Skin (BTVS)
Dawn held the curved needle in her hand, the inside of her latex gloves slick with sweat. Breathe, she reminded herself. You’ve done this a dozen times.
On dead people, though, said the devil on her shoulder. Never on the living.
The boy on the bed in front of her muttered something and twitched feverishly. Dawn brought the needle to the edge of the three-inch gash down the side of his arm and poked at the skin, half expecting him to cry out in pain, or leap up from the bed, or call her a bitch, or something. She didn’t know why. Rupesh - Dr. Gupta, she reminded herself, blushing softly - had administered a local anesthetic and irrigated the wound in front of her, smiling warmly at her when he declared that the injury had missed the brachial artery and would heal nicely with a clean stitch. She remembered how her relief at this one small victory had turned to horror when he’d handed the prepared needle to her confidently and, without a single look backwards, moved away from the bed.
Blood was slowly starting to pool inside the cut again. Cursing herself, she grabbed a sterile gauze pad and delicately absorbed the viscous red liquid, ignoring the sudden moan from the boy. It wasn’t pain, but no amount of lidocaine could distract anyone from how weird it felt to have something touching an open wound. It’s appalling, confusing; your insides are supposed to stay in, that’s like the whole point of skin. It’s why we have so many biological processes dedicated to keeping our bodies whole and our skin unbroken. Not just healing or automatic self-defense, like throwing up your hands to break a fall or turning your torso from an attacker, but millennia of instinctive fear. The urge to flee from a blade is like a thousand previous generations remembering the feeling of being stabbed. The knowledge of danger triggers senses we otherwise forget we have, something ancient and unbidden leaping into our stomachs and fingers and the backs of our necks. We know in our skin that we need to run. Touching the inside of a wound is reminding someone of their failure, an affront to the genetic predisposition to stay unbroken. It’s biologically insulting.
Dawn’s entire life story could be told in a series of wounds - some of them hers, most Buffy’s, one tiny and vicious and hiding somewhere under curly brown hair and loving eyes, many of them quiet and invisible and never completely healed.
The blood had long since cleared, and when she shook off her reverie, she was surprised to notice that the stitches were halfway complete. The boy moaned again - he couldn’t have been older than sixteen - and turned his face away in an attempt to hide helpless tears. Dawn, who needed to focus, couldn’t hide hers.
“It’s okay,” she said softly. “I’m a… I’m trained to do this. You’ll be fine.” He gave a little shiver and scrunched up his face. “What’s your name? I’m Dawn.”
After a second, she realized he was laughing, but she had no idea why. Returning to her stitches, she fell back into the automatic pattern of pierce, loop, knot, cut.
When the sun gets blotted out, casting the entire world into, at its brightest, perpetual evening, and the vampires, led by the Immortal Cult of The Dusk, come out of the shadows and build their army with impunity, your priorities are obviously going to shift a little. Dawn was only four months into her first year of university when it happened, with nothing to do but turn up at the makeshift hospital that was once her dormitory and offer untrained hands and a strong stomach to the cause.
Pierce, loop, knot, cut.
She’d thought maybe she’d be a writer, back then. Less than a year, but it felt like a thousand. Buffy was gone: when she tried to amend that to “dead” her entire mind rebelled, pointing out that it wasn’t confirmed, there was no body, no news from Rome either way. But of course, she’d left to stop the ritual that would plunge the earth into twilight and destroy the Cult forever.
Pierce.
There was only one reason she could have failed. Even the most idealistic parts of Dawn’s mind couldn’t be kept from the obvious conclusion.
Loop.
She hadn’t seen any of them - Willow, Xander, Giles, even the new Slayers that she’d barely had a chance to meet - since Buffy had left. Her sister wasn’t big on providing Dawn with details about their plans, urging her to go to school, do her best to have a life, even as the Slayer armies were growing every day and the only life she’d ever known, the family she’d cultivated, seemed less and less to have a place for her.
Knot.
If they could see her now, though. Training as a field medic, coordinating channels of news from the resistance front… sleeping with her teacher… maybe it’s best that they couldn’t see her now, come to think of it.
Cut.
Rupesh returned, took a single silent look at the five stitches she’d now completed, and let his hand rest affectionately on the back of her neck. It was only a second of contact, but she leaned into it, grateful for the contact. The flip side of the instincts to protect our skin is the constant desire to touch and be touched, to trust another person enough to allow them access to the most sensitive and important organ of the body.
No, not that one.
Letting someone else touch your skin is a tacit declaration of trust. I choose to believe you will be careful with me. I choose to believe you won’t cut me.
Two left. Pierce. Loop.
The ironic thing was that, in a world overrun with vampires, who bite into you and pull your inside out and replace you with evil, that wasn’t actually the biggest problem. See, religious zealots are the same, living or undead: they never see beyond their cause. Blotting out the sun means the vampires can take over, turn people, eat their fill, never hide again. Fine, whatever. Go nuts. But the sun did other things besides set vampires on fire.
Knot. Cut.
At the moment, the world’s crops were, according to the most recent estimates coming across the wireless, 70% dead. Meat and milk were the first to go, because it takes ridiculous amounts of grain to raise animals, and entire farms have been razed and converted into freezers and smokehouses to preserve what little meat remains. Pasta was a pipe dream; the most anyone had seen in two months was bulgar wheat or oatmeal mixed with lentils, and every three days the stew featured strips of partly rehydrated, unidentifiable leathery meat.
Even the vampires were starting to notice the problem; there had been reports of defection, vampires working as spies for the resistance. Because when it came down to it, there were only two options now. The first was to restart the sun. The second was to die of starvation: first the humans, then the vampires when all the people are gone. Hunger is a hideous way to die, and she felt the first stirrings of it, a yawning emptiness that stabbed at her abdomen.
Pierce, loop, knot, cut. Dawn covered the stitches with bandages and gently pressed the tape around the edge. The boy was no longer crying, but still turned his face away from her when she patted his arm in what she hoped was a reassuring manner. At least he’d stopped laughing, too.
Every time she closed her eyes, she thought about the resistance, wondered if her family was there, if any of them were still alive. Sometimes she’d be able to catch a few hours of sleep with Rupesh, spooned up against him, skin on skin, and she would look at the dark blue of the sky, the omnipresent stars, and think of scars and needles and blonde hair and full-body hugs. In the seconds before sleep, she would utter a silent prayer, hoping against hope for the sun to rise, for the coming of the…
Oh.
I get it.