FIC: Fight From The Inside 2/?

[dollarformyname]

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If You Negotiate The Minefield In The Drive

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The shooting has tapered off, and there are too many windows.

The coffee shop is three walls of windows from waist to ceiling, and they're all shattered, some with jagged teeth hanging on, sunlight punching through and casting an incongruous lemonade shine over everything, chasing away the shadows.

It's exposure Dawn isn't comfortable with in the least. She has to get everyone away from the windows.

But there are bodies.

Too many bodies, and too many pools of thick fluids, just spilled out all over like the lives they supported were nothing more than an accidental knock away from a tipped glass. So many glasses emptied, the eyes are glass and fixed and staring, and nothing can fill them ever again; put them on the shelf, they're done.

But she has to get everyone away from the windows, because the continuous barrage has ceased but there are still sporadic little explosions that explain the show must go on to its gorier end. There are still gunners roaming the sidewalks, seeking out the mice and spitting bullets into them. Someone said children, but Dawn can't reconcile children with this disaster. It's doesn't fit: square pegs, round holes.

She has to flee the gaping windows. She doesn't want to see children. She doesn't want to fight or kill children.

"We have to get away from the windows," she informs Jess, who is still cowering close and tight with her beneath the table, looking about as eager to scoot outward and view the full extent of the damage as she is. "I'm gonna go check the back, make sure it's safe."

Jess shifts, nods jerkily with a burst of a sigh. "Okay."

It took a long minute of shock for it to settle in, but it's there now, this stark unmovable reality where people are dead all around them and others are grieving and crying and terrified. There are muffled sobs behind whitened hands, trying to stay quiet, stay low, stay invisible, and Dawn's own hands are trembling a little as she extricates herself from the tangle her and Jess have made, crawls forward so slowly and rises just a little, upright and on two feet, not crawling, but hunched below the window line.

The smell hits her then. It's the baking vomit in a pool of sunlight, sprawled out next to another booth that shelters two frightened female students and a hopelessly slumped shape that will never drink coffee with her girlfriends again. It's the puddles of coffee and blood spreading out underneath a guy who never saw what hit him, his limbs flopped out wide in the middle of the floor, scalp blown back like a flip-top of flesh and hair. It's fear and sweat and used copper and brain matter, sloppy and wriggly and a sort of dusky pink in slimy rivers of crimson... it's someone's thinking parts, all splayed ruins.

Dawn gags, turns her face into the pristine vinyl of an empty booth and crouches there, fighting bile and the blurring lens of tears, mouth pressed hard into her fist.

She's seen it all before—carnage and countless aftermaths—but she'll never get used to it, and if she ever gets used to it she'll pack her bags and make tracks and never look back.

And she's afraid. She's not ashamed to admit it. She knows things and she's seen things, but she will die just as easily and messily as the next person on the wrong end of a gun, and just like the next person, she doesn't want to die. Not at all. This is the real kind of dead, not mystical and not temporary, but irreversible and senseless. Like Tara.

She's quaking so hard now, thinking of that other shattered window and that other emptied glass that she knew, she knew her laugh and the sound of her tears and the warmth of her hugs, and there are others she knows somewhere so far away but nor far enough because the campus is so big and they could be anywhere, maybe really dead and maybe not, and Buffy. Holy freaking crap, Buffy will come when she finds out and Dawn can't let that happen because Buffy is not faster than a speeding bullet and Dawn won't do that again, absolutely refuses, she has to be out of this before that happens and she has to pull it together, has to check the back.

Another short drumroll of shots close by, and someone gasps, "Oh, god! They're coming!"

"They're not coming yet," Dawn whispers loudly to the girls huddled beneath the booth in front of her, like she can make it true by saying it. They look back at her, gaping rabbit eyes seeking a defending carnivore in the bloody free-for-all, and Dawn schools her features into something firmer, assuring in its assertiveness. "They're not here yet, but you have to keep quiet."

They nod desperately, lips flattened colorless on sallow, ashen faces, don't say anymore.

More gunfire, a quick one-two somewhere across the quad, and Dawn needs a weapon.

She had one class, hadn't even bothered to take her bag because it was one hour of loitering in a lecture hall and she was planning to surprise Connor; it was broad daylight and huge crowds, and Connor is a weapon so she didn't think she needed any. But then she got the text about the Slayer on campus and promised to talk to her, and she should've known better. A Summers without a small arsenal attached to her person is a blaring invitation for trouble; one hour, one minute, doesn't matter. Things can go rotten in seconds. She's been letting Connor's perpetual aura of safety spoil her is what it is, but that's something to lament about later.

She takes a gulping breath, careful not to breathe through her nose, looks up and around, eyes catching and skittering away from the smears of blood everywhere, trying to make it fade into the background, like rubber guts on a movie set. It's not working, but there are knives and things behind the counter, she remembers, because there was a girl in front of her when she ordered, and the barista handed her a gooey brownie that she had to cut from the tray.

Dawn starts forward again, skirting the dead limbs as best she can and her sneakers are not slipping around in blood and guts, they're not. She finds the little swinging half-door and pushes through, and there's the barista, eyes wide and gone, feet tangled up together like she'd been trying to turn and run at the same time, chest blasted red. She looks like a porcelain doll, all white-skinned and dark-haired and dropped from her shelf.

Dawn needs to stop looking so hard, needs to stop thinking these things.

She sees the knife. It's long and sharp and smeared with chocolate. It's still in her hand.

She swallows thickly, takes another shaky breath and crawls forward. The fingers are cooling and held fast, and Dawn can't stop the trail of hot moisture on her cheeks or the persistent clench in her chest as she grimaces and pries them loose. The knife hits the bloodied tile with a wet chink, and she flinches, picks it up before she can change her mind because of the red. She'll just... not look at it.

She holds it in her fist, sets her sights on the door that leads into the back, and the knees of her jeans are damp but she's not going to look at that, either.

Something scurries and claps down on her shoulder and she spins, knife high in the air, eyes blown wide, bites her tongue against the scream. Jess' hand locks around her wrist to stop the weapon's momentum before either of them can blink, and she spews apologies even as she looks surprised at her own reflexes.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to scare you, are you okay, I'm sorry." Jess slowly releases Dawn's wrist and regards her carefully, afraid and worried and a little pale, resolutely not looking at the body, but she's unerringly determined, too. It's a Slayer in the trenches of battle. Dawn knows the look intimately.

Jess still has her cell phone in one hand, has so far refused to give up on dialing out every few minutes, and she's crouching right in Dawn's personal bubble with her valiant air and sunny blond hair all frazzled, but it's not like Dawn minds; it's comforting and familiar and she will take it.

Dawn realizes she's still frozen in that defensive position and drops her arm, tries to relax a little. "I'm fine. It's. It's okay. What are you doing?"

It's a stupid question. Hello. Slayer. It's her literal calling in life to go where the danger is and not to hide under a table, Dawn knows this. But everything's weird and somehow more real than demons with rubbery skin and giant swords, vampires in ridiculously large hotels who always need research at the most inopportune times, and it's another of those square pegs, this superhero business in the middle of regular-person mayhem.

Jess shrugs uneasily and says, "I should have a weapon, huh?" looks around and sharpens her gaze on a hefty-looking stool set off beside the espresso pump. "I've been such a klutz, ya know?" she whispers anxiously as she shuffles over to it, and Dawn's grateful for the sound to focus on that's not crying and scared. "Since, um, since the thing. 'Cause I keep forgetting, even though it's stupid. I mean, how do you forget you woke up Wonder Woman one day? But I manage it somehow when I'm trying to, ya know, do ordinary things." She's upending the stool and yanking at one of the steel legs. "I break so much stuff, and Sam keeps asking me what my obsession is with new doorknobs and furniture, and I just let him think it's like a girly quirk for decoration even though all our stuff is garage sale crap." She cinches her lips and yanks hard, the leg of the stool bending and snapping, and she turns with a grimly victorious smirk and wiggles it. "But I guess I get to break stuff on purpose now."

Dawn returns the smirk, feels it wobble. "Yeah, there's plenty of intentional breakage," she confirms, not expanding on the bone-crunching detail of it. Jess is trying to reconcile her changed future in a horrifying situation, and it's admirable that she's not completely freaking out. Dawn kind of envies that inherent strength sometimes. "It sucks you had to find out like this, but there's... there are people that know what you're going through better than me, and it doesn't always have to be blood and horror. You can have a life." This is the standard spiel, but it's not just lip service, it's true. It's true and it's well-charted territory.

Dawn turns as Jess sidles up next to her again, and Jess says, "You seem to understand it well enough."

Dawn shakes her head, breathes a little laugh. "You can't understand it all the way unless you've lived inside of it. I haven't, but I've seen, and this one time I thought I might be... It doesn't matter." She's getting disconnected and stilted as the strangeness of everything seeps back in, bites her lip and stares at the door. "We should be quiet now. Stealthy."

"Right. Personal crisis, back burner." Jess nods. "Check."

They stop talking and Dawn creeps forward, knife securely in her grip as she nudges the swinging door back and scans the room. It's dirtier tile and stacked boxes, walk-in freezers, utility shelves of beans and pastries and ingredients, a break table against the far wall with chairs scattered around it and a little television sitting on one end, and no bodies or blood. Everything's normal back here, untouched by pointless, tragic violence, and Dawn feels like she can breathe a little better.

She motions with a hand for Jess to check the freezers and behind the shelves on one side while Dawn checks the office in the opposite corner. She'll have to find the back door, too, barricade it.

They straighten as soon as the door swings shut again, no windows back here. Dawn sneaks and starts at insignificant sounds and ultimately determines the office is just a messy desk and file cabinets, an outdated computer and no sinister gunmen laying in wait.

She can't think about gunmen, or gunchildren, because it doesn't make any sense yet. Schools get shot up by disgruntled staff or students, but the students here are not small or knee-high, and children shouldn't think about guns or how they work or their potential to take lives, much less carry them. There's something woefully wrong with that, she knows, but the specifics are not something she's sure she wants. She'll have to, though. She'll have to find out why children and why Stanford and what might be lurking behind innocent masks.

But not right now. Right now, she has to meet Jess halfway, and Jess has to tell her she found the back entrance and Dawn has to say, "Barricade it with the heaviest things you can find." Jess has to nod, and Dawn has to go back out into the broken-glass arena and usher the survivors into the marginally safer space.

She has to do all that, and she does, and now she's looking at a huddled group of college students and one sweaty older guy in tweed that has to be a professor. There are four girls and five guys, not including her and Jess. Eleven people all together, eleven people that didn't die out of the thirty or so that had to have been in the shop when it all started.

One of them is injured, a flesh wound, she determines, a chunk of his bicep taken off by speeding ammunition. She tends to it, uses towels and a strip off an apron to keep pressure on the steadily oozing flow.

Jess makes use of all the shelves and boxes, stacking them high and wide in front of both doors, then the filing cabinets and desk, and then they're just a scared group in a big room with nothing but a flimsy table to rally around, and Dawn needs something else to do.

So she gives Jess her phone as Jess settles in a chair and fusses with her own cell some more, resolutely not paying attention to the wary stares she's getting for having carted heavy things around effortlessly.

Dawn says, "Connor. Keep trying him, too."

She swallows as Jess lifts a brow in askance, can't think of Connor's mischievous hands, or his laugh against her hair, can't remember his smile that's all teeth or his smart-ass smirk that makes her want to hit him and jump his bones at the same time. Can't think that maybe that's all she has now, these pictures in her head, all of his quirks and touches trapped in memory that she won't be able to reach out for with her hands ever again, because he's strong and he's brave and he's resourceful but he's not bulletproof.

She turns back to the group looking all skittish and loose, some pacing, some sat fidgeting and grieving, no longer locked together in bonding fear as they feel a false sense of security in the new location. They're still scared, but they're also impatient, cornered animals that are just remembering they have this baser survival instinct that's unthinking and desperate, a life of safe books and loving families to get back to. It could get ugly, terrified people with idle hands, so Dawn pulls out her own chair and plops it in the center of the room.

"I need to know what you all saw and heard so we can figure out what's going on." She sounds authoritative, confident, and that's good. That will engender cooperation a lot better. She throws up a hand to stop the chorus of opening mouths. "One at a time."

They listen and obey, glad for order in the chaos, gather in chairs and on the floor. She starts with a dark-skinned guy in faded jeans and a vintage Beatles tee whose name is Clark, and Clark saw tiny tin soldiers all in a row, cold eyes and no hearts, picking off the ducks with merciless intent...

-:-

Jess doesn't feel well.

She doesn't feel sick, or bad, really. Just wrong.

There's been this low buzz beneath her skin since this whole, crazy thing began, but now it's escalating, making her twitchy.

"I got something!" Greg says victoriously, uninjured hand hovering over the television he's been fiddling with for the past twenty minutes like he's got the magic fingers of reception.

It's been pulled toward the center of the long table, and it's fritzing in and out, but there are distinguishable voices and pictures now as everyone gathers around it with fearful, hopeful expressions.

The outside world. It's weird, hasn't even been a whole two hours since the first shot, but the world has been inarguably divided: us in here and them out there, and us in here have been dying to know what them out there are doing to erase that divide. They've heard the sirens, and they've heard the sporadic gunfire still going on.

Jess scoots her chair back a little so she can see, fingers sliding over the buttons of her phone on autopilot. All the electronics have been fussy, not just the phones, and she hopes this means—

It doesn't. The phone is still spitting static in her ear.

Greg's the nerdy jock with the flesh wound, right arm held stiff and close to his middle, the sleeve of his shirt all bunched up above makeshift bandaging. He's good with electronics, he told them, so Dawn assigned him the T.V., and now he's infinitely proud of himself as she and her group of food-gatherers come over, all straight-backed, no-sinking-on-my-watch-captain-of-the-ship determination, gives him an approving smirk.

Jess admires the way she's taken charge and made the effort to calm everyone, gives them tasks and busywork so they'll feel useful and not futile, even though she's clearly mindless with worry herself. Jess' job is still the phones and a vague directive to keep her feelers out, which she didn't get until now, with the twitching.

They keep the volume low, and everyone's holding their collective breath and watching the stuttering screen raptly, listening to the field reporter's static-y account of the outsider's perspective: unknown number of unidentified assailants, dozens upon dozens of recovered bodies, witnesses who got out just in time and a small group of rescued survivors currently being questioned (Jess' heart kicks at this, but they don't give names, and she can't know if Sam made it out), the extensive perimeter that's been thrown up around the campus, and words like tragic, senseless, heartbreaking.

It's not exactly helpful information, which leads Jess to believe the authorities have yet to construct a solid extraction plan.

Dawn seems to agree, mouth twisted in a frown. "Keep an eye on that," she tells Greg, who nods distractedly, eager gaze glued to the screen. "Lemme know if they say anything important, like where exactly the blockades are and stuff. We need to know where the safe ground is." She turns away and walks over to Jess, shirt all rumpled and jeans spattered in blood, hair pulled back into a messy ponytail, squats down next to her and relaxes the authoritative air a notch.

"I feel weird," Jess admits immediately, because she doesn't know what that means. Dawn's the one with the superhero handbook here, even if she insists she's not a super-anything, just a girl with too much brain in her head.

"Weird how?" Dawn presses, voice carefully pitched beneath the earshot of the crowd.

"Like my skin itches, but not really." Jess bites her lip, shrugs. "It's shocky, or tingly, or something."

Ever so eloquent, she thinks sourly at herself, making a face. But it's not like this whole destiny revelation isn't upsetting enough without all the hiding from the Children Of The Damned, so she's allowed to be a little confused and uncertain. She's had a couple of years to get used to being a freak, of hiding it from everyone because she didn't want to get locked up or experimented on or anything, and now she's just getting the other pieces of the puzzle, the how and why, so she thinks she's handling this pretty well despite everything, if she does say so herself.

"Did it just start or has it been like that for a while? 'Cause I put up some wards." Dawn's looking up at her, scrutinizing like she can x-ray and dissect what she refers to as 'Spidey senses' from the right angle.

"That's what all that muttering to yourself was about?"

Dawn shrugs, nods. "It's not much, a very last-minute warning system, but it'll throw anything supernatural out of whack for a minute. Kinda like a magic taser."

Dawn already told her she's pretty sure they're dealing with something supernatural, given the other's accounts of blurry speed and leaping buildings in a single bound.

"Huh," is Jess' intelligent response. The whole magic and monsters thing is still unreal to her, this distant thing she can examine and deal with later, because it's not like she can just accept it even with the evidence of superstrength and weird tickling senses. She's been a master of denial and covert ops with Sam for the past year of their relationship, always putting it off, no need to tell him anything until she's sure of this commitment level or that tolerance level, justifies it with him being odd and secretive about basically his whole life before college. She knows intimately the ever elusive later is her friend. "I don't think it's that. It just started a few minutes ago."

Dawn furrows her brows, straightens and eyes the blocked entrances warily. "That's not good."

Jess goes stiff. "You hear that?"

"What?"

She strains to listen over the muted sounds of the television, and Dawn seems to read her mind, hisses quickly, "Turn that off!" mimes zipping her lips and motions for the others to take cover.

The group is suddenly this silently pulsing thing of hammering fear, shaky hands and wide eyes, scuffling quickly into the tiny office. Greg gestures for Clark to help him, and they unplug and abscond with the television before closing themselves in.

There are slowly crunching footsteps, light treads over broken glass. Jess is sort of taken over by instinct, fear trampled down and vigilance soaring up the flag pole. She points at the door, mouths, "Someone's in the shop," and Dawn nods, pulls the knife from her belt loop while Jess picks up the pole at her feet and stands.

They move swiftly, silently, to either side of the door and its stacked obstacles, backs against the wall and weapons at the ready. Jess' heart is visiting her throat for a little while, but she thinks she's got this, something deep down whispers that she's got this, nothing she can't handle, so she chooses to believe it because it's more appealing than freaking right the hell out.

The footsteps stop.

The filing cabinet shoots across the room and smashes into the table by no visibly compelling force whatsoever. The shelves and boxes skid apart and topple over one another with deafening crashes and clatters. Something comes barreling full-throttle through the door and Jess reacts, swings hard and hits the blur with a solid thwack that increases its momentum and sends it skidding and sprawling across the floor with an animal scream. A rifle drops and bounces away with a thunderous crack that rains down plaster from the ceiling before it settles, startled squeals from behind the office door at the ruckus, and the screeching doesn't stop as the child lays there convulsing and flailing like a live wire.

"It's the spell," Dawn explains as she dashes to retrieve the gun, knife stuffed back through her belt loop and the large weapon turned on its owner. "You're gonna have to hold her until he we know what we're dealing with." She's apologetic but firm.

Jess' heart is thundering, but she complies, keeps the pole in her grip and skids on her knees to the child's side.

She wrestles with the writhing girl—it looks like a girl even with the shaved head, thick lashes and full lips, honeyed skin that's so smooth and so young—gets her arms pinned behind her and presses her face-down onto the floor as gently as she can because she's such a little thing. She's agonized and screaming, splitting Jess' heart in two, little gray fatigues disturbingly splotched with blood.

Jess holds her there, careful knee in the small of her back, doesn't want to kill her, looks up with wet brown eyes and pleads with Dawn not to give that order or anything like it. Dawn swallows, obviously affected by the size and age as well, though the barrel of the rifle is still trained on the child as she gasps and trembles out the final effects of the spell.

The girl stops screaming for a beat only to start up again, but this time it's black and hateful instead of pained. "Geddoff, bitch!" She twists and thrashes violently, strong but not stronger than Jess, apparently, though she's pretty sure she's faster what with the blurring so she knows she can't let go. "Gonna rip your fuckin' throat out! Leggo!"

"Well, since you asked so nicely," Jess drawls evenly, surprised at her own calm because she actually feels pretty tremulous. "No." She's got a good grip on her wrists, tightens her hold with a wince of sympathy, looks up at Dawn again. "Something's wrong with her," she hedges, trying to pinpoint it. The girl is buried in a thick cloud of something viscous and nauseating, disjointed somehow, disharmonious. "She feels like sick fear and dark rage," is the best way she knows how to put it. "That doesn't really go together, does it?"

Dawn looks at her funny. "Sometimes," she says distractedly, biting her lip.

"What?" Jess asks defensively, unsettled by the crazy eye she's getting.

"Nothing, it's just... you feel her?"

"Yeah, I guess. Sort of. It's like a smell but not... I dunno. She's kinda choking me." Jess twitches uncomfortably under the continued scrutiny. "That's normal, right?" She hopes. "I mean, it's not normal because none of this is exactly normal, but it's normal for my particular brand of abnormal. Right?"

Dawn shakes her head slowly. "I don't think so." She's contemplative for a second. "But some Slayers have different things, so don't freak out, okay?" she rushes to add at Jess' admittedly freaked-out expression. "Some have prophetic nightmares or dream-walky... stuff. And there's this one girl who can kinda predict the future by a few seconds, handy in a fight but not for much else."

Jess doesn't exactly feel better, but okay, fine. She'll flip out later. There are priorities. "What do we do with her?"

The her in question is still pitching a fit, spewing vitriol and spittle everywhere, and that's when Jess notices it. "Look at this," she says, keeping her prisoner secure as she glares down at the marking, wholly disturbed by what it implies.

Dawn edges over, cautiously skirting the scrabbling and slamming limbs, peers down with a frown. "What the hell?"

It's a fair question. This kid is tattooed with a bar code, like she's some sale item waiting to be passed over the checkout counter. Like she's marketable goods. Property.

Then, as abruptly as she started, the girl stops flailing, goes rigid and drops her face onto the tile. "Please stop it," she sighs out so quietly and shakily that they have to strain to hear her. Her voice is high and tiny, body taut and strained and quivering, and Jess' chest clenches.

The girl jerks a few times, suddenly resumes her violent fit and growling curses. "Fuck you! Fuck you, geddoffame!"

Jess is extremely confused, glances to Dawn. "What's wrong with her eyes?"

Dawn lowers the rifle, staring piteously down at her, gaze wide and blue and endlessly compassionate but, most of all, baffled. "I have no idea."

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