Your story is terrific. You are terrific. I remember this sentence of Aldous Huxley: "How do you know if life is not the hell of another planet?". It seems that is what Buffy and Dawn live. Every day, since their mother has married Ted. And I ask myself questions. The most evident: why does Joyce stays with Ted, a man (really a man?) , who makes Hannibal Lecter looks like Santa Claus? I thought first she was scared, like her daughters, by him. Beaten and threatened by her husband. In the first chapter, Spike says about Ted : "a bloody insensitive prick that beats his wife and two step kids" and Dawn: "Couldn’t let mom take all the beating tonight". Maybe Joyce thinks that if she leaves, it would be worse, and Ted would take revenge. BUT, Buffy says too "He beat Dawn and me but he never laid a finger on her". So, is Ted a rich, a powerful man? It doesn't seem to me, he seems only a businessman, not particularly having influence, or practicing corruption on police and social services... Because he is rich and Joyce can't have enough money to assume her children? But she has a work. So, it seems it's worst, in the most horrible way, she maybe really loves her husband. Buffy doesn't want to talk about what her family bears and ask for help because "I didn’t go somewhere, or get out of there with mom and Dawn. But Mom didn’t want to leave, and I’d never leave without her". But she can go, with Dawn, because there is none mother I see in this story. A mother who "turned a blind eye on our beatings, even though she knew they were going on", who, when her daughter is beaten, cut, only "smiled sadly at me, before disappearing downstairs to her husband". Who lets her own daughters be beaten, molested and raped by her husband. About the last point, it's possible she doesn't know that Ted rapes Dawn and tries to attack Buffy. When he tries, he leaves "so that Mom couldn’t come in and see what her precious husband was actually trying to do". But even! He beats them, and Joyce doesn't make anything. She lost every right to be called a mother. My advice? Buffy must leave with Dawn. For God's sake, what hasn't she leave already? He rapes a child, a girl of 12 years old! She can get pregnant or have AIDS (don't seem to me Ted is the kind of man who is faithfull to his wife and using a condom before raping his step-daughter). Maybe Dawn reasons like Buffy and doesn't want let her mother with Ted. Maybe the sisters are afraid to be separated if they ask help to social services, to be placed in different homes or family...But they are both in danger. One day, the bastard could kill them. You said in the resume that it will be no happy endings. So, what do you prepare? One of the sister gets pregnant, and dies during abortion or giving birth? Spike is killed by Ted when he tries to protect the 2 sisters? Buffy kills Ted and go in jail? Well, dark, but we are already in hell... When I read your resume and the first chapter, I thought "No happy end? I will hate it". It's odd. I hate Ted. I hate Joyce. I think Buffy and Dawn are wrong to stay with their mother. That Spike is an ass to stay with Dru. At each chapter, I am angry... Angrier and angrier... And I can stop reading it ;)! I guess I will be very angry and very depressed at the final chapter. Life seems a cruel in any ways...