Disclaimer: I don't own Charmed. Yes, I couldn't even accomplish that during my fanfic hiatus.

A/n: This is a companion piece to my other work, "Hold My Hand." It is entirely unnecessary to read that in order to enjoy this (which I greatly hope you do).

And Dance with Me

A companion piece to Hold My Hand

a story by Ryeloza

Part One: Andy

One

The first Halliwell he kissed was not Prue, but Piper. She was five and he was seven and his mother had been tasked with watching her and Phoebe, still a baby, because their grandmother was off somewhere with Prue and their mother wasn't home. Piper was going through some phase where she wore a pink tutu everywhere and danced and danced and danced and most of the time this annoyed Andy to no end. But that day, with Prue gone and the afternoon sun blaring through the windows, Andy felt some peculiar urge to play big brother to her little sister.

So he danced with her.

Around and around in circles, Piper barking commands as if she knew everything when truly she knew nothing. Andy followed her lead, laughing when she told him to bow before taking her hand.

When they finally stopped the sun was sinking lower in the sky and Piper was mad with giggles and in some compulsion, Andy simply bent and kissed her cheek. Piper had beamed up at him.

Twenty minutes later the world fell apart because his best friend's mother was dead.

A few years down the road, Piper told him, "You were my last real smile," and broke his heart.

Two

The homecoming dance his senior year was a complete disaster. He'd asked Jenny Hutch, who was popular and athletic and slim and blonde and so completely not Prue, and she'd spent the weeks leading up to the dance cooing to anyone who would listen that Andy Trudeau was taking her to the dance. Andy knew this would happen; Andy wanted this to happen; but Andy's intentions did not have the desired effect.

Swaying to the music in the streamer-strewn gym, Andy was only able to stare across the room where Prue sat manning a punch table. She was decked in head-to-toe black with too much make-up on. She was filing her nails and shaking her foot impatiently and everything about her screamed that she was only there as some inane form of torture brought on by commitments she had made before she became this Prue. Andy wanted to despise this Prue because she was rude and selfish and ignored the entire world around her, but he couldn't because he was too in love with Prue to loathe any part of her. So he was stuck with a girl he had only asked out to make Prue jealous while Prue remained blatantly unaware that Andy was anything other than a nonsexual being.

He wanted to ditch Jenny, overturn the table where she sat, yell at her until she saw sense and then kiss her until she melted.

But he just kept dancing instead.

Three

Andy met Susan Leary his first year of college. She was a ray of sunshine in a world that Andy did not feel entirely comfortable navigating. High school had been bliss in a way; he'd been a popular jock and had a lot of friends and, in the end, had the perfect girlfriend. But these things faded away as the summer did as he didn't make his college basketball team, his friends began to disperse to various schools, and Prue looked at him with weepy blue eyes and told him that she couldn't be tied to home in that way (as if her family wasn't enough of a tie to keep her strapped to home for an eternity).

But things got better as they are want to do. Susan burst into his life one late night with a knock on the door and a gaggle of giggling girls behind her. "Do me a favor and kiss me, okay?" she said, and the next thing Andy knew he was lip-locked with a girl he didn't know and a Polaroid camera flashed brightly. When she pulled back she smiled, thanked him, and left him in a daze.

It was a perfect kiss.

The next day she found him in the cafeteria with his roommates and sat down next to him, promptly explaining that it was some sorority hazing and that she hoped she hadn't offended him. Then she stole some of his French fries.

And so he loved her.

Four

They were married on a Saturday evening at his church and the reception was an informal affair at her parents' house. They couldn't afford much else with him fresh out of the police academy and Susan still paying back thousands in student loans. But they were happy.

Then they weren't happy.

Andy thought it was a hundred little things. Money didn't stop being an issue and they both worried constantly. Although she tried to support him, Susan had never quite understood Andy's drive to be a police officer when there was so much danger involved. His parents and hers constantly dropped not-so-subtle hints about grandchildren that neither of them were ready for. Soon they laughed less and less and argued more and more.

The word divorce tripped off his tongue before hers, but Susan had not seemed shocked by its sudden appearance in his vocabulary.

"It's for the best," she said at one point. "We just weren't meant to be married."

"Why?" Andy asked before he could stop himself. "We were so happy once."

Susan shrugged slowly, as though lifting an unbearable weight on her shoulders. "Because," she finally said softly, "you never dance with me anymore."

And it was everything and nothing as an explanation.

Five

Andy wanted to love again, but he didn't give his heart easily as it was rarely handled with care. And after the divorce trying for a relationship seemed impossible, so he buried himself in his work. There were set-ups, of course, and he was asked out enough that he never lost confidence, but no one was ever right.

Prue stumbled back into his life so innocently that Andy took it to be divine intervention. When he saw her for the first time in a decade, something inside of him warmed for the first time in as long. And it wasn't just that he loved her, because he had loved her in some way for his entire life; it was more.

"No one knows me like you do," Prue whispered to him one night in bed.

And that was the heart of the truth.

They were never quite right romantically and Andy broke her heart with as much aplomb as she'd broken his ten years before. But this time, he couldn't let her slip away into a world he wasn't part of. He was selfish and he needed her and truthfully she needed him too. They were soul mates, in some unconventional sense of the words.

In the end they always found one another.