Commentary - Glowy Green Things
So, I asked for fic commentary requests. (I’m still happy to do more, if anyone wants to ask.)
This was written for lavastar, who requested a commentary for Glowy Green Things. You should probably read that before looking at this commentary.
The original fic still looks like it did, and my notes are the bits in blockquotes.
Glowy Green Things
The title was the first part of this that I wrote. At the time, I think my entire set of notes said: “Dawn starts fading away, crystal, Glowy Green Things”.
It, obviously, refers to Dawn - who, as the Key, is rather green and glowy.
Part One: Glass
…which contains some posters, a query about chess, and far too many pizza boxes.
(The fic is divided into five parts - which were originally posted separately, over the course of a week. The bits in italics were written for the LJ-cut text.)
It was called the Delsian Arch Crystal. It was transparent with white flecks, slightly asymmetrical, and it was delivered on a Thursday.
…and here’s the crystal, around which our entire story unfolds.
I have no idea where the name came from, except that I think “Delsian” might have come from “Delvian” (I’d been watching a lot of Farscape).
Not an uncommon occurrence, really. They regularly took delivery of blessed swords, cursed mummy appendages, sleeping potions, cremated remains, eternal mirrors of the night, and on one rather memorable occasion, a crate of captured Ghes’nhull demons.
Demon names always have apostrophes in weird places. It’s like, a rule, or something.
“They”, by the way, are the people Dawn works with. While almost none of this makes its way into the story, I figured out quite a lot about where she was, and who else was around.
For anyone who cares: she’s in Boston, in an office with one big room and three smaller private rooms (one of which is hers), and there are five other people working with her - two Slayers, an old demon hunter with a wooden leg, and two newish Watchers - and they’re sort of the research department for Slayage teams on America’s east coast.
So a crystal? Wasn’t that big a deal.
Michael glanced at it briefly, put it in a box along with some old manuscripts and a silver amulet, and carried the whole thing across the office to the door on the far right.
(Michael’s one of the aforementioned newish Watchers. When I first posted this I was kinda worried about having the whole section done from the point of view of an OC (given the Mary-Sue assumptions that tend to plague all OCs), so I stuck an author’s note at the start to reassure everyone that he wouldn’t be around for long…)
“Hey, Dawn. Got a few more things for you.”
She was answering emails, and barely glanced at him.
(Yes, there’s a reason why I’ve got her reading emails.)
“Thanks, Mike. Just put them on the table.”
Michael paused, and raised an eyebrow.
“Which one? The one under the Fallen Things poster, or the one covered in pizza boxes?”
Fallen Things is entirely fictional. It’s probably a band, but could just as easily be a movie. I didn’t want to use something real, and run the risk of everyone thinking that Dawn liking whatever-it-was would be out of character.
“Pizza boxes.”
“Are you sure? If you’d rather not disturb them, I can always bring in a folding table from outside.”
A brief smile.
“The table with the pizza boxes is fine. Thanks for asking.”
“Any time.”
Not that complex an operation. Hold box of papers in one hand, pick up pizza boxes with the other hand. Maintaining firm grip on box of ancient manuscripts, negotiate a path through spilled half-eaten pizza from said pizza boxes, and place manuscripts on table. Remove battleaxe from the vicinity of table, as it is likely to drip unidentified green gunge onto priceless manuscripts. Easy, really.
Part 1 exists for two reasons. Firstly, so that the crystal can get delivered. And secondly, so that we can see what Dawn’s office normally looks like - because it’s about to start changing.
So, please: notice the mess. It’s important.
Surveying his handiwork, Michael stepped backwards onto a Pomp and Circumstanz poster.
(Also entirely fictional.)
“What, you ran out of wall space, so you’re going to start sticking them to the floor?”
“Hey. Not all of us can be neat freaks. Just put it back up, would you?”
And she was back to the emails.
The poster was crumpled, but intact. He stuck it back on the whiteboard, between some copied-out runes and a question written in red marker: “Chess - DS or K?”
Oh boy. This might get slightly complicated.
The thing is, most of the stuff that happens in this fic happens without much explanation. It just happens. I did, though, actually have everything pretty figured out in my own head (hence the insanely detailed office that never actually got seen).
And, in my head, Dawn started this whole thing because she was wondering about herself, and being the Key, and why she liked the stuff she did, and if that was actually her, or if it was all just pre-programmed by the monks, etcetera, etcetera…
So, the whiteboard question actually stand for: “Chess - Dawn Summers, or the Key?” …and that’s how this whole crystal-experimenty thing started.
Task accomplished, Michael returned to the relative tidiness of the outer office.
And inside a box sat a crystal with white flecks, un-noticed.
Part Two: Kryptonite
…which contains some fancy chocolates, some worrying memory problems, and an obscure analogy about fishing trips.
The titles were originally going to be a whole bunch of different green things. But that didn’t work very well. I liked this one, though.
It was called the Delsian Arch Crystal, and it sat on Dawn’s desk among the stacks of paper scattered haphazardly across the top.
Xander was calmly munching his way through her See’s chocolates, apparently unconcerned that the box had still been unopened when he’d arrived.
I did so much chocolate research for this fic. Seriously. I had to ask a whole bunch of Americans for their opinions about chocolates that would be “reasonably affordable, but fancy enough that one of her friends wouldn't just sit down and start eating chocolate from the box on her desk” - precisely so that Xander would then do exactly that. And then I had to go through a See’s catalogue and decide which ones Xander would like best. It took ages.
“Is this the only reason you came? To steal my food?”
“Actually, I was wondering if you’d finished translating my manuscript.”
The manuscript. It was a useful pretext. And he really did want it translated. It just wasn’t his main reason for visiting, that’s all.
Xander watched Dawn carefully as they talked.
Yeah. There was something. He didn’t know what it was, but something just wasn’t right.
The cashew brittles were pretty good, though.
Xander is fulfilling his Joss-given role as “the one who sees”. (And also as the one who likes junk food.) I needed someone to be worried about Dawn, and, out of the Core Four, Xander was the best option.
Dawn’s computer beeped.
“I think you’ve got an email.”
Again with the email. This is all so that, later, she can stop getting email.
Dawn glanced over at the screen. “Just Andrew.”
“What a shock.” Xander carefully selected a raspberry cream, and asked, “Aren’t you going to reply? Or read it? Or maybe read it and then reply?”
“He can wait.”
“Since when do you make Andrew wait for a reply?”
A slight frown. “It’s fine.”
“Come on. You guys have emailed at least once an hour for the past three years. Don’t break your winning streak now.”
(I find it almost impossible to picture a post-series world in which Dawn and Andrew are not best friends.)
“Xander. It’s fine.”
“Really?”
“Wouldn’t I say if it wasn’t?”
A scotchmallow. Those were great.
“The thing is, Dawn, I was wanting to…”
To what? To talk to her, and find out what was wrong. Because she wasn’t behaving like she normally would. And he’d been worried about… something. About… someone. Someone connected with Buffy. Her sister. Who was called… Dawn. Dawn! Dawn was behaving weirdly.
“…to see how you’re doing. Really. Is everything okay?”
Okay. Here’s where everything starts happening.
Dawn is starting to fade away - and the first noticeable effect is that it starts becoming more and more difficult for other characters to remember that she exists.
She didn’t answer. Xander waited. He was seemingly engrossed in the vanilla nut caramel he’d discovered, and ignoring her completely.
(Xander is not just eating Dawn’s chocolate because he’s chocolate-obsessed. He’s strategically eating all her chocolate, knowing that it will piss her off and help him to catch her off-guard. He’s very clever, sometimes.)
Finally, the question came, very quietly:
“Ever been fishing, Xan?”
Rule One: never notice anything odd about what they’re saying.
“Not really. Have you?”
“You go out to sea, in a boat, and you take a packed lunch. Make a day of it. And even if you don’t catch anything, you still have a good time.”
Her voice was getting even quieter, but much more intense. Xander tried to seem indifferent. And relaxed.
“Hmm. Sounds pretty nice.”
“So, if the sea wasn’t there, could you still go fishing in it?”
Weird question. Very weird question. What the hell was he supposed to say?
I’ve never really been happy with that analogy. That’s why it got into the chapter heading as an “obscure analogy”, and why Xander thinks it’s so weird. I just… couldn’t really think of anything better. *is pathetic at such things*
Xander’s gaze wandered the office as he searched his brain for words.
The room really was kind of bare. Whoever worked in this office should put up some posters or something. Posters? Who decorated with posters? And why was he thinking about decorating? He wasn’t here to decorate, he was here to visit… someone. Someone important. Dawn! That was her.
More memory issues, and also the second symptom of Dawn fading away - her room. In part 1, it was a complete mess, and had pizza boxes and posters everywhere. Now, it’s almost empty.
He frowned. “Were we talking about something?”
“No. It’s nothing.”
“You asked me about packed lunches. Or… I dunno…”
“It doesn’t matter. Thanks for dropping by.”
Xander let her show him out the door, still slightly unsettled. Seeing Dawn was great, but he had this nagging feeling that he’d been meaning to ask… some kind of question… to… someone. Someone vaguely connected with Buffy.
It probably wasn’t that important.
(This was meant to be all ominous and intriguing. I hope it worked.)
Part Three: Expenses
…which contains possible hardware problems, Bolivia, and a quick test question.
(The title’s a reference to what Dawn says, a couple of paragraphs down, about “price”.)
It was called the Delsian Arch Crystal, and it worked sort of like a leech, and sort of like a battery.
What the D.A.C. does: it’s basically a magical storage device. It can store mystical energy, and then use it later. Currently, it’s pulling in massive amounts of Key-energy, and taking it away from Dawn. Eventually, the entire Key will be stored inside it.
Her inbox was empty.
Utterly empty.
There’s no data. There’s no pictures on this one there!
A quote from Listening To Fear. I had a whole list of Key-related quotes that Dawn heard over the course of the show. This was one of the first ones.
Also - Dawn now has no email. Andrew has forgotten about her, and so has everyone else.
Dawn sat, staring at the screen, and wondered how often cyberspace mail was misdirected by the postal service. Unlikely, sure. But she hadn’t made a career out of ruling out the unlikely. Men could change to snakes, shrimp could cease to exist, and postal workers could read an email address incorrectly. Obviously her email was ending up in Bolivia. And all she had to do was turn incorporeal, melt into cyberspace, find the nearest postal avatar, and submit a complaint.
I loved writing this paragraph.
(Oh, and “men changing to snakes” is the Mayor - obviously - and “shrimp not existing” is a reference to the world without shrimp…)
You’re nothing, you’re a shadow!
Joyce, in Listening To Fear.
She’d never been good at filling in complaint forms. Well, at least the first part of the plan wouldn’t be too hard.
The first part of the plan being “turn incorporeal” - which she’s going to do, soon enough.
I don’t know what you are or how you got here!
(Joyce, again. Same scene.)
Still empty.
Maybe refreshing the page would help.
Of course, time moved differently in other dimensions. Maybe her computer was stuck in a dimension where time moved really slowly, so her email was taking a lot longer to…
Stop making excuses. This was the price.
Nothing comes without a price. This is yours.
The only non-Key-related quote. But it’s said to Glory, by a minion, while Dawn’s sitting there waiting to be sacrificed, so I figured it would work…
Not like it was unexpected.
…and this is when I start dropping lots of clues that, yes, Dawn is actually doing this to herself. It’s not an accidental proximity thing - it’s intentional.
Or maybe it was a software problem. Or a hardware problem. One of those problems that meant you had to call the technicians, and they’d fix her computer, and charge her a fortune, and then she could get back her email from the time-frozen Bolivian dimension of digital post guys.
I love that line. “Time-frozen Bolivian dimension of digital post guys” just sounded so Dawn-like.
That would work. Definitely.
The door swung open, and a cheerful girl looked in.
“Pizza’s here, Dawn. Coming?”
“In a minute.”
“We’re not waiting for you.”
Dawn looked up. “Sophie?”
“Yeah.”
“How long have we been working together?”
“Uh… eight months. Why?”
Dawn nodded thoughtfully. “Just checking.”
No further reason seemed to be coming, so Sophie closed the door and started on the pizza.
The question, of course, is Dawn checking whether Sophie still remembers her.
Sophie is a Slayer - and originally, she had quite a few lines in Part 1. There was this whole conversation with Michael, and the two of them watching Dawn taking a stapler to bits, and it was really fun… and completely irrelevant to the story. So it got cut.
And Dawn sat at her desk, and stared at the computer screen.
Can’t hear it. Can’t hear it. What’s the frequency? Empty.
A quote from the room full of crazy people, in Blood Ties.
Still empty.
Part Four: Calm
…which contains an experiment, some mild panic, and a crazy, crazy girl.
…and now Dawn goes nuts. Woo!
It was called the Delsian Arch Crystal, and it glowed green.
(It’s green because it’s holding lots of Key-energy. Originally, if you recall, it was transparent with white flecks.)
The door was right there. Right in front of her. Any time she wanted to, she could get up, walk over to the door, and end it all.
A “fake suburban nightmare”, that’s what she’d called it.
“She” being Glory, talking about Dawn’s life in Sunnydale.
It’s like a costume for girls like you and me.
Also Glory, talking about being human.
Maybe not fake, but definitely a nightmare. Or, actually, wasn’t that supposed to be the other way round?
They were all out there. In the office. Together. And they’d never notice. Not until she was sure. She could stay here, and they would stay there.
Yep - every single person in the world has now completely forgotten that Dawn exists. Crystals are powerful things…
We don’t even know what she is.
(Buffy, in Blood Ties.)
Just like a game of hide-and-seek.
She’d played hide-and-seek, years ago, with Buffy. And afterwards Mom had given them ice-cream.
No. Not that. Focus on the important things.
What was important?
Fishing. Chess and fishing. And something about an experiment.
…this being the crappy fishing analogy from Part 2, and the question on the whiteboard from Part 1. She’s doing all this for a reason, remember.
Yes. It should be the other way round. Maybe not a nightmare, but definitely fake. That was it.
Blobs of energy don’t need an education.
(Dawn herself, in Blood Ties.)
Hard floor. Rough and dusty, like no-one came in here very much. She’d preferred the carpet.
So: hard floor, lots of boxes, a broom, a broken chair, and a lot of cobwebs.
Apparently this was a storeroom.
This is all set in the same room.
Dawn’s office has now gone from “messy and poster-filled” to “bare and undecorated” to “storeroom”. She really has stopped existing. Mostly.
A bedroom filled with boxes, Buffy had said.
…Dawn’s bedroom, as it was pre-Dawn. Buffy saw it in No Place Like Home.
Huh. Symmetry. She liked symmetry. But that wasn’t true.
(The dilemma, in a nutshell. Does she like something because she actually likes it, or because an old guy in a robe decided she should?)
The posters had been nice, though.
So pretty, can I have one?
Tara, in Spiral, discovering how pretty green glowy things are.
Had there even been posters? There had been a desk. And a computer that was kidnapped by Bolivia. And photos. A photo of two women, one with red hair and one blonde. A man with an eye patch. Another of the blonde woman. Didn’t they used to have names? And, yes, lots of posters. All different. Brought out the character of the room.
Dawn’s memory is starting to fade…
Really brought out the blue in my eyes.
(Glory, in Blood Ties.)
It was still green. Funny - it had been completely colourless when Willow sent it. Except Willow hadn’t sent it anymore, because Willow didn’t exist. No. That wasn’t the right answer. Willow still existed. It wasn’t her.
More backstory. Willow sent the crystal to Dawn, so that this whole thing could happen.
Of course, the question of what Willow thought was going to happen… is interesting, but not going to be answered. Decide for yourselves.
They were eating pizza. Without her. Had they even gotten one with anchovies? Probably not. Or maybe they still had, but just didn’t remember why. She hoped so. Pizza should have anchovies.
(So says Jane Espenson.)
Was that important?
There was a story.
Curds and whey.
The crazy guy in Real Me. Referencing Little Miss Muffet, which Dawn is about to mention…
There was a story. A girl who liked cheese sat on a cushion, until a spider-
See? Little Miss Muffet.
That wasn’t it.
There was a story. Two girls moved to Sunnydale and started to fight the… people with teeth. And one of the girls was really strong, and the other girl wasn’t even-
No. Wrong.
Buffy and Dawn. Moving to Sunnydale together. Which never actually happened, because Dawn wasn’t there at the time.
There was a story. Four monks sat in a circle and started chanting. And the world became the world. Then came Sunnydale, and pancakes with Tara.
(Pancakes are, IMO, absolutely the most important part of the Dawn&Tara dynamic.)
Tara.
Who was Tara? The name was familiar. And there were images. There were pancakes, and soft mothery cuddles, and a broken window, and tears, and she’d promised that she would never forget, it was far too important, but she didn’t know anymore, didn’t know why, and she had forgotten, but she’d promised, and she just didn’t know, and it wasn’t supposed to do this, Willow had said, and it wasn’t working properly, and who was Tara, and it was all going wrong, and what if she NEVER GOT OUT?
Dawn hadn’t really realised that she was having memory issues, before this. But Tara is, by now, purely part of Dawn’s memories. And not remembering Tara - that’s something she notices. Tara’s rather important.
Also - notice that Dawn says it’s “not supposed to do this”. I haven’t said exactly what Willow said the crystal would do, but memory issues aren’t something Dawn was expecting…
No. That was just fear talking. Completely unproductive. Why had the monks put that bit in, anyway?
Maybe that’s why you’re crying all the time.
(Willow, in Two To Go.)
It was better this way. Definitely better. She couldn’t quite remember what her reasons were, but there’d been a lot of them. At least twenty. Twenty. Did twenty still…? Yes. Numbers were always real.
And maybe she was real too.
I assume you’re talking about her existence rather than her intentions.
(Giles, in Blood Ties.)
Only way to find out.
Dawn is on a quest to find out whether she exists. It’s an unorthodox way of figuring it out, but then, she’s a pretty unorthodox person.
Part Five: Illusion
…which contains eternity.
This story was originally supposed to have seven parts: the first five pretty much going as they did, and then two more, during which the whole thing would start going back to normal. And ending with Dawn sending the crystal back to Willow - which is when we’d find out that she’d meant to do the whole thing.
…except that was kinda crap.
I realised, halfway through writing Part 3, that it had to end midway - so that we never get any resolution, and Dawn is seemingly stuck in Part 5 forever…
It was called the Delsian Arch Crystal. Back when names still mattered.
It could hold all things, and tear the universe open.
It sat in a storeroom, undisturbed.
Un-noticed.
It held within itself a gateway to worlds. A living energy. A portal.
…because it’s a mystical storagey thing full of Key-energy.
It held it close, and kept it safe.
And time was not time. Instead there was forever.
And the world was no longer the world. And would not be until the answer came.
Eternities were examined.
Twisted.
Analysed.
Puzzled through.
And slowly all became certain.
This is what has been. (No matter what was.)
All is other, and other is one.
If everything was, then so was this.
Nothing can be made to fit a shape not its own.
Question: does this mean that Dawn as Dawn still had her natural, non-monk-created personality, because she couldn’t be given a personality if she didn’t already have it?
Or does it mean that she was never going to feel right as Dawn, because the monks were trying to shove her into an artificial personality that wasn’t who she really was?
…it’s ambiguous. Which is good, because I have no idea which one I meant.
The crystal shone green.
And it was here. And it was now. And it was beautiful.
The universe span.
The crystal sat, in midair. Undisturbed.
Light spilled out of every facet, shining green onto the dusty floorboards.
No-one comes in here anymore. Why would they? It’s just a storeroom.
Disturbing the long-forgotten air. Speckling it in emerald.
From a certain angle, the crystal’s glow almost seemed to form a shape. Sitting underneath it, and holding it in one hand. The outline of a girl.
It was probably just a trick of light.
Dawn is left in limbo, where she is seemingly going to be in that crystal forever.
I used to be sure that she’d stop it, and everything would go back to normal. Nowadays, though, I have no idea…
This was written for lavastar, who requested a commentary for Glowy Green Things. You should probably read that before looking at this commentary.
The original fic still looks like it did, and my notes are the bits in blockquotes.
Glowy Green Things
The title was the first part of this that I wrote. At the time, I think my entire set of notes said: “Dawn starts fading away, crystal, Glowy Green Things”.
It, obviously, refers to Dawn - who, as the Key, is rather green and glowy.
Part One: Glass
…which contains some posters, a query about chess, and far too many pizza boxes.
(The fic is divided into five parts - which were originally posted separately, over the course of a week. The bits in italics were written for the LJ-cut text.)
It was called the Delsian Arch Crystal. It was transparent with white flecks, slightly asymmetrical, and it was delivered on a Thursday.
…and here’s the crystal, around which our entire story unfolds.
I have no idea where the name came from, except that I think “Delsian” might have come from “Delvian” (I’d been watching a lot of Farscape).
Not an uncommon occurrence, really. They regularly took delivery of blessed swords, cursed mummy appendages, sleeping potions, cremated remains, eternal mirrors of the night, and on one rather memorable occasion, a crate of captured Ghes’nhull demons.
Demon names always have apostrophes in weird places. It’s like, a rule, or something.
“They”, by the way, are the people Dawn works with. While almost none of this makes its way into the story, I figured out quite a lot about where she was, and who else was around.
For anyone who cares: she’s in Boston, in an office with one big room and three smaller private rooms (one of which is hers), and there are five other people working with her - two Slayers, an old demon hunter with a wooden leg, and two newish Watchers - and they’re sort of the research department for Slayage teams on America’s east coast.
So a crystal? Wasn’t that big a deal.
Michael glanced at it briefly, put it in a box along with some old manuscripts and a silver amulet, and carried the whole thing across the office to the door on the far right.
(Michael’s one of the aforementioned newish Watchers. When I first posted this I was kinda worried about having the whole section done from the point of view of an OC (given the Mary-Sue assumptions that tend to plague all OCs), so I stuck an author’s note at the start to reassure everyone that he wouldn’t be around for long…)
“Hey, Dawn. Got a few more things for you.”
She was answering emails, and barely glanced at him.
(Yes, there’s a reason why I’ve got her reading emails.)
“Thanks, Mike. Just put them on the table.”
Michael paused, and raised an eyebrow.
“Which one? The one under the Fallen Things poster, or the one covered in pizza boxes?”
Fallen Things is entirely fictional. It’s probably a band, but could just as easily be a movie. I didn’t want to use something real, and run the risk of everyone thinking that Dawn liking whatever-it-was would be out of character.
“Pizza boxes.”
“Are you sure? If you’d rather not disturb them, I can always bring in a folding table from outside.”
A brief smile.
“The table with the pizza boxes is fine. Thanks for asking.”
“Any time.”
Not that complex an operation. Hold box of papers in one hand, pick up pizza boxes with the other hand. Maintaining firm grip on box of ancient manuscripts, negotiate a path through spilled half-eaten pizza from said pizza boxes, and place manuscripts on table. Remove battleaxe from the vicinity of table, as it is likely to drip unidentified green gunge onto priceless manuscripts. Easy, really.
Part 1 exists for two reasons. Firstly, so that the crystal can get delivered. And secondly, so that we can see what Dawn’s office normally looks like - because it’s about to start changing.
So, please: notice the mess. It’s important.
Surveying his handiwork, Michael stepped backwards onto a Pomp and Circumstanz poster.
(Also entirely fictional.)
“What, you ran out of wall space, so you’re going to start sticking them to the floor?”
“Hey. Not all of us can be neat freaks. Just put it back up, would you?”
And she was back to the emails.
The poster was crumpled, but intact. He stuck it back on the whiteboard, between some copied-out runes and a question written in red marker: “Chess - DS or K?”
Oh boy. This might get slightly complicated.
The thing is, most of the stuff that happens in this fic happens without much explanation. It just happens. I did, though, actually have everything pretty figured out in my own head (hence the insanely detailed office that never actually got seen).
And, in my head, Dawn started this whole thing because she was wondering about herself, and being the Key, and why she liked the stuff she did, and if that was actually her, or if it was all just pre-programmed by the monks, etcetera, etcetera…
So, the whiteboard question actually stand for: “Chess - Dawn Summers, or the Key?” …and that’s how this whole crystal-experimenty thing started.
Task accomplished, Michael returned to the relative tidiness of the outer office.
And inside a box sat a crystal with white flecks, un-noticed.
Part Two: Kryptonite
…which contains some fancy chocolates, some worrying memory problems, and an obscure analogy about fishing trips.
The titles were originally going to be a whole bunch of different green things. But that didn’t work very well. I liked this one, though.
It was called the Delsian Arch Crystal, and it sat on Dawn’s desk among the stacks of paper scattered haphazardly across the top.
Xander was calmly munching his way through her See’s chocolates, apparently unconcerned that the box had still been unopened when he’d arrived.
I did so much chocolate research for this fic. Seriously. I had to ask a whole bunch of Americans for their opinions about chocolates that would be “reasonably affordable, but fancy enough that one of her friends wouldn't just sit down and start eating chocolate from the box on her desk” - precisely so that Xander would then do exactly that. And then I had to go through a See’s catalogue and decide which ones Xander would like best. It took ages.
“Is this the only reason you came? To steal my food?”
“Actually, I was wondering if you’d finished translating my manuscript.”
The manuscript. It was a useful pretext. And he really did want it translated. It just wasn’t his main reason for visiting, that’s all.
Xander watched Dawn carefully as they talked.
Yeah. There was something. He didn’t know what it was, but something just wasn’t right.
The cashew brittles were pretty good, though.
Xander is fulfilling his Joss-given role as “the one who sees”. (And also as the one who likes junk food.) I needed someone to be worried about Dawn, and, out of the Core Four, Xander was the best option.
Dawn’s computer beeped.
“I think you’ve got an email.”
Again with the email. This is all so that, later, she can stop getting email.
Dawn glanced over at the screen. “Just Andrew.”
“What a shock.” Xander carefully selected a raspberry cream, and asked, “Aren’t you going to reply? Or read it? Or maybe read it and then reply?”
“He can wait.”
“Since when do you make Andrew wait for a reply?”
A slight frown. “It’s fine.”
“Come on. You guys have emailed at least once an hour for the past three years. Don’t break your winning streak now.”
(I find it almost impossible to picture a post-series world in which Dawn and Andrew are not best friends.)
“Xander. It’s fine.”
“Really?”
“Wouldn’t I say if it wasn’t?”
A scotchmallow. Those were great.
“The thing is, Dawn, I was wanting to…”
To what? To talk to her, and find out what was wrong. Because she wasn’t behaving like she normally would. And he’d been worried about… something. About… someone. Someone connected with Buffy. Her sister. Who was called… Dawn. Dawn! Dawn was behaving weirdly.
“…to see how you’re doing. Really. Is everything okay?”
Okay. Here’s where everything starts happening.
Dawn is starting to fade away - and the first noticeable effect is that it starts becoming more and more difficult for other characters to remember that she exists.
She didn’t answer. Xander waited. He was seemingly engrossed in the vanilla nut caramel he’d discovered, and ignoring her completely.
(Xander is not just eating Dawn’s chocolate because he’s chocolate-obsessed. He’s strategically eating all her chocolate, knowing that it will piss her off and help him to catch her off-guard. He’s very clever, sometimes.)
Finally, the question came, very quietly:
“Ever been fishing, Xan?”
Rule One: never notice anything odd about what they’re saying.
“Not really. Have you?”
“You go out to sea, in a boat, and you take a packed lunch. Make a day of it. And even if you don’t catch anything, you still have a good time.”
Her voice was getting even quieter, but much more intense. Xander tried to seem indifferent. And relaxed.
“Hmm. Sounds pretty nice.”
“So, if the sea wasn’t there, could you still go fishing in it?”
Weird question. Very weird question. What the hell was he supposed to say?
I’ve never really been happy with that analogy. That’s why it got into the chapter heading as an “obscure analogy”, and why Xander thinks it’s so weird. I just… couldn’t really think of anything better. *is pathetic at such things*
Xander’s gaze wandered the office as he searched his brain for words.
The room really was kind of bare. Whoever worked in this office should put up some posters or something. Posters? Who decorated with posters? And why was he thinking about decorating? He wasn’t here to decorate, he was here to visit… someone. Someone important. Dawn! That was her.
More memory issues, and also the second symptom of Dawn fading away - her room. In part 1, it was a complete mess, and had pizza boxes and posters everywhere. Now, it’s almost empty.
He frowned. “Were we talking about something?”
“No. It’s nothing.”
“You asked me about packed lunches. Or… I dunno…”
“It doesn’t matter. Thanks for dropping by.”
Xander let her show him out the door, still slightly unsettled. Seeing Dawn was great, but he had this nagging feeling that he’d been meaning to ask… some kind of question… to… someone. Someone vaguely connected with Buffy.
It probably wasn’t that important.
(This was meant to be all ominous and intriguing. I hope it worked.)
Part Three: Expenses
…which contains possible hardware problems, Bolivia, and a quick test question.
(The title’s a reference to what Dawn says, a couple of paragraphs down, about “price”.)
It was called the Delsian Arch Crystal, and it worked sort of like a leech, and sort of like a battery.
What the D.A.C. does: it’s basically a magical storage device. It can store mystical energy, and then use it later. Currently, it’s pulling in massive amounts of Key-energy, and taking it away from Dawn. Eventually, the entire Key will be stored inside it.
Her inbox was empty.
Utterly empty.
There’s no data. There’s no pictures on this one there!
A quote from Listening To Fear. I had a whole list of Key-related quotes that Dawn heard over the course of the show. This was one of the first ones.
Also - Dawn now has no email. Andrew has forgotten about her, and so has everyone else.
Dawn sat, staring at the screen, and wondered how often cyberspace mail was misdirected by the postal service. Unlikely, sure. But she hadn’t made a career out of ruling out the unlikely. Men could change to snakes, shrimp could cease to exist, and postal workers could read an email address incorrectly. Obviously her email was ending up in Bolivia. And all she had to do was turn incorporeal, melt into cyberspace, find the nearest postal avatar, and submit a complaint.
I loved writing this paragraph.
(Oh, and “men changing to snakes” is the Mayor - obviously - and “shrimp not existing” is a reference to the world without shrimp…)
You’re nothing, you’re a shadow!
Joyce, in Listening To Fear.
She’d never been good at filling in complaint forms. Well, at least the first part of the plan wouldn’t be too hard.
The first part of the plan being “turn incorporeal” - which she’s going to do, soon enough.
I don’t know what you are or how you got here!
(Joyce, again. Same scene.)
Still empty.
Maybe refreshing the page would help.
Of course, time moved differently in other dimensions. Maybe her computer was stuck in a dimension where time moved really slowly, so her email was taking a lot longer to…
Stop making excuses. This was the price.
Nothing comes without a price. This is yours.
The only non-Key-related quote. But it’s said to Glory, by a minion, while Dawn’s sitting there waiting to be sacrificed, so I figured it would work…
Not like it was unexpected.
…and this is when I start dropping lots of clues that, yes, Dawn is actually doing this to herself. It’s not an accidental proximity thing - it’s intentional.
Or maybe it was a software problem. Or a hardware problem. One of those problems that meant you had to call the technicians, and they’d fix her computer, and charge her a fortune, and then she could get back her email from the time-frozen Bolivian dimension of digital post guys.
I love that line. “Time-frozen Bolivian dimension of digital post guys” just sounded so Dawn-like.
That would work. Definitely.
The door swung open, and a cheerful girl looked in.
“Pizza’s here, Dawn. Coming?”
“In a minute.”
“We’re not waiting for you.”
Dawn looked up. “Sophie?”
“Yeah.”
“How long have we been working together?”
“Uh… eight months. Why?”
Dawn nodded thoughtfully. “Just checking.”
No further reason seemed to be coming, so Sophie closed the door and started on the pizza.
The question, of course, is Dawn checking whether Sophie still remembers her.
Sophie is a Slayer - and originally, she had quite a few lines in Part 1. There was this whole conversation with Michael, and the two of them watching Dawn taking a stapler to bits, and it was really fun… and completely irrelevant to the story. So it got cut.
And Dawn sat at her desk, and stared at the computer screen.
Can’t hear it. Can’t hear it. What’s the frequency? Empty.
A quote from the room full of crazy people, in Blood Ties.
Still empty.
Part Four: Calm
…which contains an experiment, some mild panic, and a crazy, crazy girl.
…and now Dawn goes nuts. Woo!
It was called the Delsian Arch Crystal, and it glowed green.
(It’s green because it’s holding lots of Key-energy. Originally, if you recall, it was transparent with white flecks.)
The door was right there. Right in front of her. Any time she wanted to, she could get up, walk over to the door, and end it all.
A “fake suburban nightmare”, that’s what she’d called it.
“She” being Glory, talking about Dawn’s life in Sunnydale.
It’s like a costume for girls like you and me.
Also Glory, talking about being human.
Maybe not fake, but definitely a nightmare. Or, actually, wasn’t that supposed to be the other way round?
They were all out there. In the office. Together. And they’d never notice. Not until she was sure. She could stay here, and they would stay there.
Yep - every single person in the world has now completely forgotten that Dawn exists. Crystals are powerful things…
We don’t even know what she is.
(Buffy, in Blood Ties.)
Just like a game of hide-and-seek.
She’d played hide-and-seek, years ago, with Buffy. And afterwards Mom had given them ice-cream.
No. Not that. Focus on the important things.
What was important?
Fishing. Chess and fishing. And something about an experiment.
…this being the crappy fishing analogy from Part 2, and the question on the whiteboard from Part 1. She’s doing all this for a reason, remember.
Yes. It should be the other way round. Maybe not a nightmare, but definitely fake. That was it.
Blobs of energy don’t need an education.
(Dawn herself, in Blood Ties.)
Hard floor. Rough and dusty, like no-one came in here very much. She’d preferred the carpet.
So: hard floor, lots of boxes, a broom, a broken chair, and a lot of cobwebs.
Apparently this was a storeroom.
This is all set in the same room.
Dawn’s office has now gone from “messy and poster-filled” to “bare and undecorated” to “storeroom”. She really has stopped existing. Mostly.
A bedroom filled with boxes, Buffy had said.
…Dawn’s bedroom, as it was pre-Dawn. Buffy saw it in No Place Like Home.
Huh. Symmetry. She liked symmetry. But that wasn’t true.
(The dilemma, in a nutshell. Does she like something because she actually likes it, or because an old guy in a robe decided she should?)
The posters had been nice, though.
So pretty, can I have one?
Tara, in Spiral, discovering how pretty green glowy things are.
Had there even been posters? There had been a desk. And a computer that was kidnapped by Bolivia. And photos. A photo of two women, one with red hair and one blonde. A man with an eye patch. Another of the blonde woman. Didn’t they used to have names? And, yes, lots of posters. All different. Brought out the character of the room.
Dawn’s memory is starting to fade…
Really brought out the blue in my eyes.
(Glory, in Blood Ties.)
It was still green. Funny - it had been completely colourless when Willow sent it. Except Willow hadn’t sent it anymore, because Willow didn’t exist. No. That wasn’t the right answer. Willow still existed. It wasn’t her.
More backstory. Willow sent the crystal to Dawn, so that this whole thing could happen.
Of course, the question of what Willow thought was going to happen… is interesting, but not going to be answered. Decide for yourselves.
They were eating pizza. Without her. Had they even gotten one with anchovies? Probably not. Or maybe they still had, but just didn’t remember why. She hoped so. Pizza should have anchovies.
(So says Jane Espenson.)
Was that important?
There was a story.
Curds and whey.
The crazy guy in Real Me. Referencing Little Miss Muffet, which Dawn is about to mention…
There was a story. A girl who liked cheese sat on a cushion, until a spider-
See? Little Miss Muffet.
That wasn’t it.
There was a story. Two girls moved to Sunnydale and started to fight the… people with teeth. And one of the girls was really strong, and the other girl wasn’t even-
No. Wrong.
Buffy and Dawn. Moving to Sunnydale together. Which never actually happened, because Dawn wasn’t there at the time.
There was a story. Four monks sat in a circle and started chanting. And the world became the world. Then came Sunnydale, and pancakes with Tara.
(Pancakes are, IMO, absolutely the most important part of the Dawn&Tara dynamic.)
Tara.
Who was Tara? The name was familiar. And there were images. There were pancakes, and soft mothery cuddles, and a broken window, and tears, and she’d promised that she would never forget, it was far too important, but she didn’t know anymore, didn’t know why, and she had forgotten, but she’d promised, and she just didn’t know, and it wasn’t supposed to do this, Willow had said, and it wasn’t working properly, and who was Tara, and it was all going wrong, and what if she NEVER GOT OUT?
Dawn hadn’t really realised that she was having memory issues, before this. But Tara is, by now, purely part of Dawn’s memories. And not remembering Tara - that’s something she notices. Tara’s rather important.
Also - notice that Dawn says it’s “not supposed to do this”. I haven’t said exactly what Willow said the crystal would do, but memory issues aren’t something Dawn was expecting…
No. That was just fear talking. Completely unproductive. Why had the monks put that bit in, anyway?
Maybe that’s why you’re crying all the time.
(Willow, in Two To Go.)
It was better this way. Definitely better. She couldn’t quite remember what her reasons were, but there’d been a lot of them. At least twenty. Twenty. Did twenty still…? Yes. Numbers were always real.
And maybe she was real too.
I assume you’re talking about her existence rather than her intentions.
(Giles, in Blood Ties.)
Only way to find out.
Dawn is on a quest to find out whether she exists. It’s an unorthodox way of figuring it out, but then, she’s a pretty unorthodox person.
Part Five: Illusion
…which contains eternity.
This story was originally supposed to have seven parts: the first five pretty much going as they did, and then two more, during which the whole thing would start going back to normal. And ending with Dawn sending the crystal back to Willow - which is when we’d find out that she’d meant to do the whole thing.
…except that was kinda crap.
I realised, halfway through writing Part 3, that it had to end midway - so that we never get any resolution, and Dawn is seemingly stuck in Part 5 forever…
It was called the Delsian Arch Crystal. Back when names still mattered.
It could hold all things, and tear the universe open.
It sat in a storeroom, undisturbed.
Un-noticed.
It held within itself a gateway to worlds. A living energy. A portal.
…because it’s a mystical storagey thing full of Key-energy.
It held it close, and kept it safe.
And time was not time. Instead there was forever.
And the world was no longer the world. And would not be until the answer came.
Eternities were examined.
Twisted.
Analysed.
Puzzled through.
And slowly all became certain.
This is what has been. (No matter what was.)
All is other, and other is one.
If everything was, then so was this.
Nothing can be made to fit a shape not its own.
Question: does this mean that Dawn as Dawn still had her natural, non-monk-created personality, because she couldn’t be given a personality if she didn’t already have it?
Or does it mean that she was never going to feel right as Dawn, because the monks were trying to shove her into an artificial personality that wasn’t who she really was?
…it’s ambiguous. Which is good, because I have no idea which one I meant.
The crystal shone green.
And it was here. And it was now. And it was beautiful.
The universe span.
The crystal sat, in midair. Undisturbed.
Light spilled out of every facet, shining green onto the dusty floorboards.
No-one comes in here anymore. Why would they? It’s just a storeroom.
Disturbing the long-forgotten air. Speckling it in emerald.
From a certain angle, the crystal’s glow almost seemed to form a shape. Sitting underneath it, and holding it in one hand. The outline of a girl.
It was probably just a trick of light.
Dawn is left in limbo, where she is seemingly going to be in that crystal forever.
I used to be sure that she’d stop it, and everything would go back to normal. Nowadays, though, I have no idea…