t artefacts – there aren’t many duplicates – and Leena seems to think that they’re purely mechanical.”
“Does she?” Dawn said in surprise. “I didn’t know that.”
“But why do you think that your brain is the explanation?” Calder continued.
“Because... because something has to be. There has to be a reason, and I think it’s something to do with me.” Dawn said. She was aware that the reason she thought it was involved her secretly being a big ball of energy, and that wasn’t really something that would turn up on a scan, but it was a starting point. It might show something, and something was better than being stuck in a limbo with no proof either way.
Proof was the thing. She needed proof.
“Honestly, part of the reason that I’m here is to check up on you. You died, and then you just kept going, even after the artefact involved was destroyed. That sort of thing might have lingering effects.” Calder said.
Dawn grinned. “So you’ll do it?”
“I’ll have to run it past the other Regents, but there’s no reason why not.” Calder replied, smiling slightly. “What kind of scans did you want?”
“Uh... I don’t know. What kind of scans would you run?” Dawn asked. “It’s not really my field.”
“Well, I’d start with an MRI...”
~*~
“All clear?”
Dawn jumped. She hadn’t heard Claudia come in. “What?”
“All clear? You know, medically speaking. I hear Artie called the doctor in.”
“Oh, yeah.” Dawn said, before realising that she was going to be having a couple of scans done in a few days, and she couldn’t really hide them from Claudia. “I mean, she wants to do some scans to check, but, you know, probably fine.”
“Cool.” Claudia remarked, sitting next to Dawn. “So... what was it like?”
“What? You’ve been to the doctor before. You know what it’s like.”
“Not that.” Claudia replied, exasperatedly. “The being dead thing.”
“Oh. That.” Dawn said.
“I mean, I asked Pete about it when he died, but he says he doesn’t really remember, but you were dead longer than he was.”
Dawn nodded. That was true. The circumstances were also remarkably different – although they had both been killed by artefacts, Pete had been electrocuted to death, whereas Dawn... Dawn hadn’t even realised that she had died until someone had told her afterwards. “I... wasn’t dead, exactly. I mean, technically I was, but for me I wasn’t dead. It was like... a hallucination. My sister showed up, and the Abomination, and she killed it.”
“Really?” Claudia exclaimed. “I wonder if that’s Heaven, then.”
“What? I was still walking around. I was dead and walking around. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the usual afterlife experience.” It was an interesting thought, though.
“Well, yeah, but having your sister show up and kill, like, your literal demon sounds pretty good. I mean, vanquishing demons and having a happily ever after is kind of what Heaven is about, right?”
“I guess.” Dawn said slowly. “Why? Why’d you want to know?”
“Because you died. How would I not want to know?”
“Right. Makes sense.” Dawn said absently.
“Are you okay?” Claudia asked gently. “You seem kind of out of it.”
“Just thinking.” Dawn sighed. “I died. I don’t really know what to do with that. I mean, I should be freaking out, I guess, but... it didn’t feel like I died and it’s like it didn’t really happen, you know? It’s just like ‘hey, that’s a thing that happened’. I haven’t absorbed it yet.”
Of course, Dawn had a lot on her mind. She had a lot to think about, but even with all of that, she couldn’t quite make the step from knowing that she’d died to accepting it. Even though everyone had said that she’d died, that she’d had no pulse, that she hadn’t been breathing, even when her legs had buckled and everything had started going black, she hadn’t felt like she was dying. She hadn’t felt anything at all.
“Right.” Claudia nodded. She didn’t really understand. She knew what it felt like, to almost die. She’d almost died on her first outing as an agent – she only reason that she was still alive was because HG had saved her. She’d almost burst into flames, and she’d certainly felt as though she was going to come apart and melt into the floor from the heat. She remembered when she’d thought that Dawn was going to die, back when she’d accidentally overdosed. She remembered all of that, sometimes at 3AM when what she really wanted to be doing was sleeping. Sometimes she even dreamt about it. She couldn’t imagine actually dying and barely even seeming to notice. “Well, if you need to talk, I’m-“
As if on cue, Dawn’s phone started ringing. “It’s my sister.” Dawn said, with some surprise. She made no move to pick it up.
“So... you’re not going to answer that, then?”
“Wasn’t planning to.” Dawn replied. “We had a bit of a... falling out, I guess.”
Technically, that wasn’t true. She’d decided that seeing Buffy again wasn’t really a good idea, given that last time they’d met they’d been in a reality created by a wish, a reality in which Dawn was dead, and Buffy had come running when Dawn had called and Buffy had been killed because of that. Dawn had said that she couldn’t always be available, that she couldn’t be around that much, in case she got Buffy hurt. Besides, if any time was a good time to be unavailable, the day after your own death was one.
Claudia, judging by the nudge she gave Dawn, didn’t agree. “Yeah, but you died yesterday. Seems like a good time to make up.”
The ringing stopped. Buffy hadn’t left a message.
“I’ll call her later.” Dawn said. “Right now I’ve got some thinking to do.”
“Okay.” Claudia said, after a few seconds. “I’ll leave you to it.”
~*~
What exists everywhere?
Dawn looked at the question she’d just written on a sheet of paper stuck to her wall. After a little while, she underlined it.
It was an important question. The key, or rather the Key, to everything.
For years, she’d hallucinated being to Key, some kind of energy made human by some monks and hunted by the Abomination. She hadn’t known what the Key was, what it was for, why the Abomination wanted it or what the Abomination even was. Then, a while ago, she’d had a dream in which the monks had hid the Key, hid here, saying that if the Abomination found it then the universe would end. At the time, she hadn’t thought much about it. It hadn’t been until yesterday, when she’d died and hallucinated the Abomination that she’d put it together.
She’d already known that universes needed some kind of buffer zone so that they didn’t blend together. That was why Joshua’s pocket dimension had collapsed and why the hell dimension she and Buffy had found in LA had had a gateway. It was needed so that they the universes didn’t bleed into one another – Joshua’s hadn’t had one, and it had fallen apart because of it, gradually leaking through here and affecting things. It was why vengeance demons couldn’t simply shunt people into other dimensions, they couldn’t cross the barrier – what they could do was life the barrier between two dimensions so that they blended together to get the desire they wanted.
She’d been in the universe that the vengeance demon had created, even though there was no reason she was aware of that would explain why. The best that she had been able to think of was that she was the Key, and the Key needed to be everywhere.
Then the Abomination had said that it would use the Key to break down the barriers between the dimensions so it could get back home, destroying this universe in the process. Which meant that the Key had something to do with the barrier between dimensions. Which meant that, if she was right, she – or rather, the Key – needed to be both in every dimension, and between every dimension.
But what was in every dimension? Energy? That needed time, and there hadn’t been time in Joshua’s dimension. Of course it could be some kind of other energy – perhaps magic, although the scientist in her shied away from using that as an explanation – that no one knew about, something which was both non-material and non-dependent on time, but if she assumed that, how could she prove it? What could she do with the information?
If the Key was everywhere, what was the Key?
Dawn’s fruitless thoughts were interrupted by her phone ringing. Buffy was calling again. She ignored it, and continued staring at the paper in the hope that inspiration would suddenly hit.
After a little while, Dawn’s phone buzzed. Buffy had sent her a text message. Given that Dawn wasn’t getting anywhere, she thought that there wasn’t any harm at looking at a text.
Science question
As Dawn looked at it, trying to figure out what Buffy was saying, another message came through.
If I died in a universe which doesn’t exist, why has another Slayer showed up?
Before Dawn could even wrap her head around that, there was another message.
There’s someone here you should meet.