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There’s a line in the emergency room. Go figure, right? Classic Sunnydale. Buffy was always the one with a whole thing about hospitals but being in here makes Dawn sick now too. And that’s on top of all the other pain and horrible icky feelings going through her at the moment.
They give Spike gauze and water to clean off the blood that’s making her hair stick to her cheek at least while they wait for the X-ray tech to finish scanning apparently the entire town population or something and he helps her wash her face. Well. Spike does the washing. She tries to do it herself and that means letting go of her arm but she can’t hold it up on its own right now so it jostles and hurts all over again and she whimpers so much more pathetically than she should as a teenager and then Spike takes over the whole operation.
That also hurts, when he pulls some of the hair out of the dried blood.
“Ow!”
“Sorry.”
She scrunches up her face and tries to will her tears back into her eyes. “Can I go back to your place after?”
Spike is crouching in front of her and he stops what he’s doing to raise one eyebrow that way he does and stare at her like she actually is dinosaur pregnant. Like it’s such a crazy thing to suggest. “Bit late for that tonight, uh, Bit.”
“For the night, I mean.”
Now he looks like she hit him in the head with her bouncing bundle of pterodactyl.
“You’ve watched me overnight before. And I don’t even need watching. I’m fifteen now, remember?” They’d had a really dumb party about it and the Buffybot had made too many cupcakes and Dawn started crying two bites into her pizza and screamed at everyone and then ran up to her room and couldn’t bring herself to come back down so Willow and Tara and everyone had to cover for her to Janice and Melinda while the bot banged on her door reciting gibberish platitudes. “I just. Don’t wanna go home.”
“I’m not having you round to my place when you ought to be sleeping. Not safe. And you’d cramp my style if I have company over.”
“Oh, give me a break. What company? Everyone knows you’re still in love with Buffy.”
Spike’s mouth quirks up a little and he fights it back down. Like he’s probably surprised she noticed he was talking about sex. He reaches for her forehead with the gauze and she pulls away.
Turning in her chair moves her arm again and she gasps and grits her teeth and holds very still and very quiet while she waits for the wave of extreme pain to turn back into just a lot of pain instead. “Forget it,” says Dawn. She would have totally come off as casual as she was trying to sound if she wasn’t a little breathless still. “Can I stay with Xander then? Or Tara?” The anger runs through her again as she pictures going back home and sharing the house with Willow and she feels flushed and hot. “I don’t want to see her face.”
“Think it’s Big Sis you’ll have to sell on that one.”
“If she even comes.”
“She’s coming. Hey.” He dodges to the side so she has to meet his gaze and he looks up at her intensely. “She’s probably on her way already. But she came right over to get me so we could find you soon as she realized something was wrong. Just gotta take care of Willow first, yeah?”
“Sure. She’s the one who was magic drinking and driving and I’ve just got a broken arm. Let’s take care of her first.”
Spike drops the bloodied gauze on the floor because those are the kind of manners he has and sits in the chair next to her. His hand kinda twitches around like he’s thinking about touching her or holding her hand again but can’t make up his mind about that. “I’m not defending Wil. Would’ve bit her if I could. But Buffy trusted me to take care of you. She wouldn’t have sent you off on your own.”
She does most days , is what Dawn thinks, but she doesn’t bother to say it out loud anymore. “Whatever.”
Her arm hurts. Her face hurts. Her ankle hurts. She can’t remember the last time she felt this angry and the memories of Willow crying and begging for her forgiveness, like she could just take it all back like that, make her want to puke. That’s probably a little bit from the shock and it’s mostly from how it’s Willow’s fault she almost died multiple times tonight but some of it is just how familiar that desperation felt to her.
Dawn’s always waiting for somebody. Sitting in a scummy waiting room for hours. Waking up to an empty house. Xander was late to pick her up for school the other day and he said it was traffic but she knows it's because he and Anya were doing it. Everyone keeps leaving, everyone keeps finding better places to be and things they’d rather be doing than hang out with her, even when they promise a movie night.
She’s sick of it. She’s sick of how desperate they make her feel, how some days she’s felt just as low and pathetic as Willow sobbing on the dirt just pleading for them to notice her. If Buffy had been home, if Tara hadn’t left, if Giles hadn’t moved across the ocean, if Spike wasn’t wherever he’d been, her arm bone might be in one piece right now. She wouldn’t feel so shaky and miserable. She wouldn’t be sitting in an uncomfortable hospital chair again . She probably wouldn’t have even had to invent her peanut butter quesadilla.
So, she’s done. She’s so over it.
She turns away and watches everyone else come through the ER and she waits until they remember she’s here.
She’s learned her lesson on wanting to spend time with the people she loves. She’s never going to be like Willow was tonight. Never going to be that desperate. She’s never going to let them make her beg.