Dawn
Summers was born on her fourteenth birthday, flashing to life in
an explosion of teenaged angst and older-sister envy.
She
remembers the time before, but knows it isn’t real. In the
time after, her mother died, a demented Hell-goddess attempted to
bleed her dry and her sister’s leap unraveled Dawn’s
faith in the world. In time, Buffy came back. Dawn very nearly became
a child bride in hell with a dancing demon, but thankfully he didn’t
prosecute shoplifters and left her in relative peace. She was put
through her own hell instead, watching her newly made family fall
apart.
Dawn
moved to Italy and discovered an almost preternatural gift with
languages, soon becoming one of the most valuable translators the
struggling Watchers could find. She began to think of a future outside
of the world according to Buffy. Her linguistic work with the rebuilt
Watchers Council was enlightening: there was magic in the world
around them, harnessed for spells and incantations, but even the
vaunted Council libraries knew only a fraction of the possibilities.
Dawn saw the puzzle of plant-based magical substances and explored
it with the same dogged fascination she’d shown as a child
in hounding Buffy about her various suitors.
Later,
she discovered that the magic that Glory had attempted to steal
was still there, more or less. Dawn began a formal education in
magic after accidentally transporting a slightly-used razor blade
and pile of bloody herbs to Devon. While she knew she would never
attain the level of immeasurable power that Willow possessed, she
was competent, thorough and disciplined. This was the year that
mutants first made headlines, their curious traits both fascinating
and alarming the public.
Dawn
began studying for a degree in pharmacology from the University
College of London, paid for in full by the Watcher’s Council.
Buffy had decreed that at least one woman in her family was going
to have a normal life and shipped Dawn off to college. Eventually,
Dawn accepted a Rhodes scholarship to study the traditional remedies
of the ancient Maya people in Guatemala. The day she left, bags
in hand, the world was all abuzz with the news of a mutant attack
at a conference in New York. She saw the Statue of Liberty swirling
with light, nauseated by a niggling sense of familiarity, remembering
only when she took her seat how the sky had lit up the night Buffy
died for the second time. She spent the flight absently rubbing
the scars still etched on her stomach.
When
she was twenty six, the rest of her life began in a flash infinitely
more dramatic than the one that thrust her into existence in the
first place.
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