Fic 042 - Triangle
Standard disclaimer: The characters aren’t mine. The settings aren't mine. Both characters and settings belong to Joss Whedon, along with 60% of the known universe.
Setting: Mid S4, post Hush.
Prompt: Triangle. Apologies in advance for the saccharin involved in this story. Additional apologies for spelling maths "math." They're supposed to be American, so it's not entirely my fault.
Character: Tara.
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 where 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 spell. 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 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.
“Ah-ha.”
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.