So, I've lurked for a while, posted a little, went away for a bit, lurked a little more, and now, having written a couple of W/T shorts, I'm back to post 'em. Any that I post here are likely to be very short shorts (Hee, short shorts >_<) as I have yet to master the skill of writing fanfic lasting more than five pages, but I hope you enjoy them anyway!

Triangles (Short)

• Rating: PG
• Disclaimer: Minor spoilers for seasons 4 and 5.
• Feedback: Yush please.
• Summary: Tara never quite understood math.

Tara never quite understood math. Well, that was a bit of a half-truth, sort-of-lie. She understood some parts of math just fine. The whole equations thing, with the balancing everything out? Makes perfect sense! Fractions? Ratios? All good! Some of the logic stuff was even fun.

But geometry. Oh, geometry.

Even then… squares were pretty normal. Rectangles were just slightly confused squares. Cubes were squares with ideas above their stations, but squares nonetheless. Circles, she could live with, provided she stayed away from them as much as possible and kept an unfamiliar, unwieldy calculator with her as protection (She was as uncomfortable with the calculator as she would have been with a more conventional, tangible form of defence).

Triangles. They were the problem. Triangles. Three sides, three angles, and a truly ridiculous number of rules and uses and rules and an irritating habit of appearing in even the most innocent-looking math questions and did she mention rules already? Triangles. Tara just didn’t get them.

She was the cause of her math teacher’s total despair, because she could have aced geometry if it wasn’t for those feisty shapes; as it was, she scraped a pass, studying on her own after three successive math-whiz seniors attempted to tutor her and proceeded to admit defeat.

So Tara had taken her battle home with her.

She tried everything; she really did. She recited the formulae multiple times before bed every night, and woke each morning to find that she’d forgotten them all. She assigned each rule to a day of the week and dedicated that day to the rule and memorisation of the same; she lasted three full days of this before realising that it was liable to make her hate not only Mondays, but every day of the week with a dulled-but-nevertheless-still-pretty-darn-hot passion.

At around this point, Donny had taken her aside. By this time he had already resigned himself to a life in the small town, and was in training to become a mechanic. Oh, but Donny had dreams: he wanted to become an engineer, or, as Tara put it to him during their not-too-infrequent siblings’ quarrels, a glorified mechanic. Privately, though, she was rooting for him. Anything that might get him out of the house and away from Donald Maclay Senior’s influence had to be a good idea. Besides, Tara figured that Donny would probably make a good mechanic, and a better engineer. He understood machines and physics and geometry. He understood triangles.

And Donald Maclay Junior, glorified mechanic in the making, had offered her his help. This was no doubt brought on by a fervent desire to be rid of a sister chanting formulae at seven o’clock every morning in the room next door, but Tara had been taught never to look a gift horse (or any kind of horse, really) in the mouth and accepted despite this.

Donny might have been good at understanding triangles, but he wasn’t particularly good at teaching anyone about them. He did, by some miracle, infuse Tara with some of his enthusiasm for them. He spoke to her of intricate machinery, of hooks and gears and puzzle-like pieces, of the triangles inherent in the stability of the buildings he hoped, one day, to design. And Tara listened, and nodded, and by the end of it all she still didn’t understand triangles, but she could, at least, understand why someone would want to do so.

And then her mother had talked to her, and Tara didn’t just understand why someone else might want to know about triangles; she knew that she wanted to know about them. Rules and all.

That was her mother’s last year – not her last year alive, but the last year she functioned. The last year where she lived like a person should live. Tara’s memories of that year were mercifully free from the curse of foresight, and yet, maybe because of this, all she could recall was a massed jumble of memories. Somewhere in that jumble, tangled up with medicinal herbs and life lessons, were triangles.

Not the rules, not the formulae or the math, but the magic of triangles. Her mother had spoken of carvings in the stone of ancient civilisations, triangles in art and architecture, of the triangles in ritual, chant and song. Half comprehending, half confused, but wanting to understand the elusive shape, Tara had pressed on.

And her mother had sickened and died, and Donny had shrunk away and learned to put tyres on trucks in the local car dealership, and Tara had run away and stayed busy for a while. There wasn’t much time to learn about triangles, then.

And then Willow had come along, with bright hair and a brighter smile, and, after the initial terror with the enforced silence and the scalpel-armed organ harvesters and the exploding heads, the discovery that the girl loved maths, geometry in particular, only barely made her heart beat faster. And, what with the college-required Math For Dummies class Tara was taking, it was entirely justified for her to ask for a little tutoring.

And in the end, it was not an outburst at a campus Wicca group or the shifting of a soda machine, but a knack for explaining triangles that convinced Tara once and for all that Willow was bonafide magic.

OMG! This story is so cute. I love how end the end it was Willow that made Tara thrive. It's set in math but I can see how you mean not only triangles, but love, and magic, and life... *sighs* ( or maybe I'm reading to deep into it lol) Beautiful... bravo!

This really is adorable.

You have a knack for creating Tara even through third person that is really cute and very appealing.

I have great confidence that you will progress past five pages and look forward to reading the outcome!!

*settles in and waits patiently for more*

Michaela~

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Don't rain on my parade...

I like this a lot, but I'd like to see if fleshed out. The introduction of Willow in the second-to-last paragraph necessitates a rushed summary of an ending. Are you planning to write a series of shorts that piggyback off of each other, or will each be independent?

~ Megan

I think this is darling. Refreshing and new and I'm so glad you came out, so to speak to share this. I love when elements are woven into a characters life and are connected to events and other people. It enriches Tara so much here, and I'm glad to see Donny as more than just a sad, twisted thing.

Your writing is nice. There aren't superfluous details that drag the story down and distract from the main event. You write like I think, which really grabbed and kept me in.

I hope you've got more shorts up your sleeve. If not, better get crackin'

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Lotus

Loved this. Geometry is a bit of a bear, isn't it?

I really like your style of writing. The details are not overdone and there's a humor to your storytelling. Each of Tara's thoughts regarding triangles had to make me smile because they are squirrelly little shapes.

What was particularly enjoyable about this piece was how it connected something from Tara's past (a distaste for triangles) to what we imagine to be her future (Willow). Even though Willow was introduced in the end, we understand her importance because of the way you've built this story. Her significance to Tara becomes more than magic and more than a crush.

This short is great because it can easily be a standalone piece or lead in to another story.

Very interested to read more. Thank you for sharing!

This is really great, the writing and what is written both. It also reminded me why I am glad geometry is far, far away from my life. So thanks for that and please write more in a very soonish way

And that is my short feedback for the first of your short shorts. Heh.

First, can I say thank you to everyone for reading and replying? It’s a massive confidence booster – I was a little nervous about posting a fic here, even one as short as this, but you people are just ridiculously nice =)

Sapphos Dream: Heh, cute is what I aim for! The parallel with triangles and love was definitely intended as I wrote it, but you could certainly parallel the other things too. No such thing as reading too deep, in my opinion. =)

Tarasgirl: Thanks! I’ve attempted first person in my writing before, and the result was terrifying in a swarm-of-army-ants way, so I think I’m going to stick with third-person Willow and Tara for a little while. Still, who knows? And I have hopes – and very basic plans – for a longer fic too.

Jasmydae: This was intended to be a definitely Tara-centric fic rather than a particularly Willow AND Tara fic, but I agree that the ending was cut a little short. I do intend to go a little more into the start of Willow and Tara’s friendship in a later fic, following on from this ending, so yes, hopefully a continuation of this ending will be seen at some point. Hopefully, as I get into writing longer fics, they’ll become more independent.

Zooeys_Bridge: Heh, most fun coming out I’ve ever had ^^ I’ve always been a little intrigued by the tiny events, likes and dislikes and influences that make us what we are, and I think that learning about them can really build up a character (not that Tara needs that at all.) I have felt that Donny can sometimes be maligned in fanfic – obviously in some fics the character’s done some truly dreadful things, but I have seen others where he’s a sympathetic character, which I think works really well for him sometimes. And if you think about it, yes, Tara had the tough upbringing with the whole demon thing, but she escaped. Donny never got that chance.

Ophelia11: Thank you =) I’ve had my own little irritations regarding triangles, too. Hasn’t everyone? And I agree that Willow was important in helping Tara through a whole bunch of things. Triangles were just one of them =) I hope to continue off this story at some point.

Owl: Maybe I should change the thread title to “Short Shorts.” That might get quite a few readers ^^ Thank you very muchlies for the feedback!

Great writing.

Thinking inappropriate thoughts about Lady Tiphaine d'Ath's coat of arms right now....

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Snapshots:http://thekittenboard.com/board/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=10210 a Love Story
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Kim: (breaks off the kissing) I l... (Sue stops her with a hand)
Sue: We don't talk about things like that right after, you know that, no saying those things in The Moment.
Kim: (moves the hand aside) Screw The Moment. I *love* you.

Blue (Short)

• Rating: PG
• Disclaimer: Minor spoilers for seasons 4 and 6.
• Feedback: Yush please.
• Summary: Lots of things are blue.
• Notes: I was apprehensive of putting this one up, as the ending's a little darker than that of the other. I think it fits in with the Pens rules, and it's a decent look at Willow besides, but if not, just tell me and I'll probably take it down.

Blue is the colour of the sky. That’s what Willow’s picture books said, and Xander’s comics – graphic novels, as he later insisted that they be called – agreed, cheerfully. California’s weather obliged, and for a long time, or a short time that seemed like a long time, blue was the colour of idyllic childhood; blistering midday sun through the sky on the green in front of the high school, where she and Xander lay in wait to ambush less-than-happy students. It melted the white, hazy desert-like heat out on Kingman’s Bluff, when Xander sat with a really-just-borrowed cowboy hat from Partytown, a miniature Indiana Jones. Yes; for a while, those blue-sky days formed Willow’s entire view of life.

Her first day of school, dressed in the neatest of starchy skirts to make a good impression on the kindergarten teachers, was a blue-sky day. Maybe that tilted her view of education in general to the better, or maybe it tainted her appreciation of blue-sky days for the worse. Whatever happened that day, as Willow got older, the sky continued to be disgustingly blue, but something about the rest of the world became greyer. Maybe, as a world-weary ten year old, she had left the days when a blue sky was something special. In California, you saw a lot of blue, after all. Days were spent at home instead of on the green, in her room instead of on the Bluff. Willow became more intimately acquainted with the Blue Screen of Death than with the sky.

“The sunlit sky appears blue because air scatters short-wavelength light more than longer wavelengths. Since blue light is at the short wavelength end of the visible spectrum, it is more strongly scattered in the atmosphere than long wavelength red light. As a result, the human eye perceives blue when looking toward the sky.”

A few years passed, and blue meant Buffy’s high fashion LA wardrobe, and really nasty gooey demon blood that was impossible to get out of any clothes, and saving the world on Tuesday afternoons. It meant stargazing in graveyards. It meant that Willow was growing up.

With Oz, blue skies meant summer – meant long, lazy days where night fell late and dawn rose early. It meant that those three days a month where Oz was something else were cut short.

Blue was the music Oz listened to, and, by extension, the music that Willow listened to as well. Blues in a garage on a summer afternoon or a winter morning – not the evening, when Willow was busy or Oz was… elsewhere. Blues with Oz on guitar and Devon singing, messing around, making Willow giggle a bit, feel grown up, feel almost cool.

The day Oz left was a grey day, but Willow certainly felt blue.

“The phrase might also be linked to a custom among old deepwater sailing ships. If the ship lost the captain or any of the officers during its voyage, she would fly blue flags and have a blue band painted along her entire hull when returning to home port.”

Blue-sky days were a long way away now, in a time of innocence. That’s what it is: blue means innocence. Innocent blue like Tara’s eyes, as they look at her now, full of trust, full of love, forget-me-not blue that’s forgotten what Willow said and did the night before.

Maybe innocence always has to be balanced. That would explain the yellow guilt curling inside Willow.

But she smiles and lets herself sink into that innocence, lets herself pretend that it’s a real blue-sky day again, swinging Tara’s hand in her own. She’s aware that Tara asked her a question, joking, laughing shyly, so she answers.

“Well, who wants to be cooped up on a day like this? The sun is shining, there's songs going on...”

Great short fic.

A great fic from you.