Without further ado,
That story is one of the few that was actually inspired by fanart. Shortly after I came back from my cross country roadtrip in summer 2008,
One scene that I hesitated including - starved, vampire famine victims aside! - was Buffy and Dawn in bed together because of the somewhat incestuous connotations. I hope, ultimately, what came across was the deep, emotional trauma that all of them were going through. In a world where everything they knew was gone, that closeness, despite moral ambiguity, seemed really important for them to have with each other and Spike. Their cycle of survival - Spike hunting for them and his feeding off of them for his own sustanence - was one of the most rewarding parts of this fic to work on.