Anyway everyone should read it and also??? Why is there not a Mr & Mrs (or Mr & Mr/Mrs & Mrs/etc as applicable) Smith AU of every ship???? I’m disappointed in you, fandom.
HAHAHAHA OKAY SO I’m not gonna reblog the meta I just read because I get that everyone is entitled to their own opinions about who fictional characters are in love with even if I strenuously disagree with them and this was in no way directed at me and I don’t want to be an asshole, BUT ALSO just so we’re all aware:
the idea that James was not romantically in love with Miranda is, just. JUST. !!!!!!!!!!! DID YOU NOT SEE THE WAY HE LOOKED AT HER? DID YOU NOT SEE HIM COMMUNICATING WITH HER WITH BOOK-PRESENTS, DID YOU NOT SEE HIM SMILING AT HER LIKE SHE WAS LITERALLY EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD TO HIM (BECAUSE SHE WAS), DID YOU MISS ALL OF TOBY STEPHENS DOING THE ACTING. IT WAS SUCH GOOD ACTING. THE VERY IDEA. THAT HE ISN’T IN LOVE WITH HER. THAT HE LOVES HER LIKE A MOTHER (OH MY GOD, IT WAS A METAPHOR, I AM DYING, DREAM MIRANDA ALSO CALLED HERSELF HIS MISTRESS AND HIS WIFE, AUGH.) DID YOU NOT SEE HIM IN THAT VERY SAME DREAM SEQUENCE LOOK AT HER WITH ALL THE LOVE IN THE FUCKING WORLD ON HIS FACE AND MURMUR I’M RUINED OVER YOU. WHAT. THE FUCK. AND. the idea that James is gay and not bi and isn’t sexually interested in Miranda when footage of him giving Miranda that wolfish fucking grin in the carriage exists is so STUPENDOUSLY, WILFULLY, TREMENDOUSLY WRONG that I want to go scream like a banshee on the moors just to try to cope with the enormity of the degree to which it is wrong.
I get that the show is open to interpretation, and that it doesn’t label anybody’s sexuality because hey oscar wilde hadn’t gone to trial yet and so there were no labels for anybody’s sexuality, but, LIKE, OH MY GOD, if you don’t think James and Eleanor at the very fucking least are bisexual you are RECKLESSLY reading against the grain and this bitter bisexual actually does kind of hold it against you.
Anonymous asked: UM HI. So I'm the one that sent the ask about the magical gf things and I have a confession. I already knew it was from your magical book and was kinda subtly hoping you would talk about it?!?!?! I"M SO SORRY but like I said I'm so invested in this crap and would read the entire frikin thing. ALSO I LOVED THE EXCERPT. And now I'm leaving before I disgrace myself any further.
WAIT NO DON’T LEAVE
SO HERE’S IRONY FOR YOU: you came in and didn’t want to bug me so you asked in like a sideways way, BUT I DIDN’T WANT TO BUG YOU, so I didn’t talk about it. (I’m a mess, I’m sorry, y’all gotta be explicit about this stuff because I have no self-confidence.)
BUT ON THAT NOTE let’s talk about perceptions of sex and romance in Alleirat? Like? I’m into it?
So you know the code of chivalric love, where like the fair and pure maiden is adored from afar by the knight and on the one hand it’s kind of cool but on the other hand it’s predicated on the fair and pure maiden who can’t reciprocate or even really acknowledge what’s going on? I like that first half but the second half bothers me like FUCK so I made a better version.
In Alleirat, sex and romance are considered linked, but not intrinsically so–having casual sexual partners is fine as long as your partner is aware and good with it, and sexual experimentation is considered normal (even expected) between the ages of like 16 and like mid-to-late twenties. (People who are like ‘I am gay/straight and I am EXCLUSIVELY gay/straight and I have never experimented with another gender’ are considered weird and kind of to have missed out? Like, they’re thought of as…having skipped an important life stage? Societies Are Problematic, is my point here.) Monogamy is common, but not mandatory, and conditional monogamy (which I’m about to get into) is pretty normal.
So, the courtly love arrangement, which is called amuniasa. Like, say that you are a woman and you work closely with another woman, and you fall in love with her. And you’re very much in love with her (commitment is Serious Business in Alleirat and cheating is considered an actual crime) and you tell her as much. Now she has two options. Either she can take you up on it and you can attempt a relationship, or she can acknowledge the honor you’re doing her with your feelings and declare herself amiasa, or ‘the beloved.’ Then you have the choice to remain committed to her as amdri (the lover). Some basic rules of amuniasa include:
Amuniasa is generally given the same level of importance as marriage, and there are a very short list of reasons that are considered valid to dissolve it.
Amdrin and amiasan are permitted, but not required, to engage in other romantic and sexual relationships. It is common and accepted for someone to have both a spouse and an amdri/amiasa, although it’s not frowned upon if someone devotes themselves wholly to their amiasa.
Brenneth’s right-hand during their previous stint in Alleirat (Krei The Tree Lesbian’s mother Torei) was Brenneth’s amdri, and never took another romantic partner during the remainder of her life. Brenneth and Torei are held up as sort of the Platonic ideal of devotion and amuniasa. (Krei’s coloring also suggests that her father looked like Brenneth, but she never met him.)
The amiasa has a limited period of time to change their mind (often one year), and leading your amdri on with hints that you might one day return their feelings (or with sex) is considered incredibly cruel and dishonorable, and is a valid reason to dissolve the relationship. (Your amdri is functionally off limits for sex for this reason.)
Hassling your amiasa and trying to force them to return your feelings is not permitted and is a valid reason to dissolve the relationship. It can also get you arrested, sent out of the city, or placed under what basically sums up as a restraining order.
It is standard for the amdri to give gifts to their amiasa, or to perform great deeds in their name if they’re in a position to do so (also a thing that Torei is considered the ideal of). Alternatively, an amdri might cook for their amiasa or perform another kind of service, like braiding hair, tending children, etc. This is because Alleirat views service and gift giving as a mandatory core of every romantic relationship (…this extends to orgasms), not because the amdri is viewed as in any way subordinate or servile to their amiasa. The amdri considers it a privilege to perform service and give gifts, and the amiasa recognizes the honor being accorded to them.
It’s actually not common for amdri and amiasa to continue working closely unless it’s necessary, as it’s believed that this is unfair to the amdri. They interact largely socially and on their own terms, to the extent that the amdri is comfortable with–this might be several visits in a week, or the amdri might travel quite a distance. (Torei is considered an outlier, as she took a position as the captain of her amiasa’s guard and proceeded to live, work, and spend all her time with Brenneth for four years. …there are songs about Torei’s devotion and selflessness and disregard for her own pain, is what I’m getting at here.)
It IS common for your amdri or amiasa to know your children, if you have any, and is generally considered their de facto guardian in the event of a disaster.
It is NOT UNHEARD OF for someone to executively decide not to even try to have a relationship and act as an amdri without telling their amiasa. This is generally because they believe they have no chance with the other person and that their attention would make their amiasa uncomfortable, such as a man falling in love with a lesbian, or someone falling in love with someone aromantic. This is considered fine, but it also means that you have no formal claim on the other person.
This can also be because they have a terrible (justified) guilt complex and believe that the other person could never reciprocate as a result of four years of mutual attempted murder. Not that I’m in any way vagueblogging about any of my characters here.
ANYWAY THIS HAS BEEN A PRIMER ON LOVE AND ROMANCE IN ALLEIRAT, PLEASE FEEL FREE TO ASK OTHER QUESTIONS.
as a high school freshman, i was in love with a senior boy. his name was something like, but not exactly, harry. my high school did have a handsome boy who was older than me named harry—although, now that i’m writing this, i’m remembering that actually his name was dylan.
were there any harrys in my grade? were there any harrys in my school? there had to have been. that’s a pretty common name.
“why are we still talking about this?” you’re asking.
the answer is: i don’t know! i can’t stop! my brain is a nightmare!
a n y w a y, whatever. the point is, my whole freshman year, i was in love with not-harry (actual not-harry, not the not -harry who was in fact dylan). he was very tall, and more importantly, he was very sweet to me, a pigeon-toed and badly socialized fourteen-year-old who really believed she looked good in low-riding boot-cut jeans with leopard print patches on them. not-harry and i met because he was the student waiter at my lunch table, and we stayed acquaintances because of a peculiar and excellent thing that happened to me, which was that for the entirety of my high school career i was not in my school’s lunch attendance system.
the thing you have to understand for any part of this story to make sense is that my boarding school had a lunch system where most days you had an assigned seat. every other lunch period, you were seated at an arbitrary table in order to like, help you make friends or something. student waiters would bring your food.
there was a rotation freshman year in which every student had to be a student waiter, and if you were good at it, you could stay on and make money.
i was so not-good at it that they took me off rotation early, which feels pretty on-brand for me.
for whatever reason, i was never assigned a table. in the land of seated lunches, i was king.
some people might have used this opportunity to sit with their friends or maybe with a teacher from whom they wanted to hassle a better grade, but i was a simple child and all i wanted to do was have many opportunities as possible to ask not-harry, who always remembered my name and never called me out for knocking things over all the time, to bring me the vegetarian option.
the teacher assigned to that table was a teacher that i never had, and never bonded with, and was constantly perplexed as to why i always insisted on sitting at his table and then never spoke to him.
“so weird they keep assigning me here,” i would say, and mr. wilcox would answer, “but they didn’t. i have the list. you aren’t assigned to sit here.”
“so weird,” said i.
the other great benefit of not having an assigned table at lunch is that i did not have to go to lunch. i could go to nap.
alternatively, i could go back into the kitchen and cajole the cooks to give me extra dessert, which i also did all the time. they made these peanut butter and chocolate bars that slammed. i kept some hidden in the freezer wrapped in paper towels because i am never more like a dragon than when somebody asks to share food.
everybody who knew that i existed knew that i was in love with not-harry. my school was very small, and probably even people who didn’t know me could have pointed at me and said something like, “whatever that girl’s name is, she’s in love with not-harry, who is tall and cool and has lots of friends.”
let’s break here to talk a little about not-harry. i, of course, was miserably uncomfortable in my own body, extremely uncool, and hadn’t yet figured out the difference between being sarcastic and just being mean. also, i once wrote and recorded a song called, “sweet like elk bladder,” which is something i don’t exactly regret but am also not exactly proud of. and if it sounds like i am being unkind to tiny baby molly, please know that despite being objectively unbearable, i love her. she was trying her best, and would improve rapidly between the ages of seventeen and twenty. she was a late bloomer.
but, at fourteen, if i could boil down my whole personality it would be: your least favorite cousin.
you know the one.
you don’t have to tell anybody who it is, just visualize them in your mind.
that was me.
not-harry, on the other hand, was devon sawa in little giants. he was sean biggerstaff in harry potter. he was what’s-his-face in a walk to remember. (you know. not matt damon but the guy that kind of looks like matt damon?)
not-harry:
in high school freshman molly’s fantasy of who not-harry was, he played the guitar, is what i’m saying.
i do want to say, in my own defense, that i was aware of how out of my league not-harry was. it’s not that i thought i had a chance with him. first of all, he had a girlfriend, who was blonde and beautiful and also very nice, which was rude because it meant i couldn’t even spitefully dislike her. she played field hockey and once helped me pick up an armful of books when i inevitably dropped them.
secondly, i have never in my life expressed an emotion and even if he had been moved by my letter, i am confident that if he’d approached me about it i would have simply sprinted away at top speed.
thirdly, like, a bird can love a fish but where would they live, you know what i’m saying?
anyway, all this exhausting set up is to say that i was obsessed with not-harry, and he did not know who i was except probably to have noticed that i was assigned to his lunch table a lot.
“she’s actually not. i don’t know why she’s here all the time.” - mr. w, still not getting any answers.
every year for valentine’s day, my school would do this fundraiser thing where you could buy carnations and have them sent to your friends (or, you know, if you were the kind of person who got asked out, you could send it to your babe or whatever. that…wasn’t really a concern for me).
or, of course, some people sent them anonymously to people they liked.
“no,” you’re probably saying to yourself. and i get it!!! i get it. looking back at my own self, i am also saying, “no.”
that’s a pretty common theme, for me.
i think that i knew, at the time, that it was a bad idea. i kind of remember thinking to myself, this is a bad idea. i know that this is a bad idea. and then immediately following it up with, yeah but how bad of an idea can it really be?
pretty bad, molls!!!! preeeeetty, pretty bad.
you know, looking back, i think that the worst thing wasn’t even sending the carnation. like, that’s pretty embarrassing, but not end of the world embarrassing. but i didn’t just send it, i sent it and i included a note, and that note said, with painful earnestness, “this is the closest i’ll ever get.”
god. god!!! i know!!!
like, what??? was i thinking?? what a horrible, creepy, incredibly vulnerable thing to just put in the universe!!!! lil’ baby molly, somebody is going to read that. he, and all his friends, are going to know that you have feelings. feelings are embarrassing. we’ve been over this.
honestly, at the time, i think i was kind of just like … screw it. you know? i was young. i knew high school was going to be the time in my life where i was the least likeable person i’d ever be. everybody knew i had this huge embarrassing crush on him, so, like, what was the worst that could happen? you only live once!!! you might as well just be the most embarrassing person you can be.
obviously, i did a complete 180 on that opinion the second it was too late to take it back.
as soon as the carnations went out i started making plans to dig myself a hole and quietly die in it.
everybody knew it was me. i mean, everybody. not a single person saw that note and was like, “gee, i wonder who sent this. could it be the awkward, long-armed monster child that spends the entirety of lunch drooling at not-harry with her chin in her tiny troll hands? haha, no. that’s crazy! it must have been someone else. what an unsolvable mystery.”
i fruitlessly tried to talk my way out of it. i sent an email to my entire grade that i am deeply grateful has been lost to the internet abyss that said something like, “hey just in case anyone was wondering who sent that carnation to not-harry, uh, it wasn’t me. i’m not saying anyone thinks it was me, but if they do think it was me, it wasn’t. they’re wrong. i definitely didn’t send a carnation to not-harry. that would be weird, and am i weird? no. as this email proves, i’m a normal person who does normal things only.
“normal things only,” is going to be the name of my autobiography, and it’s going to be a bald-faced lie.
in hindsight, this wasn’t even the most embarrassing moment of my high school career, though it certainly ranks. but it does hit a very specific and tender part of my memory: high school molly was so young, and so earnest, and so terrible at everything, but she was trying so hard. you know? when i think about myself writing that horrible note, i remember thinking, “obviously he is not going to read this and dump his beautiful, kind girlfriend to date me,” but i also remember thinking, “…yeah, but he might.”
i feel like this attitude toward things has lowkey been a guiding principle in my life, and possibly all of human history, for better or worse: this isn’t going to work, but it might.
humans are such heartbreakingly optimistic creatures, even when we try not to be. think of all the times that we have done things just to do them. just to prove we could! just to do something impossible. we are impossible animals who do impossible things.
like, people built airplanes!!! how dumb is that? people built airplanes and gave humans wings, even though it definitely wasn’t going to work, except that it might, and it did.
i like the idea of that, i think. every once in a while, it does. it does work. against all odds.
to be clear, in this particular instance, it did not.
not-harry never talked to me about it, because not -harry took one look at me and probably realized that i had enough problems. i know he got it, because i watched him get it in the lunchroom. i chose not to sit at his table that day, because i was an idiot but i wasn’t stupid. i knew i didn’t have the acting chops to keep a straight face when he opened it.
not-harry looked at the note, and then looked around like, “what the hell kind of john-hughes-movie loving moron sent me this?”
we locked eyes.
dear god, i thought to myself, if he puts the note away and no one ever talks to me about it again i swear i will find a new table.
not-harry held the note up. i looked at it, and then back at him. i don’t know what my face was doing, but i can only assume i looked like little foot in the scene where he realizes the thing he thought was his mom was just his own shadow.
very slowly, and very kindly, not-harry put the note in his pocket.
“i haven’t seen you at lunch in a while!” mr. w said to me months later, in passing, and i did the sign of the cross as i said, “so weird!” and kept walking.
(i looked not-harry up on facebook just now, and he’s still beautiful, and i still love him. reader, should i friend him? probably not, right? it’s probably a bad idea.
wildehacked asked: Marco/Rachel + "Jerry Springer, not Casablanca".
(I like your setup for these so I’m stealing it)
AO3 summary: It’s not a gin joint and it doesn’t belong to him and she’s not the love of his life. Some days he’s not even sure they’re friends. They fuck anyway. (PWminimalP, Angst, Longer War AU, Unsafe Insane and Consensual, Light Bondage, Blood)
Actual summary: It’s about year six of a war that burned them all out about year three. They’ve managed to keep their secret through increasingly brutal means over the years. Rachel and Cassie haven’t spoken except on missions since Rachel killed a member of the Yeerk Peace Movement in order to keep them from giving the Animorphs up. Jake looks like the walking dead and hasn’t smiled–really smiled–since they failed to save Jake’s parents. Tobias is less human than ever since Rachel left him, and morphs Ax more often than he morphs his old body (his old body is barely fourteen, glaringly young among the others).
Marco and Rachel aren’t dating. Marco is still their tactician and their sense of humor, but their sense of humor is bitter and cutting, and when Rachel kisses him, she bites until his lips bleed and ties his hands with rough cord, he fights her and leaves bruises and cuts. They don’t have a safeword. Rachel needs to feel in control and Marco needs to feel like he’s not the one guiding Jake’s hand on the trigger. It’s a bad system, but God they need it and if anything happens…well, they can just morph it away, and wash each others’ blood from their hands.
You wake up with two small lumps on your back, just around your shoulder blades. Your friend has a similar dilemma, however, theirs are on their forehead, and look like zits. Small horns protrude from theirs, while feathers come from yours.
Within a month, you have large, white, dove wings, while your friend has long, curly horns. Turns out, you’re an angel, they’re a demon, and you’re supposed to fight. But you both’d rather just go see a movie.
she looks like the way summer tastes. but she’s my best friend. she’s just my best friend, and this entire thing is too cheesy.
she’s spitting up into the sink. blood has been in her mouth a lot ever since the teeth starting coming in. “do you think teething is like?” she lisps around a sore tongue “permanent?”
i’m scrubbing at my eyes. i’m allergic to certain animal dander. my body has been going through shock; fever on, fever off. the truth is that human bodies don’t like foreign cells inside of themselves.
“you know,” i say, “i wrote this story once.” the movie ended a while ago but we had to wait until the bathroom was empty. if we’re lucky, people just think we’re cosplaying. we locked the door behind us.
“my mouth hurts,” she says.
“i was like, twelve,” i say. i feel like there are mites, always, everywhere, crawling all over me. the other day a third set of eyes started growing in my hands. i’m not used to it yet and i get a lot of vertigo and 3D glasses per pair are super expensive. “it was bad.”
“i mean,” she pauses. “we look stupid.” for a second, the fire on her starts again, and she swears while she puts it out. i meanwhile send her another “i can be ur angle or yuor devil” meme, leaning against the counter while she again washes her mouth out.
“it was stupid,” i say. “i didn’t even know the word nephilim, like some kind of pleb.”
“get wrecked, twelve-year-old you,” she says.
i’ve learned a lot these past few months, have scoured the bible sixteen times. “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them.” Genesis 6:4. Maybe that’s us. Or maybe we’re in the X-Men. If it wasn’t for the creepy voice who told us otherwise, we have no evidence.
i have trouble looking at her sometimes. not because she’s so different now, but because she makes my heart swell up like balloon. like an explosion. like heavenly light.
she makes eye contact with my original set. i feel my hearts start revving. she smiles at me in that way that makes me forget about wings and horns and eternal forces.
“i liked the movie, though,” i blurt.
“ugh!” she rolls her eyes, drying her hands by shaking them off. they again ignite, and she swears again, clapping them out. “it was bad, ray.”
i laugh, we head out. two girls in a jeep with too many layers for the heat. i can’t drive anymore, i’m too distracted by the extra eyes. she does better but has to stop sometimes to put out fires.
she pulls off on the lookout by the watertower to shake a few teeth loose. i stretch and almost fall over, unused to a new body and no balance. my bones are hollowing.
“was that crack your wrist?” she asks.
“yuh,” i say, holding it.
“yuck,” she says, “sounds broken.”
“might be,” i’m biting my tongue, “it’s lit.”
she comes over to examine it. “broken,” she says. she glows in the darkness, but i don’t know if that’s literally her or just how i see her, all alight with life and perfect. she helps me wrap it. we sit on the hood of her car and look out to the forest below us. we sip snapple i stole. i hear my bone heal. we both ignore the noise it makes.
“that guy is kind of a dingus,” i say. i put on a deep voice, “Thou must wage in the eternal war. Put on Earth so that thy may Know; as above and so below.”
“might not be a guy,” she says. “very gender-specific of you, ray.”
“my apologies,” i say to the sky, “that was crass of me. you can be whatever gender you want, giant sky voice. or many genders. or all. whatever works.”
“i’m still like… what the hell does that middle part about knowing mean. like. also. crack open a grammar book for the modern century.”
i “hmm” into my snapple. my running theory is that our time spent as mortals meant we knew what it was exactly we were fighting for. i don’t tell her this because my entire evidence is how i feel about her, is how every day with her made it worth it, how being her best friend was the best experience i ever had. but like. it’s chill.
“it’s a broken capitalist heaven economy,” i say. “war eternal?”
she laughs. i love it when she laughs. “at least you can be sure you’re going to the place that profits off of all of this,” she says. “heaven’s got the big guy.”
i make a note in the back of my throat and face her. “you don’t know that,” i whisper, “we’ve talked about this.”
she laughs in a new way, a sad one, staring out ahead of her. “yeah, you and your bible. ‘angels and demons are the same species but separated geospatially,’ blah blah blah, either one of us could be the damned soul, blah blah blah.”
“hey, i did research,” i say. “and i’m right, a lot of angels are…”
“goatish? have devil horns? light on fire?”
“micheal was like, forty to ninety percent fire.”
“micheal also was like, always an angel. he don’t need to question anything. fire? sure, he good. he was born angel.”
“i don’t know they’re like, born,” i say. i look up at her. “but i’m serious. i got like sixteen eyes and counting -”
“nine, you have nine”
“and like that’s not counting the spiritual aspect of this whole thing since -“
“oh my god, ray,” she says, sighing, “not this whole ‘morally impure’ thing again.”
“i’m just saying,” i don’t like how upset she is, but the more i try to fix it, the worse it is, “i’m not, like, a good person! i’m -” i stop myself two milliseconds before finishing the loaded end of that sentence about her, and how i feel, and the terrible gap before us.
she whips around and looks at me. just really looks, like i’m pinned there by her. for a second, she’s my best friend, not angel or demon, and she’s glaring.
“that’s not true and you know it,” she says, her voice barely over a whisper, “don’t say that kind of thing about yourself.”
i sigh and pull my hair, dropping her gaze. “i’m sorry,” i say, “i’m just… this whole thing is messed up and, like… i’m not… an angel, i guess.”
“i thought you said that the original angels were all-powerful and scary,” she says, “that purity was a new myth.”
i stare at her. how do i explain to my best friend that i’m taking advantage of her just by being around her; how every time she hugs me i mean more by it, how holding hands with her gives me little shocks that keep me happy.
“you know what?” she says, kicking off the hood, “fuck this, let’s go back to my place and let’s get drunk.”
we do.
late in the night i wake up and she’s not in bed anymore. i’m still drunk and my mouth feels like a trash bin. i blink in the light of her room, grab my toothbrush, put toothpaste on both tongues as an appetizer, just to dispel the taste. stretch the gross chicken-finger nubs of a sore back with six pairs of soon-to-be wings and stumble to her bathroom.
she’s sitting on the floor and her horns are gone. bandages bloodied with green ooze sit around her. black scars hide up in her hairline.
“how’s it going?” she says casually.
i drop everything onto the sink and drop to her side. “oh my god,” i whisper, my hands touching her warm skin, “what happened?”
she looks at me. our faces are so close i have to stop myself from shaking, but the more i look at what she’s done, the worse i feel for her. i push back her matted hair and reach for new gauze to wipe away the blood she missed. her hand loops gently around one of my wrists, not restraining, just comforting.
“it’s okay, ray,” she says softly, “i found a tutorial on the internet. how to cut off goat horns. it didn’t hurt that bad, i promise. like, when we pierced our own cartilage back in middle school hurt a lot worse.”
i stare at her. “you cauterized your own wounds and you expect me to calm down.” i clean up her face frantically. i feel tears, but i’m not sure in which pair of eyes.
“i didn’t say i cauterized anything.”
“it’s clear!” i almost burst into a thousand pieces, holding her round face in my hands, struggling to lower my voice, “it’s clear.”
“i’m okay,” she says, half-smiling, “i’m okay.”
“you should have woken me up,” i say. “what kind of -“
she kisses me and i understand why she’s got the power of fire. if i immolate, i don’t notice. we move from bathroom floor to hallway to bedroom. her hands and my hands and our bodies almost feel human.
when we finally separate, her voice is low. “fuck,” she says, “i wasn’t supposed to do that. you weren’t supposed to know.”
i’m breathless. i can’t form words. “know…?” i manage.
she leans in. kisses me again. “i like you, ray,” she whispers, “i like you a lot, you giant six-winged bug.”
“in a gay way?” i ask.
she laughs. “the gayest.”
“okay,” i say. i’m shaking. “because, like, i like you too. like. in the gay way.” my voice sounds different, high and tense and fluttery. almost too loud, even though we’re both whispering.
“your wings kind of look like chicken fingers,” she says, “or like, really big nipples.”
“you know,” i say, “i think the same thing.” i stare at her. all of my eyes, on her, on this girl, on the girl i can’t have, on the girl i couldn’t have even if we weren’t magical beings from a metaphysical plane, because we’re best friends and that matters more than anything.
i think of us and of our future and of her, surrounded by the pieces of her horns, and of my wings, and of the world. i think of the bad movie we watched and how it was good because she was next to me. i think of the words of the giant sky voice and how we’re supposed to fight in an eternal war and how i do know, how i’ve always known, how love was the only thing that was worth fighting for, how she has always been my angel. how i would tear heaven down in order to have her and that’s how i know: i’m the one who fell long ago.
she deserves heaven and holy and the best things. she deserves more than a twelve-year-old’s silly plotline, more than to be forced into fate, more than to be a drafted soldier. she deserves a better life than this.
look out, god, i think, i’ve got a hell of a bone to pick.
“i love you,” i whisper, “and i have loved you for a long time.”
she kisses me.
in the morning, i’m gone.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH What the fuck AAAAAAH This is glorious!
the one thing about american gods that i’m
liking is that all the gods who are supposed to be black are black AND dark skinned. like i shouldn’t be happy over a tv show meeting basic casting requirements but still it’s nice.
