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Both Sides Now	By : addielogan Category: BtVS AU/AR > Het - Male/Female Views: 6136 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BtVS), nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 23
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Emma wasn't sure what she expected to find
when she walked into Dawn's apartment, but it certainly wasn't Dawn sitting on
the floor surrounded by notebooks and old, weathered texts. And to make the
sight even more bizarre, Dawn had an almost wild look in her eyes as she tried
to do what appeared to be an attempt to read every bit of what was in front of
her simultaneously.
Emma stood silently for some time, watching
Dawn and wondering if she was going to acknowledge her presence before she
finally cleared her throat and spoke up. "Um, Dawnie�what's with the
mini-library on your floor?"
Dawn looked up suddenly, her expression
making it clear to Emma that she really hadn't realized she was there.
"It's about the Key," Dawn said, gesturing to the papers spread out
around her. "All of it."
"Oh wow," Emma replied.
"Like�stuff you didn't know?"
Dawn nodded. "There's a whole history
here. Where it came from, how and why it was made, where it's been since then.
It's all here. Everything I've ever�it's all here."
Emma found a clear spot on the floor and sat
down, cross-legged. "Where did you get it?"
Dawn swallowed, her gaze falling down.
"Andrew. Well, Giles is the one that actually physically handed it all to
me, but Andrew got all of it. He�he found it when he was looking for other
texts for the Watchers' Council."
"Did he go looking specifically for
stuff about the Key?" Emma asked. "Like did he just sign up for the
thing in the first place so he could try to find all of this?"
Suddenly, Dawn was on her feet. "I�I
have to go for a bit. I'll be back."
"Dawn!" Emma called after her, but
Dawn was already out the door.

***
*** ***
Dawn was able to find out fairly easily
which flat Andrew had been moved to. She banged hard on his door, waiting
impatiently for him to open it. When he finally did, she blurted out, "Why
did you do it?"
"Dawn? Huh? Why did I do what?"
Andrew asked, blinking.
"All of it!" Dawn yelled.
"Why did you get all that stuff about the Key?"
Andrew sighed. "Why don't you come in
and talk to me instead of us having this conversation in the middle of the
hallway, all right?"
Dawn thought about it for a moment before
she nodded, coming in as Andrew stepped back to clear the way. "Is Cynthia
here?" Dawn asked as she looked around.
"No. She's had meetings all day,"
Andrew replied. He had his hands shoved in pockets, and Dawn almost smiled at
how familiar that stance was to her. Much more so than how he'd been the last
couple of times she'd seen him.
"Is she a Watcher?" Dawn asked.
"Yeah. She was on the team that I went
in with."
"Oh. Love out of adversity?" Dawn
asked, trying her best not to sound bitter.
"Something like that." Andrew
paused for a moment, then asked, "So did you come here to grill me about
my love life?"
"No," Dawn replied. "I�I want
to know why you did it, why you got all that information on the Key."
Andrew gave a small shrug. "I thought
you deserved to know."
"But there's so much there. It's not
like you just happened upon some information about the Key, Andrew. And Giles
said you sought it out on purpose. Is that why you left? To find out about the
Key?"
"Part of the reason," Andrew
admitted. "I knew it could give me a chance to find the answers you
wanted, and yeah, that was a big part of why I went."
"But not the only
reason."
"No."
"Then tell me the other reason."
Dawn felt tears threatened to come to her eyes, but forced them back, refusing
to cry in front of him. "Why did you leave me?"
"I didn't leave you, Dawn," Andrew
said, his tone suddenly almost bitter. "It was already over between
us."
"No it wasn't!' Dawn yelled, surprising
Andrew a little. "We were just beginning!"
"Beginning what? How long do you
honestly think we would've lasted? We were a mismatch from the start,"
Andrew replied. "Besides, you're the one who told me to leave!"
"I meant my bedroom, not this
dimension!" Dawn snapped. "I wasn't breaking up with you! I wasn't going
to break up with you."
"You would have. Eventually,"
Andrew said. "It was better that we went ahead and got it over with."
"Better?" Dawn yelled, her voice
rising to near-screeching levels. "How the hell was this better?
You left me, without even so much as a goodbye. Do you have any idea how
much that hurt, how heartbroken I was? Do you know how many nights I spent
crying myself to sleep, or worrying about you because you were off in some
demon dimension somewhere? I didn't even know if you were still alive,
and�" Dawn stopped and shook her head slowly. "But all of that was better
for you. Fine. Maybe you're right. Maybe we never really were in love, because
you sure aren't acting like it."
Dawn reached up to her neck and yanked off
the chain she had there, then threw it at Andrew's
feet. "I hope Cynthia gives you whatever the hell it is you're looking
for," she snapped before she stormed out of the flat and slammed the door
behind her.
Andrew stood for a moment, staring at the
door, before he finally bent down and picked up what Dawn had tossed at him.
His heart skipped a beat and he sucked in a deep breath when he realized what
it was.
The tiny silver key he'd given her their
first night together�
Had Dawn honestly worn this for three years?
And if she had, what did that mean? Had she been carrying a torch for him all
this time?
Andrew shook his head. No� It
couldn't be that. Dawn wouldn't spend all that time thinking about someone like
him. Surely she had moved on, realized how much better she deserved. That had
been what he had counted on. He would leave, put plenty of distance between
them, and Dawn would see how much better she was without him. They'd both go on
with their separate lives.
But what if Dawn hadn't? What if, for whatever
reason, she'd actually been waiting for him for all these years?
Andrew wouldn't accept that. He couldn't.
The thought that he'd walked away from something with Dawn that could've
actually been long-lasting was too much to bear. Surely that wasn't the case.
Surely Dawn had wised up and realized that he wasn't worth her time.
He stared down at the small piece of silver
in his hand.

***
*** ***
"You were coming from seeing him,
weren't you?"
Dawn stopped short at the sound of someone
speaking behind her and turned around slowly. She suppressed a groan when she
saw who it was. "I just needed to ask him about something, Cynthia,"
Dawn said, her tone sharp.
"You aren't fooling me," Cynthia
snapped. "But it doesn't matter anyway. I always get what I want."
She narrowed her eyes at Dawn.
Something about Cynthia made goose bumps
rise on Dawn's arms. She definitely didn't like the other woman, though she
supposed that could be because she was Andrew's fianc�e. Jealousy was
definitely a factor, even if Dawn wished she could claim otherwise. "I'm
not trying to take him from you," Dawn said.
Cynthia narrowed her eyes, and Dawn felt a
shudder run up her spine. "See that you don't," she said before
turning around and walking away from Dawn.
Dawn wrapped her arms around herself, trying
to push off the sudden chill she felt.

***
*** ***
Dawn had tried her best to act normal after
she'd gotten back to her flat, smiling and eating dinner with Emma as if
nothing was wrong. Emma knew something was wrong of course�Emma could
read Dawn as well as Dawn could read her�but she'd been nice enough to let it
slide, knowing Dawn wanted some time to just not talk about Andrew and
the problems his reappearance seemed to be causing in her life.
But then, once Emma was gone, it all became
too much to ignore. Dawn brought the information she had on the Key into her
bedroom and went through it all slowly as she sat on her bed. Just looking at
it all brought her mixed feelings regarding Andrew. On the one hand, she was
deeply touched that he would risk so much to help her discover who�and what�she
really was. On the other, she was still angry at him for leaving her, angry at
him for being able to look at her and tell her that him walking away from her
was somehow "better."
She tried instead to focus on the texts
themselves, and not where they came from. These were the answers she'd been
searching for for years, and she knew she should just be happy to have them.
She finally knew where she came from�
But it was so hard to distance herself from the source when every one of the notes she was
reading was written in his handwriting�
He'd starred or underlined certain passages
in his notes, and they were all the things that she'd been the most interested
in, or things she'd specifically talk about with him in the past. Dawn knew
he'd made all of these notes for her, had done all the work needed in order to
hand her the answers to her questions. He'd left her, asked another woman to
marry him, and yet he'd spent three years risking his life to give her this.
It was overwhelming, both the knowledge she
had now and what he had done to get that to her. She didn't know how to handle
it all, didn't know how to even begin to deal.
She knew things now that she didn't know
before. She knew that the Key had not been forged for use specifically by good
or evil, but that it depended only on the intentions of the user. She knew that
before her, there had never been an attempt to make the Key flesh. She knew
that the Key itself had been the focus of cults throughout millennia, as it had
been held up as both something to revere and something to fear.
And yet, she had no idea how to handle the
reappearance of her ex-boyfriend in her life. Didn't that just figure�
Dawn grazed her fingers above a parchment that
had served as part of a holy text of a group that had worshipped the Key
thousands of years before any of her memories began. At first, the words on the
page meant nothing to her, appearing to her eyes as only a jumble of shapes,
but suddenly they began to shift, until she could read them all as clearly as
if they'd been written in English.
She knew she should think it was odd, but
after her life, very little still struck her as that anymore. She had a feeling
it wasn't really her that knew the words anyway. It was the Key, existing just
below the surface. It knew what was written there, and it wanted her to know as
well.
It described a ritual that the high priests
of a group of Key worshippers would perform in order to bring into themselves
the essence of the Key. Unlike Dawn's case in which the Key had been made into
an actual person, this was people pulling the Key into themselves
on a temporary basis. While possessing the essence of the Key, the priests were
said to have been endowed with a great power, and afterwards, were blessed with
a second sight.
Dawn shivered as she realized in a moment of
clarity what had really happened. None of them had been strong enough to retain
the power that the Key gave them, and it had driven them all insane.
She pushed the parchment back from her, a
sudden sense of awe washing over her as she realized exactly what she was. She
was the Key, and the Key was something so powerful that it had been worshipped
as a deity. The power inside of her was so strong, that it had driven those
before her who had tried to harness it insane.
It was never something she'd had an easy
time wrapping her head around, and now that she was seeing it all so clearly
spelled out, it wasn't any simpler. She still felt so much like just a girl
that it was hard for her to accept that in reality, she was so much more. She'd
known it on some level for years, but it had never fully sunk in. She could do
things a normal person couldn't do, and with the people she'd faced over the
years who had been desperate to harness the power of the Key, she'd known it
had to be great. But how could she fully come to terms with the fact that she
was truly this thing of extreme power?
With trembling hands, Dawn cleared off her
bed, placing the notes and texts back in the box Giles had given her. She
couldn't handle anymore than night, not about the Key and not about Andrew. She
needed to sleep, to let her mind take a break from all of this. She lay down on
her pillow, her hand automatically reaching to grasp her necklace as she did
every night, only for her to find nothing. With a frown, she remembered it was
gone, and Dawn dropped her hand and closed her eyes.

***
*** ***
- 23
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