Square Root Minues One by Doyle

People ask them how they met.

Dawn tells it best, because she makes a story out of it; inventing little details that make people laugh and imitating the weird look Angel got when Fred shook her hand way too long.

Fred's answer is a stream of babble. She talks about what they were both wearing, and the exact hallway it was in (third floor, by the snack machine that only ever gave out change all in nickels), and how brilliant Dawn was/is/was even then at twenty-one. Sometimes she has to stop herself from proudly saying that Dawn was already a Watcher, because then people'd want to know what that means and that would really open up a whole

(can of worms, box of cats, the cat isn't dead/alive till you look and Dawn's a schoolteacher now because a demonless world doesn't need Slayers and Watchers)

mess of questions.

Together eight years and Fred still asks herself - why girls now when it wasn't ever that before?

She thinks about this when she kisses her girlfriend goodbye in the morning before they go to work, and when the news is full of some new law banning gay couples from adopting, and when momma calls every Thursday and talks in supportive-voice about the pie she's making for the local PFLAG's bakesale. And when she talks about Dawn or about herandDawn she babbles because maybe someday she'll reduce it down to something real and understandable. Human relationships reduced to a number,

(except not all numbers are real, not the square roots of a negative number, and some are as real as a person or a streetlight or a car, but just go on forever. She thinks she and Dawn might be Napier's constant, two point one seven one eight two eight and on and on, infinite and nonrepeating)

add them and divide them and find the sum of the parts.

Taking it logically it seems so easy. Not girls, just Dawn. And Dawn because:

Dawn is funny, and kind, and tough, and sometimes she reminds Fred of the kind of kid Wes and Gunn would've made together. She snorts laughter at the thought of an adorable mocha kid with glasses. But Wes stopped wearing glasses long ago, she suddenly remembers, even before he lost Lilah for the second time and none of them could save him from him.

Dawn cares for other people and speaks four languages and spoils her niece. She likes Christmas decorations, horror movies, apple juice, snow. She knows squat about politics and cries at cute injured animals on TV but won't let Fred buy a kitten because of "bad, guilty memories". She used to harass Fred and Knox into turning more of the lab over to cancer research, and whenever she accidentally cuts herself she gets this weird not-there look.

But when Fred clung to her hand that day in the third-floor hallway

(this is dawn, she's an old friend
yeah, one time he boinked my sister and went evil... you're fred, right? hey, you okay?)

she didn't know any of that.

She'd just thought "pretty".

**

She knows the Story of Dawn, cover to cover. Her childhood stories are funny and sweet and - even with a Slayer for a sister - normal. Fred trades stories of her own mundane growing-up, and even though she knows Dawn notices the five year jump between College Student Fred and Professional Monster Killer Fred, she doesn't explain, and after that first fight Dawn doesn't ask anymore. Fred lets her think she was homeless.

If Dawn doesn't know about Pylea, it never happened, because the monsters are all gone from this dimension and there's no magic anymore to bring them back, and maybe it was all a dream after all.

She loves Dawn, loves her desperately, because Dawn is such a normal girl.

But sometimes, when she's tired or stressed and Dawn is just barely in her field of vision, she'll see something in the corner of her eye: blazing, brilliant green light, so pure it takes away her breath; but no matter how fast she turns, when she looks again it's always gone.

.End