fic: Sounds and Logic
This weeks ficlet for Taming the Muse, for the prompt: radius. Basically, more fluff I wrote as a writing exercise.
Title: Sounds and Logic
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Characters: Willow Rosenberg, Daniel "Oz" Osbourne
Pairing: Willow/Oz
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: I don't own anything in this unofficial fanwork, nor do I claim to or profit in anyway.
Summary: Willow and Oz teach each other to dance. Set somewhere between IOHEFY and Becoming in the end of Season 2, whenever Oz's Senior Prom would've taken place.
A/N: This started out fluff, but ended up as something akin to character introspection, looking at Willow and Oz as characters, and how they complement each other.
Willow felt foolish and self-conscious when she knocked on Oz's door, wringing her hands the way she would squeeze water from a dishcloth. This was a bad idea, really bad, and hopefully Oz wasn't home, so that way he would never know that she came and he wouldn't ask why. But, just then, Oz opened the door in a ratty UC Berkely t-shirt and boxers, blinking as if he was seeing daylight for the first time in years, and all of a sudden, Willow had something new to feel flustered and shy about.
"Will?" Oz blinked sleepily, running a lazy hand through his sleep-mussed hair. "What're you doing here this early? Is something wrong?"
"Oz, it's almost noon," Willow laughed. "Nothing's wrong."
"Is it? Already?" Oz asked, nodding in understanding when Willow held up her wristwatch for him to read. "So it is."
"Can I come in?" Willow asked in a rush, forcing her words out as quickly as they would come. "I want to ask you something."
"You're always welcome here," Oz told her, stepping back out of the doorway and waving her through, in lieu of inviting her in. He'd only known about vampires for a few months, but he learned quickly.
"What's up, baby?" Oz asked after he ran upstairs to pull on pants and brush his teeth. He pulled Willow close for the good morning kiss he'd postponed on the grounds of unsatisfactory oral hygiene, then walked over to his sofa, smiling at Willow when she sat down beside him.
"So, Senior Prom is, well it's coming. And, you asked me! Which is nice!" Willow babbled, quickly losing her control over her speech. "I'm glad you asked me, even though I'm not a senior. I mean, I'm not glad just because I get to go to Prom, even though I am excited, by the way. I'm glad because I'm going to go with you. I like you and I like dating you and, if I was to go to Prom with anyone, I would want it to be you, hands down, so, yeah."
"I'm happy that you're going to Prom with me, too," Oz smiled, soothing a hand down her hair.
"Right," she blushed, taking a breath before confessing. "Except I don't know how to dance!"
"Okay."
"I asked Buffy to teach me, but, no offense to Buffy, but she's kind of an awful teacher in terms of active stuff. You know, because she's all Slayer-girl, so she doesn't really get how us normal people move. And, I didn't want to ask Cordelia because she'd totally make fun of me. And, well, I couldn't really ask Xander, could I?" As if cued, both teens cringed in unison, remembering the number of times the taller boy had been forcibly pushed off the dance floor at the Bronze.
"So you're asking me?" Oz questioned, the barest hint of a smile on his face. Willow nodded shyly, still feeling terribly embarrassed about having to ask her boyfriend for dance lessons. She was still so new to this dating thing, and even though Oz was making it easy and warm and simple, Willow still got fussed over the little details of their relationship. "Confession: I can't dance either."
"But you're musical, Oz! You play music, which is a lot like dancing to music, since they both have that close connection to the music, and all."
"So you'd think, but not so much. I'm much better off hiding behind my guitar than dancing."
"Oh," Willow said, trying bravely to keep the disappointment off her face.
"Why don't we try and figure it out together?" Oz suggested, raising his eyebrows just a tad and smiling tentatively.
"Okay," Willow agreed after a moment of thought, a grin breaking out across her face as Oz grabbed her by the hands to pull her to her feet. "Let's learn to dance."
Quickly, they pushed the living room furniture against the walls to create a makeshift dance floor and Oz slipped a CD into the large stereo in the corner. The easy part done, they came together in the center of the room.
"Just do what feels right, I guess," Oz shrugged as they awkwardly tried to place their hands, brushing fingers quietly along waistlines and collarbones and blushing at the accidental touches. Finding what "felt right," Willow quickly discovered, was much harder than advertised, because she felt awkward and silly and out of place, trying to dance with this boy in his living room. She nervously second guessed each move she made, from placing a hand on Oz's shoulder to taking even the slightest of steps. But, she was determined to do this right, so she kept at it, wishing she felt as comfortable as Oz seemed.
"Is this right?" Willow asked anxiously once she'd settled one hand on Oz's shoulder and clasped the other in his, poised nervously on the edge of a misstep. Willow was accustomed to perfectionism, familiar with ruler-straight lines circles with equal radii and consistent circumferences, but this was terrifying in its capacity for mistakes. Dancing was difficult because each step was like solving a problem, one which had nothing but variables, and because each step depended on your partner, who was the biggest variable of all. Willow wasn't accustomed to this type of problem, but she wanted to solve it, all the same.
"Feels right," Oz nodded and cocked to the side, listening for the music, Willow realized. "Waltzes have three steps, but that's all I know about them. Want to give it a shot?"
"That's not an awful lot to go on," Willow answered uncertainly, imagining just how many sets of three steps it would take before she tripped them both up.
With no warning at all, Oz began to move, taking a step backwards and pulling Willow along with him, letting his body move as the words did. Oz looked focused on the music, letting the flow of the music dictate his moves like a current. They were listening to the same gentle song, but Willow couldn't hear what Oz did, couldn't feel the same pull that he seemed to, couldn't find cues or meanings or directions in the notes. What Willow could find was a pattern in their footsteps, far simpler than she had anticipated, and, as long as she knew what direction Oz would next flow, she could follow his lead with ease. Of course, Oz was nothing short of unpredictable, and following his lead could be like guessing the next number in a sequence with an ever-shifting rate of change, but that was the challenge, keeping up with the pattern.
"It's like math," Willow grinned excitedly as they spun around the living room. "Everything is sequential, the length of your step, the direction, the timing. It's all about ratios!"
"I always thought it was about the music," Oz murmured slowly, looking at her thoughtfully. "About finding a beat and feeling which way to follow it."
"Well, sure," Willow babbled on happily, having captured the essence of this dancing thing as easily as she would catch a firefly. "But music's all about math too, isn't it? I read a book last month about music theory, because, well," she blushed, "I wanted to know more about the songs you write, but music is all about patterns. The way you arrange notes and chord progressions, the way you count measures and change time signatures. It's all math, lyrics set to numbers."
"I'm not so sure," Oz answered, voice steady and weighty with logic. "Music's not just math, it's expression. It's about feeling. It's the dynamics and articulation that makes music, otherwise, it's just a bunch of rhythmic sounds."
Oz released Willow's waist and lifted their joined hands in the air, holding them above her head and quietly urging her to spin. She turned, flighty as a breeze, spinning around their joined hands like an axis, but she caught her foot on Oz's and nearly fell.
"Steady," he soothed, recovering and falling back into the dance, as naturally as breathing. Willow blushed hotly, embarrassed by her miscalculation, even if Oz didn't seem to care.
"Try again?" Oz asked and Willow nodded fiercely, determined to prove to them both that she could solve this newest problem.
She was a circle, Willow decided, with one foot as a focus, while the other drew a circumference around it. The trick was the radius, Willow realized with a rush of satisfaction, because the radius changed everything about a circle. If she drew her foot in closer as she spun on her axis, if she kept the radius short, forced the area to remain small, then she could plot her turn where she chose and completely avoid intersection the line between Oz's feet.
This time as she spun under Oz's raised arm, her spin was tight and measured, and Willow cheered as she turned from her spin into her next step. Oz smiled at her as they danced on, and the fond look on his face made her feel just as pleasantly warm as her success had.
The song ended and a new one began, but instead of standing still, Oz took a step closer to Willow and wound both arms around her waist. "As much as I like waltzing with you," Oz whispered slowly in her ear, "I think maybe we'd be the only ones waltzing at Prom."
"Oh," Willow shivered, his warm breath on her ear making her spine feel loose and tingly. "Then how should we dance at Prom?"
"Like this," Oz whispered, a slow smile curling its way across his face like honey. Willow slipped her arms around his neck the way she had watched people dance at the Bronze, from far away at lonely tables. It felt right in the way that coloring pictures of leaves green and writing her own name across pieces of paper felt right. It seemed as if she had been waiting a very long time to dance with Oz in his empty house, to wrap her arms tight around his neck so they could learn how their bodies fit together like a ripped piece of paper, from knee to neck. Willow dropped her head against his shoulder, because the curve of his neck into his shoulder was just the right shape to nestle her head, because they fit together in ways she'd never noticed before.
"This isn't so hard," Willow whispered into Oz's ear, feeling the shiver roll down his spine as her lips grazed his ear, and smiled secretly against his shoulder. This was the best kind of dance, Willow decided, tucked against Oz as if their bodies had been shaped to fit against each other, swaying in time to the numbered beats of the new song. Willow felt nearly giddy with a silly, delirious sort of happy, holding close to Oz. Something must have gone right for her to have found him, because they worked just right in the funniest, loveliest sort of way. He rationally told her how to feel music while she exclaimed about logic and reason and rationality, and how funny was it that their own silly, personal dichotomies would match and contradict in that way, that somehow they would balance out the funny little things about each other. There must be some variable, some way of determining the probability of finding, out of all the humans in the world and in America and in California, somebody who fit her as seamlessly as Oz did, Willow mused, wrapped around Oz. But maybe Oz was onto something with all his talk about feeling things out. Right here, tucked against Oz's chest as his body fit perfectly against hers, everything felt right, as if all the pieces of a puzzle were lined up perfectly, and that was enough.
fin.
Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.