skip the light fandango

Title: Nobody Girl
Author: Maren
Friendship Pairing: Dawn/Oz
Rating: Gen
Disclaimer: Not mine, no profit.
Summary: Dawn wishes for a different kind of life.
Author Note: Written for niuserre for estepheia's Friendship Ficathon. niuserre requested Wishverse, either a sunset or sunrise, Oz as wolf, a fight, NO Sunnydale, and NO Dawn as a watcher. Thanks to southernbangel and jadedcynic for the beta.



Nobody Girl

Dawn wonders what her life would have been like if she was a real girl instead of a big ball of mystical energy shoved into girl-shape.

Maybe she would have had a family—one that loved her very much, even when she was being a brat. They’d do normal things like rent movies and pop popcorn. They’d live in a perfect two-story house with a big yard in someplace warm and sunny, like California.

She has memories of California, vague and hazy in the recesses of her not-brain. She doesn’t know why the monks put them there, except maybe because that’s where Oz is from and they wanted her to know something about the place he used to live before he ran far, far away. It’s why they made her American, even though she’s never even been there in the millions of years she’s existed as pure energy. It’s why they formed her taste-buds to appreciate really odd combinations of processed foods, just like him. And it’s why they gave her a motor-mouth that will just not stop, to fill in the long silences between his own carefully chosen words.

It’s why they made her a werewolf.

Dawn doesn’t like to think about that, much, so she returns to her fantasies about being a normal girl in sunny California, with a normal All-American family and a normal future. She’d have a mom and a dad who called her silly pet names like sugar booger or punkin’ belly and who would wake up early on the weekdays to fix her chocolate chip pancakes before school. Her mom would do something cool and hip, like run an art gallery. It’s harder, even in her fantasies, to form a real picture of her normal dad so she saves him for later.

If she were a real girl, Dawn would let her hair grow long and straight and her mom would brush it for her as they talked about how her day was at school. Oz cuts her hair short so that it’s easier to keep clean as they travel. It somehow feels wrong to Dawn, like the monks hard-programmed her to swing her shiny hair, but she doesn’t have anything to swing.

Once she imagined that Oz could be her older brother in her normal life, but it just didn’t feel right. He’s the one really awesome thing about this world—friend, protector, companion, confidant. She’d rather he be her friend there, too.

Anyway, she thinks that maybe she’d rather have an older sister, one of those annoyingly perfect kinds with bouncy blonde hair (not as shiny as Dawn’s, though) and a know-it-all attitude. They’d bicker and scream, steal each other’s clothes and make-up, and generally want to strangle each other. Dawn would tag along after her sister and have crushes on her older guy friends. Her sister would boss her around and act like she was Dawn’s mother instead of her sibling. But no matter how much they fought, her sister would always know just what to do to make Dawn feel safe and loved.

It’s not that she doesn’t feel safe with Oz. She does, most of the time. It’s just that here, in this world where she isn’t really a girl, they are always on the run. They started in Tibet, where the monks entrusted her to Oz, and then moved on to Kathmandu where they spent a few weeks loading up on supplies before moving into India. They’re in Calcutta now, lost among the masses that crowd the city, and Dawn likes it enough that she will miss it when they have to leave. She knows that Oz will miss it more, the art and the music and the poetry disguised in crumbling ruins and extreme poverty, but he will never say it. He’ll tell her when it’s time to pack up and go and when they leave he won’t look back. Dawn won’t look back either, because she thinks maybe it’s easier that way.

It would be nice to have roots, though. Dawn is pretty sure that normal girls have roots. She’d like to have her own bedroom with her own bed and her own things— not that she’d be greedy, but she’d like to own more things than she can shove into a pack and strap to her back. Dawn would paint her room lavender and decorate the walls with posters. She would have gauzy white curtains that would blow delicately in the breeze and a lava lamp that would cast undulating shadows on the walls.

She isn’t sure where these ideas come from, exactly. Dawn’s never seen the normal American room of a real American girl. She thinks the monks must have put that knowledge there too. Sometimes she wishes they had left it out. Sometimes, but not nearly as often as she wishes they hadn’t made her a werewolf.

They stayed in Tibet for longer than it was safe so Oz could show her how to control it. He told her she was a natural and Dawn screamed at him that there was nothing natural about her. She’s ashamed to remember how she beat at his chest with her fists until she was too tired to continue. Oz had bruises for days, mottled purple and yellow splotches the color of a sunset. But he held her afterward, when she was nothing but a sobbing ball of not-girl, and Dawn wondered how he did it all alone when he first turned.

The thing that Dawn likes the most when she thinks of her normal life is that she is never alone. She would have her mom, her sister, and all of their friends to keep her company. They would have dinner together and go to movies and help her with her homework. They would hold her hand at the doctor’s office and let her crawl into bed with them when she had nightmares of monsters in her closet.

Once she asked Oz why the monks made her into a half-monster when they could have molded her into anything in the world. He said they did it to make her stronger if Glorificus ever caught up with them, that they gave her teeth so that she can fight back. Most of the time Dawn hopes it will never come to that, but sometimes, in her deepest darkest self, she wishes it would hurry up and happen. Maybe Dawn can be normal in Glorificus’ dimension. Maybe that’s where these half-thoughts and hazy images of what her life could have been come from. Maybe, if she’s very good, Glorificus will take her there.

Not long after she learned to control her wolf, Dawn told Oz that she wanted him to take her to California to live. Oz turned whiter than normal and turned his back on her, walking away. He didn’t come back for hours and by the time he did, Dawn was hysterical. She promised not to ever talk about that place again if he promised not to leave her, and Oz stroked her hair until she calmed down. Then he told her how his hometown was overrun by vampires and how he’d fought them with a small group led by an older Englishman. He told her that he’d had to kill a girl he had loved very much to try to save the town—maybe the world.

Dawn never mentions her California dreams to him anymore.

As she catalogs her memories of her life with Oz, comparing them to her fantasies of a different life, a sudden image of her normal-family father finally comes to her and Dawn smiles. He would be really smart and smell like tea and old books. He would wear glasses and speak with an elegant British accent as he moans about the California weather. He would love her so much that he would hurt when she is hurt.

And he would kill her, if he had to, to save her normal world.