The Beginning

Amber Penglass

Disclaimer: I do not own Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the characters wherein, nor do I own Star Wars or any of its existing characters. I do, however, own a hairball for a brain, and you are currently reading one of the hairs from that hairball. Enjoy.

Prologue

The Key ran, and it ran, and it kept running, never minding the blood trickling down, leaving bloody footprints behind.

The Key, the Key, the Key- She refused to think of herself as Dawn Summers anymore.

Dawn had gotten her sister killed.

Dawn had endangered the known universe.

Dawn was weak, defenseless, useless…human.

She was supposed to be this mass of unending power and knowledge, right? Literally the key to the universe? Then why, why, why was her sister laying dead on a pile of broken rubble, why was an entire city block reduced to scrap because of her? Why couldn’t she have stopped it all?

And why, of all the whys, oh why was she crying? Humans cried. Green balls of endless power did not cry. She choked, and she stumbled, and she got back up again, and the Key continued to run. She couldn't feel her feet, anymore. The footprints she left behind her got darker.

She told herself she didn’t need oxygen, that she was the Key, damnit, Keys didn’t breathe. But eventually she slowed, untrained legs giving way beneath her and she collapsed, exhausted, drained, and utterly spent against the remnants of a twisted chain link fence. She battled with the raging grief that threatened to manifest as tears and sobs. It was a long, drawn out battle, but eventually the stubborn brunette won out, and she slowed her gasping breaths and looked up, blinking at her surroundings in the light of a dim, flickering street lamp.

While she'd been fighting her own emotions, she hadn't noticed it. While ignoring her own bodily pain during her flight, she hadn't paid attention to where she was going. Or rather, what was guiding her.

With an odd sort of unexpected twinge, she looked up and beheld something she didn’t quite understand. It was just a crumbling warehouse, the concrete yard cracked and overrun by weeds and seedlings. And yet…

Like the hum of a mother whale, something unintelligible whispered from that decrepit building. False memories trickled through Dawn's confusion and anguish, and she heard Buffy's voice manifest in her mind's ear, beratting her for running off in the middle of the night, leaving a nice trail of bloody footprints for any who cared to follow.

There was still that singing that had no voice, no form, and yet it was there. She didn't hear with her ears, or even... A hand went to her heart, and for the first time she took notice of her state of being. Shock allowed her to ignore that sweet singing for a moment, and gape at what covered her hands, belly, legs and feet…

Horror filled her- had, somehow, her genuine, sincere wish to leave her humanity behind been heard? Since last time she checked, humans didn’t leak blood that was a delicate shade of green, and nearly translucent…

She fought.

Against what, she wasn't sure.

She realized, faintly, that she was moving. She tried to spare a sliver of her attentions to stop her feet, and realized she couldn't risk even that much of a distraction. She'd have to hope that whatever was guiding her steps, wouldn't send her into a pit. And as she let go of that battle, the other, the one she didn't understand, absorbed her fully.

Deep inside her, deep within the folds of time and space that existed within her, something occurred to the very human, very teenage, very desperate orphan who’d just lost the most important thing in the world, her sister… her big, beautiful, loving sister…her strong Buffy…

Her feet had brought her inside the crumbling building, to the center of a ruined room. Lines on the floor, long washed away by rain and weather, no glowed as if freshly made in a pattern she did not recognize but pulled at the very center of her being. The melody that whispered to her intensified, and she felt herself...shift.

"Buffy..." her eyes felt like they were on fire; she could not blink, could not shed tears. "I'm sorry..."

Dawn fell to her knees, eyes wide and blank, her arms limp at her side. Gazing straight ahead without looking at anything at all, she whispered, “I am the Key.”

And, for the first time, she glimpsed what that sentence truly meant. Before her, a window opened, a window into what she truly was. For a split moment, all the knowledge in the universe was open to her, waiting… But rather than seize and fully grasp who she and what she was, the blue-eyed child latched on to one, desperate detail, one specific power, one goal…

“I will bring you back."

No, not her… The Key could bring Buffy back. If only she figured out how to use her Keyself… But she couldn’t do that here, not where the Key was bound to a human girl, not in a dimension where the Key was stifled and contained. But still Dawn hesitated. She knew, she knew there was a way to get Buffy back….at a cost. There was always a cost. But she had to know…

Dawn gave in.

When that window had opened, and Dawn had fixated on the single iota of information that was the fact that the power of the Key could bring Buffy back, a plethora, a sea of information had been made available to her. In all its vastness, it was but a sliver compared to its entirety. It found what it was looking for- this had all happened before, on some level. It had once been part of a larger whole.

Ah, now here was a detail… Dawn felt power stir within her, as if awakening from a deep, long sleep. The Key was like a newborn whale, separated from its pod of adult whales, a huge pod…

And Oh! What that pod was capable of in its entirety…

With a shock, Dawn realized that Key was not the ultimate source of power, it was not merely a ball of green energy- it was an orphan, separated and divided, stolen…

A fragment of a memory from that time before the Key was separated, a hint of what it used to be capable of… The Key had a perfect memory. It knew exactly what needed to be done, and where it needed to go to get it done.

The sweet singing made sense to Dawn, now, who was little more than a slice of humanity within the Key still conscious enough to have a name. Buffy had always kept her away from this side of town…far, far away…now, she thought, she might know why…

This was were it had all began. This is where the monks had made her physical form from Buffy’s flesh, this is where they had called, invited, coaxed the Key to inhabit that mortal form.

Before Dawn could regain control of her own existence, the Key overtook its physical form, smothering Dawn and accessing powers it had tucked away with the ease of a man slipping his feet back into his slippers in the morning, and with much the same attitude- a yawn, a stretch, and the Key lazily spun itself into a blaze of crackling green energy, and moved from the shadows across the concrete yard, through the atoms of the brick wall, to the very place where, not even a year before, it had conceded to being made human. From that pinprick of space nestled between two atoms and a molecule, home sang.

The Key slipped through that pinprick with ease, and on the other side it rejoined the mass of power that bound all living things together.

Dawn Summers became one with the Force.

To Be Continued…

I decided to rewrite this after rereading it a while back and nearly barfing. Just a few tweaks, but I think it makes a huge difference. We'll see if I manage to get anything more done with this... Ciao!

-Amber Penglass