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She hates the way they say it in the movies, the way people say I'd die for you, like those words mean anything in their mouths. Those are mouths that have only had closed-mouthed kisses, never kissed their mother's gravestone, never buried the only family they've ever had, never stood on top of a tower and known their blood could end the world.
When Dawn says it, curled up in the duvet, her face pressed close to Janice’s on the pillow, she means I know what’s in my blood, and I don’t care, damn the whole world for you, for this.
When Janice says it back, her teeth shiny with spit in the dark, she means let’s go dark together.
She means, I want to kiss you on the throat the way a knife would.
It’s almost too easy a secret to keep. That before the dead boy sank his teeth into her pale throat, Janice had already swallowed deeply from the sluggish cut on his wrist, gagging on the coppery taste of him. That her heart had stammered for a moment. That a tide had changed within her.
Buffy had sewn it deep, the mantra they aren’t themselves anymore, that’s just an animal wearing their old face. But that’s never been exactly true. Not of Angel, certainly not of Spike. There’s a person in the monster, blurred by hunger and moral flippancy, but a person, nonetheless. Janice’s laugh hasn’t changed, Dawn learns, when she rips the throat out of a girl who called her a fat little art dyke in the locker room two weeks before.
It’s awful, and horrible and her worst nightmare walking. But Dawn laughs, a little bit, too.
Dawn has lost a lot of people lately, and she’s decided on this new thing, where she digs her nails in as far as they go and holds on.
So Janice is a vampire, now. Everyone has their flaws.
The charade is all going fine, Janice sick at home with fever, and climbing out of her window at night, her fingers so cold in Dawn's as they lace them, swinging in the darkness, waiting for one of the drunk frat douche types to spot them outside the Bronze and be perverse enough to follow. They say their real ages, and the guy never cares, and so Dawn doesn't feel all that bad when Janice presses him up against the rough brickwork and drinks him dry. It's a perfectly serviceable system, at least for the immediate present and so Dawn isn't ready when the call comes at 8:30 AM, just before she leaves for school.
Buffy hands her the phone, her pink painted nails chipping where she coils the cord around them.
"Dawn, something happened," Janice says, her voice barely more than a quiver.
So Janice ate her parents.
Stranger things have happened.
She's shaking when Dawn gets there, shrinking back from the light, all the curtains closed, the blinds pulled, her hoodie pulled tight around her face.
"I didn't mean to," she keeps saying, not looking where the bodies are slumped in a heap on the couch. "I didn't mean to. They wanted to take me to the doctor and Mom opened the blind and my hand burst into flames, god, it hurt so bad and hurting made me so hungry."
She looks at Dawn when she says that, at her throat, at the way it moves when she swallows.
"She'll kill you, you know," Janice says, as Dawn covers her hands with her sweater sleeves and inspects the corpses. "Your sister, for hiding me. For helping me."
Dawn raises an eyebrow. "Is that just occurring to you now?"
"I could," Janice says, stepping a little closer, still watching her neck. "I could kill you first. Make us match, like we wanted."
Dawn's got on her crucifix, which seems mean, felt mean when she'd put it on just after she put the phone down, tasting the bloodlust in the air, even over the phone. Still, she's not scared the way she probably should be. Not for herself, anyway.
"I wouldn't let you drink from me," Dawn tells her, eyes soft, hands open. "It was fine, when it was some dumb boy. Who cares if he gets a mouthful and his head go asplode, you know? But I wouldn't let you take that risk. We don't know what I am on the inside, not really. My blood could open the portal to hell right in your mouth."
Janice is there for that last bit, right there, her nose tucked up under Dawn's chin, breathing her in. "You smell like danger, Dawnie."
"Always did," Dawn tells her, stroking through her hair.
"Smell like home." Janice breathes, her arms wrapping tightly around Dawn's ribs.
"That too."
They sit up until the sun sets, watching old Beverly Hills 90210 reruns. Dawn eats microwave popcorn, and Janis wrinkles her nose at the smell of burnt butter.
They're on the living room floor, like kids at a sleepover. The bodies still slump on the couch, like spectres on their shoulders.
When it finally gets dark out, Janice perks from where she's sunken against Dawn's shoulder, the night infecting her eyes.
"I'm starving," she whines. "Let's do this."
Janice carries the bodies into the little navy Volvo in the garage, and Dawn drives them out to the edge of the university campus, a place she knows bodies like to pile up because she's tripped over them there, on patrol with the Buffy Bot in the summer, limbs loose and half slung in the bushes. It should be conspicuous, really, because why would Mr and Mrs Penshaw be hanging out around Greek Row? But they're all overtired and desensitized now. No one's thinking too hard about another drained body or two.
Dawn sits in the car, the engine running, the radio on, watching Janice toss the corpses aside, Sunday Girl by Blondie drifting from the tinny speakers. She taps to the beat on the steering wheel, and Janice tosses the bodies like they don't mean anything, boneless mannequins, a series of body parts with nothing to connect them to what they once were.
Baby, I would like to go out tonight, Debbie Harry croons.
If I go with you my folks will get uptight
Stay at home, Sunday Girl
Janice climbs back into the car, her hair askew, her face still contorted to fangs and ridges.
"I'm starving," she says, light as air. "Ugh, I hate this song."
They drive slowly around Greek Row, waiting for a Kappa Phi Delta to stumble out of a house, pawing at a girl who says stop one time too often.
Janice drinks deeply, always does.
Dawn thinks, is this so evil, really?
Is it?
It's different after that, though.
Janice goes out on her own some nights, and every time the back of Dawn's neck. She's the demon, sure, but Dawn is her armour. Without the cloak of Dawn's soft hair and Summers blood, Janice is an appetizer for Buffy or Spike, a patrol warm up, a stretching exercise.
Dawn doesn't like it, and Janice doesn't care, because she's free, now, no authority but the hunger that tugs at the back of her throat. It's as if her parents were her last tie to humanity, and now she's all animal, all body, all bloodlust.
Dawn knows better than to think she was ever that, the morality chain. Dawn is the monster Janice comes home to, well fed, bloodstains on her teeth, her head tipped up for a kiss. Dawn is not her humanity, Dawn is her absolution.
She follows her once, on a snub-night, when Janice wants to be wild out on her own. Dawn curls in the shadows like the Nancy Drew paperbacks curl on her bookshelf and follows the path Janice takes in the night.
She takes a deep breath. She swallows around the lump in her throat.
Because Janice has her mouth - the human one, where the lips are a little too plump and ill-defined, where her teeth are a little too square and blocky - nuzzling into the throat of a tall, thin girl with waist length hair, chestnut brown, curtain straight. Because Janice has her cold arms around the girl's waist, her hands up under the back of her shirt, palming against the skin Dawn knows must be sweaty and singing back against the touch.
Because Janice is dancing out of time to the band whining on The Bronze's stage, preternaturally smooth, the girl's spine arching beneath her fingertips.
Because Janice is going to sink her teeth in, soon, and catch Dawn's gaze as she does it.
She climbs in through Dawn's window, long-since invited, and yet so deliriously stupid when Buffy, still death-touched is twitching awake in the room next to hers. She doesn't say anything, but her skin is warmer, from the fullness, from the girl when she pushes her way under the duvet and presses her hands into Dawn's stomach.
She kisses her, her mouth warm and knowing the shape of this, the rhythm of this, both of them entirely too pliant for the other. She kisses her, and Dawn kisses her back, fury like hunger on the back of her tongue. Janice's hands roam across her body over the top of her stupid pink cotton pajamas, a matched set her father bought two years ago when it was three sizes too big. They skim her waist, her hips, the jut of her ribs, the curve of her breasts as she breathes hard into the touch. Dawn's back arches, for her, for the fingers flitting across her chest, catching on her nipples where they've hardened.
"I saw what you did," Dawn whispers, when those fingers find her throat, softly brushing the skin there, then sliding back down.
"I want you too much," Janice says, and kisses her again, roughly, like an animal, pressing their clothes bodies together so they fit, puzzle pieces perfectly slotting into place.
Dawn makes a sound at that, not sure what it means, not sure if it's her words or her thigh pressed tightly between her legs or just her, Janice, the girl she'd go dark for, any time, any place. She's liquid hot for her, her hips rocking, wanting more than language can contain.
"Not enough," Dawn says back, sinking her teeth into Janice's lower lip, only just soft enough to not draw blood. "Not enough to make you stay."
Janice keeps kissing her, pulls her in tighter, her fingers rough in Dawn's soft hair, and she wonders if Janice did that to her doppelganger. If she did it because she wanted to do it to Dawn.
When she wakes up her mouth is still swollen.
Another willowy, brunette corpse shows up.
And another.
Dawn still leaves her window open.