Sonmi's Couples, Characters and Writing - Posting Welcome

[horchata]

I'm definitely in!

[Lierre]

Me too!

[Sonmi-451]

He woke slowly, as if pulling himself out of the ocean and up onto the rocks of some strange land after thousands of miles at sea, and he took a deep breath as he opened his eyes and smiled at his redemption when he saw a goddess there sitting on the end of the sofa next to where his head lay.
“Hi,” Sarah murmured as she returned his grin, and he echoed the greeting as he shifted so that he could rest his head in her lap.
He pressed his face against her thighs and felt her, small in stature but not weak, slight but not diminutive, deceptively thin-looking for all of the strength within her, and a smile flitted across his lips as he was reminded of how good she felt. She smelled good, too, he realized as he turned his head so that he could look directly up at her, like laundry soap and a faint perfume and coffee and a sort of alertness that he certainly didn't possess at this hour of the morning. But her scent was one of sadness to him as well, of melancholy and a deep ache in his chest and a thousand other things he knew only in their collective form as heartbreak.
“How are you?” she questioned quietly as she stared down at him, and he did his best to ignore her scent and respond with what he knew he was supposed to say.
“Much better now that you're here,” he replied, and he gave her a small smile as he looked up at her. After a moment of silence, he felt that he could keep it inside no longer and found himself compelled to add, reaching a hand up to touch her cheek gently, “God, you're beautiful from this angle.”
And she was; with her light brown hair pulled up in a bun and her dancing amber eyes and her adorable nose and her smile that could charm his wits away in a microsecond, she was perfect to him. She was everything he could have ever wanted, and yet...
“Don't let Michelle hear you say that,” Sarah told him, smiling despite herself as she gazed down at him, and it made the situation just a fraction more bearable, to see that she actually appreciated his compliments of her. “She's already pretty jealous of you, and I don't think it'd help either one of our causes to have her hear you tell me that.”
“Mhmm.” He made a sound low in the back of his throat that conveyed unwilling agreement to Sarah's plan – he wished for all the world that Michelle would just stop being jealous, but he supposed that he certainly couldn't blame her, given who he was and how very openly felt about her girlfriend – and he lifted his head off Sarah's lap to sit up, stretching his back and neck and shoulders luxuriously and being rewarded with many joints popping as he sat upright next to Sarah on the couch.
“Hi,” he said as he looked over at her, a smile on his face, and he pulled her into him, wrapping his arms around her and almost cradling her against him. For all that she was strong despite her small size, he knew himself to be far stronger than she was, and he feared very desperately that he would break her if he squeezed too hard.
“I'd almost forgotten how big you are,” she told him when he finally let her go, and there was a grin curling her lips as she looked up at him. “Six-eight doesn't seem nearly as long as it is tall.”
“Well, I promise I'm six-eight both ways,” he replied with a smile of his own, and in that moment he felt as if he had never possessed more of a desire to kiss her or more of a fracturing in his chest over the fact that he never would, that she would be never be his, that he could have just about any woman he wanted except for the one he desired, and in that moment he cursed fate so fiercely that he was half-surprised that his life didn't end right then and there simply out of the universe's anger at his words.
“Do you want some coffee?” Sarah's words brought him back into the present and out of the spell thoughts of destiny had cast over him, and he nodded in confirmation as he looked over at her for a long moment.
“Two spoonfuls sugar, one shot of creamer, right?” she asked, and he nodded again, and then, just as she was about to get up, he could contain himself no longer and leaned over to kiss her gently on the cheek, her skin smooth and warm and lovely beneath his lips.
“I love you,” he told her as she rose to her feet, and she gave him a smile that was oh so dangerous for how beautiful it was and the sort of fantasies it could give him as she echoed, “I love you too, Gruffen,” and then made her way into the kitchen.
He stayed on the sofa, staring after her both wistfully and desperately like his chance for salvation was disappearing with her, before finally letting her slip out of his sights and sigh as his shoulders slumped and the pain that her presence had worked like a sedative on creeped back into him. He pulled his shirt up slowly, his eyes flickering over his tattoo of a black wolf standing on the right side of his ribs with its head turned around to look out – the one tattoo that he had that was for himself – to let out a deep exhalation of worry at himself when his gaze found the wound on the other side of his body, a row of teeth marks far bigger than anything a normal person would ever get bitten by, and he could tell from the way the injury was radiating heat that it was doing its damnedest get infected.
“It's a good thing I'm immortal, because I'd be long dead by now if I weren't,” he muttered under his breath, and, as he lowered his shirt back down into his original position, the bite mark seemed to throb even worse, as if admitting its existence had also allowed the pain it caused to be felt by him.
“What the ---- did you do to yourself?” an exasperated and annoyed and yet also most definitely worried voice asked from the base of the stairs, and Gruffen looked up to find his sister standing there, her arms folded across her chest and her absolutely stunning facial features pulled down by her concern for him and her piercing golden eyes – the same color as his – locked on his and her medium-blond hair pulled up in a ponytail, and it took him only a split-second of observation to see what she was wearing and know that she was just about to go for a run.
“Colossus,” he responded shortly, and she sighed deeply as she took steps towards him and then stopped when she was about six feet away so she could still look down on him without looming over him.
“One of these times you're not going to come home if you keep on doing this ----, Gruf,” she told him, her gaze glued to his and not letting him look away and escape the truthfulness of her words, “and I'm worried that that day is not that far away, because with all of this that you're doing, all these missions you're going on, all these monsters you're killing, you seriously seem like you want to die.”
“That's the issue, isn't it, Lizzie,” he murmured as he held her stare. “I am just a walking corpse, because some day I will die. Some day I will encounter a monster I cannot beat and I will perish trying to destroy it. That's the hero's fate, particularly the immortal hero's.”
“Just because that's maybe going to be your fate doesn't mean you're dead now because of it. Everyone mortal dies at some point, and yet the vast majority of them don't sit around and mope about how their end is approaching quicker with every passing moment.” She looked him straight in the eye for a moment's pause before adding, “You can still live knowing that you're going to die, Gruf; I do.”
“What do you mean?” Her words immediately made him a very unpleasant combination of suspicious and worried, and before he could even articulate his entire question his head was filled with a mixture of horrified recollections and nightmare visions of her attempting to take her own life. She may bear the scars on her arms as proof of how little she had wanted to live then, but he wore the internal ache deep in his chest as evidence as to how much she had not just damage herself but him with those actions.
“Gruf, I have no intention of living forever,” she said, holding his gaze evenly. “I don't know if I'm going to be the reason why I die – although, given that it's me that we're talking about, I probably will be – but I don't see myself living an incredibly long time. I think that maybe I'll just get burned out after a few centuries or a millennia or so and I just won't want to be around anymore.” She shrugged and then remained quiet for a second before finishing, “In some ways I'm already tired of life now, so I just can't see myself lasting for forever. Cassandra and Kellan can give it their best shot, but me? Eternal life just isn't my thing.”
Gruffen gazed over at his sister for a few long moments, his heart hurting at the thought of his sister's death – if he was to be honest, he loved her a great deal, probably a lot more than most older brothers love their little sisters – before he finally sighed and responded, “I certainly don't think I'll be living forever either, because I do think that the hero's fate will be mine.”
He allowed there to be silence for a second or two as he thought about all of the great heroes, all of the truly incredible human beings that had done feats truly worth remembering, and how all of them had died tragically, because all of them had been overcome by the power of their foes. It was unfair, he believed, that good should be so fleeting and sparse among only a few members of the population while evil existed forever and had a faceless, overwhelming, interminable hoard of monsters and humans and creatures at its disposal to dispatch the threats it found. It was not easy being a hero, that was for certain.
“How do Cassandra and Kellan do it?” He surprised even himself with his inquisition, but he stood by his statement as he looked up again to meet Lizzie's gaze. “How have they, heroes like they are, escaped the hero's fate for five thousand years?”
“Cassandra's not really a hero; she's too flawed and cynical and yet in some ways cares too much about humans to be a hero,” Lizzie responded, and Gruffen nodded in contemplative agreement as he thought about Cassandra as her war-hero self. “She's more of an antihero, because she does good not for the sake of beating evil but for her own personal agenda and maybe in order to save people too. And Kellan, for all of his great philosophy, isn't really a hero either, because he's not really the kind to go out and fight and therefore isn't the kind to incur the hero's fate onto himself.”
Lizzie paused for a moment, her eyes distant with thought, before she raised her stare to catch Gruffen's again and add quietly, “You know, I think that being a true hero requires a martyrdom of sorts, because being a true hero requires living with the knowledge that the hero's fate will become yours someday. That's why Cassandra's not really a hero; she's never intended to die on the job, although a lot of people throughout the centuries have given it their best shot to kill her. But you and I, we're heroes, I guess, because we're both martyrs: I'd burn to show people that I can't be controlled and you'd hang yourself up on a cross for honor or valor or some stupid ---- like that.”
“Some stupid ----?” He arched an eyebrow at her choice of words, and she was forced to concede, “I guess why I burn isn't any less stupid, and why you'd burn is a lot more noble than why I would anyway, so I guess really I'm the one who gets myself torched for stupid ----.”
“You've burned for freedom and to show people that they do not have to lie down and be controlled,” Gruffen murmured, his eyes on his sister's. “That's not stupid by any means.”
“That's the thing, Gruf: I didn't really burn for their freedom. I mean, sure, I really didn't like how they were being trodden upon and walked all over and dominated by El Nieve, but my main motivation behind defying El Nieve was not for the rights of the people in the Sections, because as far as I was concerned they were chicken---- and weren't strong enough to actually stand up and fight for their rights themselves, and I don't take kindly or admire very much cowards. No, the main reason I burned was to show El Nieve that I could not be controlled, that I would rather die on my feet than live on my knees bowing to their whims. I torched myself like I did out of defiance, plain and simple; I wanted to show them that they had underestimated me in thinking that they could get me to do what they wanted, and what better way to beat their system than to die and therefore lose in the Triple Crown they groomed me to win?”
Gruffen stayed quiet for a long moment, gazing over at his sister as he looked into her golden eyes so full of pain and sacrifice and remembrance – he thought that her martyrdom came through more in her eyes than in anything else, that her gaze bore the scars of what she had even more distinctly than her body did – before finally murmuring, “No matter what you say, I don't believe that you did what you did just for defiance. I think that you saying that you did is just a way for you to refuse to take credit for what you've done, because you truly seem to have a chronic aversion to admitting that you've done things right.”
“Done things right?” He regretted his last statement as soon as it was out of his mouth, and he could tell from the arch of her eyebrows and the incredulity in his voice that she certainly isn't going to let that one slide. “Because of me 'doing things right,' thousands of people are dead, including thirty children. Because of me 'doing things right,' the man that I love is covered in burn scars and is with someone who may very well turn out to be a grenade for him that will explode and inflict maximum pain on him. Because of me 'doing things right,' I find myself questioning my sanity on any given day because everywhere I turn I see ghosts of the past that refuse to stay dead because they still have the right to haunt me for what I have done. Because of me 'doing things right,' I see Marshall and Marcus and Abby not just when I sleep but when I wake, reminding me of how I've failed. Because of me 'doing things right,' I've burned myself out so bad that I'm tired, Gruffen. I'm tired of living like this, of waking up every night with images of the dead branded into the back of my eyelids, of rolling over in bed and feeling my heart crush in on itself when I see the scars Luke bears because of me, of trying my best to act like things are alright, like I'm alright, when things aren't and I'm not and maybe none of it ever will be again. In some ways, Gruf, I'm so tired of living that I wish I could just die now. I try to take comfort in what you say I've done, in how I gave people freedom and led a rebellion against a corrupt government and helped millions of people actualize their individual fates. I try to find solace in what Frobisher talked about: “Now I'm a spent firework; but at least I've been a firework,” right? But it doesn't work, Gruf; nothing works to get rid of these ghosts or this thing in my chest that aches constantly or the compulsion with hanging myself up on crosses that first caused that pain in my chest. God, but nothing works.”
“Lizzie,” Gruffen breathed, unable to bear seeing his beautiful, incredible, wonderful sister in agony for any longer without doing anything about it, and he rose to his feet to cross over to her and embrace her, his arms wrapping around her as he felt her long, lean, hard body against his. She returned his hug halfheartedly at first, putting her arms about him just because that was what social convention dictated, but after a moment, when he didn't pull back, she seemed to realize that he wasn't letting her go anytime soon and hugged him back fiercely, and it was then that Gruffen found himself thinking about how Lizzie never crying was almost worse than if she cried a lot, because there was this deep dark aching emptiness that she carried around inside of her constantly that existed just because she kept it all inside. He wished there was some way he could compel her to change that, to actually let everything out and stop hiding her emotions from the people who loved her and cared about her, but she was his sister, a Lightning, after all, and so he knew exactly how stubborn she would be till the end and therefore that he wouldn't get her to talk unless she chose to. And he supposed that he had gotten her to talk, with what she had just said to him, but that felt more to him like a validation of her feelings than an actual release of them, a deepening of that black hurt in her chest instead of a lightening of it.
After a few long moments that seemed for all the world like their own eternities, she finally pulled back and gazed up at him to murmur, “Sorry about that. It just seems like every time we're supposed to be talking about something to do with you, my ---- gets dragged into the middle of it.”
“Well, you have a lot heavier ---- than I do,” he responded with a small smile that he hoped was comforting, and she shook her head in disagreement – like the part of him that knew her for how she was really was instead of how he wanted her to be knew she would.
“You have a prophecy hanging over your head dooming you to be eternally lost from yourself unless you find this 'woman who doesn't allow herself to feel' and have her lead you back to who you really are.” Lizzie stared up at him, pausing for a split-second, before adding, “I think that ----'s heavier than mine, because I chose my life path. I chose to string myself up, to be the pariah and then the martyr, but you? You didn't have a drop of choice or influence on the matter.”
“That's the thing, Lizzie: I've actually been learning how to not let the prophecy control me,” he told her, and it made him feel irrationally special and happy when she stood up straighter to pay closer attention to what he had to say. For all that he had loved other women romantically, he realized abstractedly as he continued to speak, he cared for the two women he would never love romantically – his sister and his mother – most of all. “Just because the prophecy says that I won't find myself without this woman doesn't mean that I shouldn't try to find myself, and I have been trying, and in some ways I have been finding myself. I've been finding myself in Sarah and Sebastian, in the people that I love that the prophecy ignores like they don't matter, and you know, besides the fact that it's stuck a fate over my head that I can't escape, I think that that might be what upsets me most about the prophecy: it disregards everything else in my life except for my lostness and the woman to make me less lost, like all I am is my lostness and my entire life is finding her. And I don't know, maybe at some point down the road, when I get so desperate to find myself, my entire life will be searching for this woman, but right now it's not and it won't be anytime soon, because I have Sarah and I love her so desperately and I have Sebastian and I love him so desperately and I have you and I love you so desperately and I'm not letting go any of you anytime soon just because the prophecy says that maybe it's my fate to do so.”
He paused for a moment, staring down at her, before ending, “I may not be able to escape my fate, but I damn well can fight it in little ways.”
“And you say I'm the brave one,” Lizzie murmured, and he would have sworn to the heavens that that was pride in her trademark smirk.
There was a long moment of quiet, this miniature infinity one of contentedness instead of awkwardness, before finally Lizzie looked back up at him and caught his gaze with her sad, knowing golden one and questioned quietly, “It hurts, though, doesn't it? Being around Sarah?”
He smiled bitterly, a faint echoing of a grin that he didn't even mean in its wanness, before replying, “It is incredible, how much pain my senses can cause my chest. It's like there's nerve endings attached between my eyes and my nose and my ears and my fingers and my tongue that all lead to my heart just for the purpose of inflicting the maximum amount of direct agony when I'm around her.”
“That's why you still go out, isn't it?” Lizzie's eyes were sharp on his, and the thought that his sister would make an incredible interrogator idly flickered across the small part of his mind that wasn't busy attempting to find a way out of answering her inquisition because he was in no mood to be reminded of its hurt. “You're trying to forget her.”
“Yes,” he answered simply, because there was nothing else he could say. “I find myself in her, and then it hurts so much to realize that she'll never be mine, that she's not the woman to help me complete the process, that hell, there's not even the remotest possibility of her and I ever being her and I, that then I go out and try to lose her in a casual ----. But I'm not the same person anymore that I used to be – I'm not the sort of man who can be distracted that way anymore – and so afterwards as I'm lying in bed with some girl that I don't know and that I'm sure I'd hate if I did all I can think about is Sarah: how she smiles, how she laughs, how her favorite perfume that she wears all the time smells, how she's never given up on me even though I've done my damnedest to give up on myself, and I just fall more in love with her with every single moment that passes. And you know, the possibility that lingers in the back of my mind and every once in a while masquerades as a hope that she maybe is the 'woman who doesn't allow herself to feel,' that she maybe is the person of my prophecy, scares the living ---- out of me, because what if that means that I'm destined to be forever alone for the rest of my life? What if that means that I'll spend the next fifty years or so loving her desperately and hopelessly and inexorably and then I'll spend the rest of eternity after that trying to nurse my permanently-fractured heart? What if that is my fate, Lizzie? What if that, above being lost from myself for all eternity, above never knowing who I really am, is my fate? I... I don't know if I could bear that; I think not knowing who I am but at least having someone I can love and who can love me back like I want would be better than that, than knowing who I am but never being able to love anyone besides a woman I can never have.”
Lizzie shook her head slowly here, and suddenly Gruffen was getting very different signals from his sister. There was sort of a metallic red feeling to the scent she was giving off; it was as if she was... angry with him. “You know, Gruf, sometimes you really can be unbelievably ------- selfish, because how do you think Sebastian feels?”
His name, his incredible, painful, beautiful, stunning, perfect, aching name, on her tongue was like a razorblade-tipped whip that she lashed out at him with, and of course she knew exactly how to wield it so as to make him bleed the most. He couldn't help it; he flinched, and she shook her head again, her eyes burning when she looked back up. “You talk on and on about how much it hurts you to be around Sarah, but at least she's an easy person to love. Sure, she may be a lesbian; sure, she may be head-over-heels in love with her girlfriend and so you could be a turnip for all she's attracted to you; but at least she doesn't go out and nearly get herself killed. But you, it seems like you want to get eaten by that drakon, it seems like you want to be Sebastian's grenade, and that's not fair to him. I know that it can be hard for you to think outside of yourself, but try this once, please, for your best friend's sake.”
Her words stung like a swarm of angry bees, and before he knew it he was covered in hives that he knew he deserved, tiny pinpricks of pain all over that hurt all the worse for the knowledge that they were what he had coming. “Since you already know how much it hurts to love Sarah, as easy to love as she is, imagine what it'd be like to feel the way you do for her if she were suicidal or on a death wish or morose and melancholy and constantly hanging her head and fighting internal battles that you can't help her with and can only stand on the sidelines and cheer her on against some unseen monster that you don't really even understand, that you only know as fate the -----. Imagine how that would feel, and you know how it must hurt for Sebastian to love you.”
Lizzie held his gaze for a long second of silence, her eyes as sharp as her words in the morning sunlight streaming into the living room through the windows, before finally continuing, “But he still sticks around for you. He still calls you, he still wants to spend time with you, he still loves you, Gruf, and he still does his best to enjoy his time with you and the lot that he's been dealt. So pull your head out of your ass and do the same with Sarah, because even if you won't do it for yourself, do it for her, because she does love you, even if not in the way that you want, and so every time you put her off, you keep your distance because you don't want to be hurt yourself, you hurt her, and she sure as hell doesn't deserve. She sure as hell doesn't deserve you, honestly – if fate were fair she'd have a much better person in love with her – but fate's a ----- and so she's stuck with you, and so the least you can do is step it up and actually be there for both her and yourself.”
Something hot had been bubbling up inside of Gruffen the whole time Lizzie had been speaking, and suddenly it emerged, like a sword pulled out of a forge, sharp and scalding anger at her and her accusations of him when she didn't understand exactly how he felt and what he was trying to do about it all.
“You think I don't know how much I hurt Sebastian?” he breathed quietly as he gazed down at his sister, and he could tell from the way she suddenly dropped her gaze that she knew she had touched upon a dangerous nerve. “You think I don't recognize what I do to the people I love, and you think I torture myself over it every second of every ------- day?”
He shook his head and clenched his jaw for a moment before meeting her stare again and continuing, “My biggest fear in my life right now, above everything else, above even the prophecy and the fate it's laid out for me, is not if Sebastian will leave – because I know he will, at some point, because at some point he's going to realize that I'm not worth sticking around for – but when, and I have nightmare visions about suddenly one day him just coming in to talk to me and telling me that he can't do it anymore, that it hurts too much for him to stay, that, for his sake, he must leave because I am too painful for him to be around and love anymore. That is my biggest fear, Lizzie: losing my best friend and the only person of my gender that I have ever been able to truly connect with because he is in love with me and I am not a good enough or easy enough person for him to keep on loving and being around. You think I don't hate myself for how I hurt him every ------- second that I'm around him? 'All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.' There's a reason why he uses that quote to describe me, Lizzie, and I literally can see why when I'm around him. I can see the pain in the corner of his eyes sometimes, when I catch him off guard after a few moments of him just looking over at me; he tries to hide it by looking away but he doesn't have nearly as good of a poker face as you do. And Sarah – God, Sarah, how I hate myself for what I do to her too. But there are just some times when I can't face her, because I think that my heart would break from such an overwhelming mixture of happiness and agony that I couldn't withstand it anymore. Call me a coward, a selfish bastard, if you wish, but at least give me the benefit of the doubt in the fact that I am trying to be better, to be someone both Sarah and Sebastian deserve.”
Gruffen paused for a long moment, and he was almost surprised to find that he wasn't done speaking yet, that there was still a pocket of deep-seated anger boiling inside of him at his sister. “And you, you're so ------- hypocritical when it comes to some of this ----!”
“Hypocritical?” She arched her eyebrows at him incredulously, her voice stunned but her tone dangerous, and yet he wasn't afraid of her snapping at him; she could undoubtedly hand him his ass on a silver platter if it really came down to that but all he cared about was getting out what he had to say before she absolutely destroyed him.
“Yes, hypocritical, because I know you better than you think I do, Lizzie, and I know that the reason why some of the time you cancel on Sam suddenly is because it hurts you too much to be around him, because you can't bear seeing how much he loves you and realizing that he's never going to have a life that doesn't revolve around you, that he's never going to have a wife or children or any existence of his own that it is independent from you. I know that, no matter how much you love Luke, there's a part of you that hates yourself so powerfully for what you've done to him that sometimes you can't bear to even look at him, because he's just walking proof of what you think are your personal failures to save him from the fate you laid out for yourself, and I know that that part of you will never die, that it will only grow even larger when he dies. I know that you will continue to loathe yourself for the rest of eternity over what you think you have done to the man that you love, to your husband, to the person you will care for for the rest of your existence and far beyond that, if there is an afterlife, and I know that, because of that, you may never have a real, solid, genuine relationship with him, that you may never be able to look at him without feeling like your chest is caving in on itself, and you hate yourself even more for that fact. I know you, Lizzie, and I know that, while you may not give a ---- about what happens to yourself, that pain and anguish that you experience on your behalf are all secondary and easily dismissed, you care so desperately about the people that you love, and you use them like ammunition against yourself to validate your shooting yourself in the heart over and over and over again. They are your rocks, Lizzie, your thousand-pound weights that you carry around with you constantly so that you always have something to hold over yourself, that you always have some reason to support your compulsion with martyrdom and therefore your constant underlying desire to die. God, Lizzie, I know that feeling so well – I know what it's like to hate yourself for what's happened for the people you really care about – because I have that same clenching in my heart every time I look over at you, the sister I failed to save from herself when that was my mandate as your older brother. But I failed, Lizzie; I failed you, and I am so sorry. I am so sorry.”
Suddenly he felt as if every square inch of his body weighed a thousand pounds, and he hated that sensation even worse than just crying, because it was such a desperate, helpless, hopeless weight that it seemed as if he would struggle under its crushing power for the rest of eternity, that it almost felt as if it would have been better to just keep everything inside and not let any of it. But it was out now, his demons and hers, and, even though they were on the prowl together, maybe they could be better killed now that they had been set free.
“Gruf...” That was all she managed to get out before she half-staggered forward into his arms, and he held her as tightly as she gripped him, and they stood there for a few long moments, not speaking, just using each other to stay standing, before finally she pulled back and gazed up at him in quiet for a second.
“I'm sorry for not being able to save you from your fate,” she murmured in a constricted voice, and he responded in an equally-low tone, “I'm sorry for not being able to save you from yourself.”
She watched him for a moment longer before suddenly a bitter grin broke out across her face as she dropped her stare and muttered, “Boy, we make two ------- great halves of the Broken People's Club, don't we?”
“We're so broken that I'm not even sure you can make a whole person out of us put together,” he added, sharing in her wan smile, and her half-grimace deepened at his quip as she shook her head again and then looked back up at him to murmur, “You think we're ever going to learn to be whole? You think we're ever going to heal ourselves?”
“Hell no,” he replied emphatically, “because I think we'd miss the club too much if we ever did.”
Her fake smile got a tinge of genuine amusement at his statement, but any tiny amount of actual happiness that she may have had disappeared as quickly as it showed up and she nodded her agreement with his words as she said, “Yeah, you're right. We're never going to change because we're too comfortable in the hellholes we've stuck ourselves in.”
There was a long moment of silence, during which time she looked up at him and he gazed down at her and found his heart clenched almost beyond survivability with worry over what she was going to do with herself in the future, over if there was anything he could do to prevent her from continuing to be a pariah, because he knew that, if she kept down that path, she wouldn't be alive for much longer, because that sort of occupation tends to be fatal in the end.
Finally she broke the quiet by questioning, appearing for all the world younger, perhaps even possessing fewer years of existence to her name than the nineteen she actually owned and usually far surpassed, “When you said that you felt that same clenching in your heart every time you looked over at me, did you really mean it?”
“Yes,” he responded immediately, because he didn't know if he had ever meant anything more genuinely in his entire life. “You're not just my sister, Lizzie; you're the first person I ever loved more than I love myself, before I learned that I'm not a creature worth even self-love, and to this day I think I love you more than even I love Sarah or Sebastian, because you're not just my blood, Lizzie. You're my best friend and the other half of the Broken People's Club and you're the one person I think I really know – I sure as hell know you better than I know myself, at least.”
He cracked a feeble grin at that bad joke there, and Lizzie shook her head in almost exasperated condemnation of it as she gazed up at him. However, she didn't say anything, which gave him the opportunity to add, “You know, I got this for you.”
He held out his left arm and gestured to his forearm, where the ink that spelled out cursive Spanish curled over his skin. “A quote by my sister tattooed on my body for my sister,” he murmured as he stared down at her, and she reached out to run her fingertips over the ink on his skin. Her touch was smooth and gentle and rather cool, and her eyes were calculating as she gazed down at the words that read, “Tengo relámpago en mi sangre. No puedes tomar eso de mí,” and she half-whispered their meaning as she looked down at them.
“I have lightning in my blood. You can't take that away from me.” At the end of her litany, she looked up at him to catch his gaze and give a small smile as she questioned, “You don't actually get any tattoos for yourself, do you? Which is funny, because it's your body and so you should really probably be marking your skin with things pertinent to yourself.”
“I get all my tattoos for myself in the end, but I choose to honor other people that I deem important enough to carry around physical remembrances of for the rest of my life by having such remembrances created on my skin,” he responded, and he reached up to touch the band of interlocking lightning bolts around his right bicep. “This is for my family, as a collective, Mom and Dad and Gwil and you and...”
His expression darkened, like both of theirs always did at the mention of the little brother they had lost, and he finished in a subdued tone that matched his face, “And Timmy.” He paused for a moment, as if honoring the brother they had lost with a moment of silence for Timothy John Lightning's memory, before continuing, “And then this one-” – he lifted up his shirt to reveal the black wolf standing on his ribs with its head turned around to look out at the observer – “-I got for myself.”
“Black Wolf Enterprises,” Lizzie murmured with a small smile curving her lips, naming the proxy company he used as a front in his quests to bring down the corrupt as a sort of online vigilante, an electronic Robin Hood, and he nodded in confirmation.
“Are you going to get any for Sarah or Sebastian?” Lizzie questioned as she gazed up at him, and he shrugged; he didn't know if the physical pain of getting a tattoo for either one of them would make the emotional pain of being around them worse or better, and he wasn't eager to get a tattoo for one of them until he knew that it wouldn't just make his heart as well as his skin smart worse.
“I was thinking of getting that quote from The Road that Sebastian loves so much – 'all things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes' – somewhere on myself for him,” Gruffen replied, and Lizzie nodded in understanding. “And then I don't know what I'd do for Sarah, but I know that, if I were to get a tattoo for Sebastian, I'd get one for Sarah too, because God knows they both deserve a place on my skin after the places they hold in my heart.”
Lizzie nodded again, and Gruffen gazed down at his sister, his beautiful, concrete yet fractured, stolid yet broken, sister, for a moment longer before it vaguely occurred to him that her original purpose had not been to come down and see him and start yelling at him but rather that she intended to be out running and he stepped away to say, “Well, you should go get running-”
“Before we get into another shouting match that maybe actually blows the house down?” she asked with an arched eyebrow and a small smirk on her lips, and he nodded in confirmation; one of the products of their last name and therefore their heritage was that the elements were tied into their emotions, so if the two of them got truly angry with one another then the backlash from the weather responding to their feelings could be genuinely powerful enough to destroy buildings. In fact, Lizzie had even caused a hurricane once when she got angry enough, but that was not her fault in losing control of her emotions but rather the fault of the people who forced her to do the unspeakable things that caused her to have those feelings.
“Alright, I'll get out of your hair,” she told him, and, with her roguish smirk and teasing golden eyes, she was just so Lizzie that he couldn't help but grin himself. “Have fun with Sarah, and don't forget what I told you about pulling your head out of your ass and being the best person you can be for the both of you.”
He bowed his head in understanding of her words – he knew exactly what she was saying and also recognized how right she was, but of course actually following her advice and acting on it would require far more than just a grasping of its concepts – and then watched her exit out the front door with the promise that she'd be back in a little while.
“You and Lizzie have quite interesting discussions,” a voice from behind him murmured, and he whipped around to find Sarah standing there with a cup of coffee in each hand and a small smile tinged with sadness on her face.
Instantly he felt overwhelming guilty, first for the fact that she had to hear his and Lizzie's conversation and second for the fact that he hadn't taken the time or care to assure that Sarah wouldn't hear it, but Sarah knew him just about as well as Lizzie did and so set the cups of coffee down on the coffee table to cross over to him and catch his gaze as she told him gently, “Don't apologize, Gruffen. I'm not looking for you to say you're sorry.”
“Still, you shouldn't have had to hear all that,” he said with a shake of his head, and Sarah took a step back to place her hands on her hips and respond, “You know, it almost seems like you don't want me overhearing your family mini-crises because I'm not important enough to you to have the right to know about your family mini-crises.”
“Sarah, you know it's not that,” Gruffen replied, almost desperate to assure her that his desire for to not have to know about his and his sister's issues wasn't because she wasn't important enough to know about them, and she agreed quietly, some of the edge falling off of her expression, “Yeah, I know.”
She paused for a moment, gazing at him in silence, before finally adding, “I just want to let you know that you can talk to me about any of it or all of it, if you want. I'm here for you, Gruffen, just like you've been here for me.”
She gave him a small smile as she finished, and in that split-second she was so heartbreakingly beautiful and sincere that it was almost physically difficult, as if he were driving a knife deeper and deeper into his chest with every millisecond that he continued to stare down at her, to keep on watching her.
“What is it now?” she questioned quietly, breaking him out of his reverie of agony and drawing his eyes back onto hers, and there were small parts of him that both wished that she didn't know him as well as she did and yet also were almost giddy about the fact that they were close enough that she did.
“You're just... “ he began, and to say that his words left him would be a lie, because in reality they had never existed in his mind in the first place. But that wasn't a new experience for him in regards to her, of course; her presence had very effectively killed his eloquence just about from the moment he first met her. “You're perfect, Sarah, and you're everything that I could ever want, and no matter what my sister says about me needing to pull my head out of my ass for your sake rather than mine, no matter how much I may hate myself and want to change for how I hurt you by staying away from you, there's this deep ache in the bottom of my heart that I get every once in a while when I look over at you and I'm struck by how perfect you are and how much I want you, and I'm not a good enough man to be able to hide that ache or even avoid acting differently because of it. I'm not a good enough man to stay around you twenty-four/seven when it feels like my heart's exuding razorblades from the inside out, and I'm sorry, Sarah, for wanting you like I do and then not being able to be around you because it hurts too bad to not have you.”
Sarah stared up at him for a few long seconds of quiet, her expression and her eyes both thoughtful and troubled and so inherently stunning that it was just naturally agonizing for him to see her in front of him like this, so close to him and yet so far away in reality, before finally she spoke. “Gruffen Mitchell Lightning, I love you, if never in the way that you will desire, and I... it breaks my heart to see yours breaking over me, because you're too perfect and beautiful and incredible to get fractured over me.” She reached a hand up to touch the side of his cheek gently, and another second slipped into a silent oblivion before she continued, “You know, sometimes I curse you for feeling what you do for me, for getting me caught up with you and all of this, with everything that you are, since there is a part of me that wishes very desperately that you had never decided to entrust me with your heart, because I don't think I have gentle enough hands to be able to hold it without hurting you, and every time I hurt you I hurt myself too, because I love you. And so I almost think that it would be better, if you had never grown to love me and I had never grown to love you back in a different way, in a way that breaks both of our hearts, and I also can't help but wonder if there's something wrong with me over the fact that I don't love you back in the way that you love me, because you're perfect, Gruffen. You're incredibly physically attractive and you're brilliant and you can quote movies and songs and books like no other and we even have the same interests in terms of movies and songs and books, and I really, really like you as a person, Gruffen; I have grown to love you more than I have ever loved anyone else as a friend because of how amazing your personality is. And you love me and want me, so much so that I can see it in your eyes every time I just happen to look over at you, and you could give me everything I could ever want, so why don't I love you? What's wrong with me, that I don't love you? Because you're the best I'm ever going to do, Gruffen, male or female, and I know that in my heart; I will never meet and come to know someone half as incredible as you, especially someone who wants me like you do.”
She paused for a moment, her eyes on his, and he kept his silence not because he didn't have anything to say – in reality, he had more things to say than there were probably words for in the English language – but because he could tell that she wasn't done speaking, and he knew that he owed her the chance to get everything out before he took his own opportunity to speak.
“But you helped show me that there's nothing wrong with me, Gruffen, that I am perfectly acceptable as a person and a human being just as I am, even with being attracted to women, and that totally overwhelms any feelings of wrongness I have over not being attracted to you. Granted, sometimes I still wish that I were straight so that then my life would be so much easier because I could just have you and you could just have me and both of us would be happy, but those moments occur fewer and fewer with every day that passes because not only did you help me come out to my parents and have them come to terms with who I really am but you helped me be okay with who I really am too. You helped me accept myself for the person that I am, faults and flaws and issues and all, and for that I am so grateful that you love me and I love you, because I don't know if I'd be nearly this happy in my own skin right now if it weren't for you, Gruffen. I don't know who I'd be right now if it weren't for you, Gruffen; I'm scared out of my wits that I'd still be that quiet, unhappy, depressed person who keeps everything locked up inside and curses herself for the fact that she has an inner battle in the first place, but I think that's really who I'd be, and I don't know if I could bear much longer existing as that person. So thank you, Gruffen, for you, for me, for everything. Thank you.”
She closed the gap between them with a couple steps and wrapped her arms around him, and he clung to her tightly, as if what she had just said to him was a rope to connect them together and, now that he had gotten a grip on it and her again, he would never let her go.
“I love you, Sarah Rachel Parker,” he murmured in her ear, and he stood up with her still in his arms so that her feet dangled a good half a foot off the ground; it almost was astonishing, he idly thought, how much taller he was than her, given that he was six-eight and she around five-five.
He could feel her smile against his shoulder, and after a moment, when he put her back down and let her go some so that she could step back and catch his gaze, she echoed with a grin, “I love you too, Gruffen Mitchell Lightning.”
She was so beautiful in that instance that he couldn't help but recoil as the pain pierced through the happiness and invaded his heart again, and her expression darkened as she looked up at him. However, she didn't say anything for a while, and when she finally spoke her voice was soft and lovely and forced his eyes onto hers as if it was a magnet for his gaze.
“You still want me, don't you?” she murmured quietly, and he nodded warily; he didn't really recognize her tone and he wasn't sure of what to think of something that he didn't know.
“Have me, then, at least for a moment,” she said, and, when he didn't move for a long second, mostly because he wasn't sure if she was actually being serious – not that he had ever known her to joke about such things before, of course, but he didn't put it past himself for this to be some sort of hallucination on his part – she told him with a small, knowing smile, “Go on, I don't bite.”
“Are you... are you sure?” he finally managed to spit out, after his words maneuvered their way through a maze of recollections of the time they slept together, which to this day was the only time he had had sex where it actually mattered and the only time she had ever had sex; as much as he wished he could put that night out of his mind, he never forgot it, and once in a while he even found himself fantasizing about it.
“I'm sure, Gruffen,” she assured him with another faint grin, and, before his mind could even truly register her truthfulness his body had responded to it and he had taken her into his arms again and fit his lips onto hers. She tasted as good as she felt, he realized as he held her, and he leaned into her deeper with every passing moment, wanting her more, wanting more of her, the longer their embrace went on. There was a part of him that desperately wanted to take her shirt off, and then to take his off, and then to pull her down onto the couch and not let her resurface for a good three days at least, but fortunately he was not a bad enough man to let that part of him rule him completely and finally he managed to pull away from her, his breathing coming deeper than usual and his emotions and desires twisted and knotted like a kite string that flew into a tree in a galestorm.
“So.” The quiet word drew his eyes back onto hers, and he gazed down at her to prompt her to finish her inquisition, “How was that?”
“Just a reminder of exactly why I love you,” he responded with a small smile, “and how truly unforgettable you are.”
He reached up to touch the side of her face gently, and he bent down to give her one more kiss, this one on the cheek, before pulling back and looking over at the coffee table where the cups she had gotten out for them still sat.
“Would you care to sit down and actually have our coffee?” he questioned as he turned back to her, and she nodded, a grin quirking her lips as she gazed up at him that didn't go away as she took her seat next to him on the couch.
However, her expression became solemn enough after a few long moments of them sipping coffee in silence, when she gazed over at him and said, “So, tell me about this colossus injury you received. And I swear to God, Gruffen, if you don't tell me the truth I will find a way to make you talk that I am sure you will not appreciate.”

[Tabuu]

Thanks! Also, I may be making something for here, it won't be exactly a story.... You will see when I am finished.

[Lanton]

I love the stories you come up with for your pets, they're really sweet. May I join the Fan Club?

P.S. Strawberry and Raspberry is my favorite. :3

[Tabuu]

Well, here I go..... This is not really a story, but.... Well... I don't know.



My life as of now.... Confusing, right?

[Sonmi-451]

The doorbell rang, and Gruffen looked over at Sarah to have her wave her hand at him in a gesture of release and allowance. “Go answer it, because we both know who it is,” she told him with a small smile, and, despite the fact that he loved rather desperately the person who he knew was at the door, he had to admit that he wasn't quite sure if he completely shared her enthusiasm, because he had to admit that he wasn't quite sure if he wanted to experience such incredible pain at this point in time.
However, he certainly wasn't going to leave his visitor waiting, so he gave Sarah a small smile that he hoped appeared genuine enough to pass her muster – upon occasion, he could be a rather good actor, actually, and could fabricate grins that even she would believe were real – before rising to his feet and crossing over to the front door to say a small prayer to the patron saint of preventing heartbreak – he had no worldly hopes of being able to prevent his pain, so he thought that perhaps testing his luck with the divine that very possibly didn't exist would wield more results than anything he himself could do for himself – before opening the door to find Sebastian standing there, like he expected.
Sebastian looked up upon hearing the door open, and a smile curved slowly across his lips as he saw his friend in front of him.
“Hello,” Sebastian greeted quietly, and Gruffen did his best to return Sebastian's grin as he greeted in his own soft tone, “Sebastian. How are you?”
“Well, thank you,” Sebastian replied with another small grin, and Gruffen stepped aside to let his friend into the house.
“How are you?” Sebastian questioned, turning to Gruffen to gaze up at him, and it made Gruffen's chest ache with two different kinds of pain at the same time, the first due to the existence of Sebastian's love for him, which seemed almost as integral a part of Mr. Luna as the color of his eyes, and the second because of the self-loathing that lived right on next to and because of the adoration. Sebastian may have been more comfortable with himself and his sexuality than Sarah was before Gruffen met her, but Gruffen certainly couldn't blame Sebastian for not being totally at ease with the fact that he was in love with his flamingly-heterosexual best friend.
“Don't listen to whatever nonsense he tells you about being alright,” Sarah's voice came from the living room, and a moment later Ms. Parker herself came into their line of sight to stand at the end of the hallway about ten feet away from them with her arms folded across her chest and a small, teasing smile of the sort that just made Gruffen fall more in love with her every moment he was around her on her lips. “He has a nice row bite marks in his side from where a colossus 'nipped' him-” – Sarah used finger-quotes to display her condemnation of and disagreement with his terms, and he couldn't help but smile at the gesture – “-and he and Lizzie got into a shouting match earlier. But besides that I suppose he's perfectly fine, if you ignore all of the usual issues and neuroses.”
Sarah gave him a teasing grin that warmed him from the inside out as she gazed over at him, but her eyes soon moved onto Sebastian when Sebastian said, “It's been one of those days, hm?”
“Yeah, one of those days,” Sarah agreed, and she and Sebastian moved towards one another to meet in about the middle of the hallway and exchange a hug. Gruffen didn't really pretend to understand the friendship between the girl he loved and his best friend who loved him, but he was very certainly glad that they got along well instead of fighting or being jealous of one another, like they could have been if they weren't as amiable like they were.
“How are you, Ms. Parker?” Sebastian murmured in Sarah's ear as he held her, and when he pulled back he gazed down at her with an expectant smile on his face to have her respond, “I'm well. It's always nice to spend time with him, you know?”
Sarah peered around Sebastian's shoulder to look at Gruffen as she spoke, and she gave him a small smile as she ended that both made him incredibly happy, because it revealed how genuine she was being, and incredibly guilty, because he couldn't say that he always felt that same way. God, how wonderful they both were, that they would stick around just for his sake, and how awful he was, that he did things that tested their willingness to stick around. How truly lucky he was and how truly unlucky they were.
Sebastian turned to regard Gruffen as well, and the mixture of emotions in Mr. Luna's eyes, the love and lust and self-loathing and sadness all combined into one swirling tempest with his pupil as the eye of the storm reminded Gruffen very powerfully of that quote that Sebastian always used to describe him: “All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.”
Gruffen was Sebastian's thing of grace and beauty, and he supposed that that was a fair description of himself, for he was graceful and beautiful in a way that no human would ever be, thanks to his godly father. And he knew himself to be held very dearly to Sebastian's heart as well; he knew himself to be the sole – and perhaps permanently only – love of Sebastian's life. And by God, did he have a provenance in pain, a birth in grief and ashes, for Sebastian, because everything good that Sebastian felt for him – the Gruffen that he had come to love, essentially – was also mixed with and entangled in sadness and disgust at himself and a desire for things to be different, for him to just love his friend as a friend. Gruffen knew that the self-loathing Sebastian experienced was not so much over the fact that he was in love with a man but due to the identity of the man that he was in love with, and yet in some ways that just made things worse, because it forced Gruffen to realize that Sebastian would not be so conflicted, would not be in so much, would not suffer so much continuously, if he only cared for a different person, if he just did not love Gruffen.
Sebastian and Sarah stood side-by-side for a long moment that felt to Gruffen like an eternity of regretful reflection, of wanting things to be different so badly that he was willing to pay any price to change them and yet also knowing that there was nothing he could do to change things, of recognizing that all of the faults were not in themselves but in their stars, for who they loved and who they wished they did or didn't, before finally the two people he loved as much as he did his family even though they shared not a drop of blood shifted from their positions beside one another as Sarah guided Sebastian into the living room with the murmur of, “Here, I'll get you some coffee.”
Gruffen knew that Sarah wasn't just getting Sebastian some coffee, that she was also leaving them alone for a spell to talk over anything they might have wanted privacy for, and his gratitude for her actions was all twisted up in a desperate desire to not be left alone with Sebastian because he didn't know if he could face the pain of his relationship with Sebastian head-on without someone else there to temper it. However, social convention also had a say in his actions, and for the time being that subsumed his warring emotions and pushed him to follow Sebastian and Sarah into the living room, which then just left him and Sebastian when Sarah went into the kitchen.
“Can I see it?” Sebastian questioned quietly, and Gruffen gazed down at his friend in incomprehension for a moment as part of him idly noticed how very clearly he could see what it was that caused women to stare at Sebastian almost as long and ardently as they stared at him. Sebastian was incredibly conventionally physically attractive, with thick, close-cropped dark brown hair and medium brown eyes that just sang for the world all of the brilliance of their owner and a lean, muscled frame of around six-two; coupled with his intelligence and personality and the fact that he possessed a doctorate at the age of twenty-two, there was no doubt in Gruffen's mind that Sebastian was far more of a catch than he was. “Your wound.”
Oh, Gruffen internally exclaimed, and on the outside he responded, “Sure,” and then braced himself for Sebastian's worried comments as he lifted his shirt up to reveal the bite mark on his side.
“It looks like it's infected,” Sebastian murmured, and he reached out to gently touch the holes in Gruffen's skin with his fingertips. “And it's burning like it's infected too.”
Sebastian looked up at Gruffen to meet his friend's gaze here, and it made Gruffen sigh to himself as the ache in his chest got deeper when he saw that there was not just worry but desire and then self-loathing at that desire in Sebastian's stare.
“You should put something on that; even if you are immortal and won't die from it, you should still try to abate the infection and prevent it from spreading so the recovery process doesn't take longer than necessary.”
Sebastian held Gruffen's stare for a moment longer before finally averting his eyes, and Gruffen stared down at his friend for a second of quiet deliberation, his heart and the part of him that was actually a decent man screaming at him to do one thing and the part of him that knew he really shouldn't, for both of their sakes, screaming at him not to, before finally the first section of himself, the part that would do anything to spare a person he loved pain, won out, and he placed a hand on Sebastian's shoulder to draw Sebastian's gaze onto him and then lean down and kiss Sebastian when his friend was facing him.
Kissing a man truly was much different from kissing a woman, Gruffen realized as he embraced his friend, because he wasn't even the slightest attracted to Sebastian, no matter how attractive of a man Mr. Luna really was. But with Sarah, just the slightest brush of his skin on hers could make him want her like he had never wanted anyone else before in his life, and, unfortunately for Gruffen's plan to comfort Sebastian through physical contact, Sebastian could tell that Gruffen wasn't really doing this because he wanted to but rather because he thought Sebastian wanted him to.
“Gruffen, no,” Sebastian told him, his eyes locked emphatically on those of his friend, after pushing him away, and Gruffen lowered his gaze for a moment and let out a sigh of frustration at himself before daring to look back up at Sebastian and murmur sincerely, “Sorry. I just... you were standing there and you were in so much pain that I just... I wanted to at least try to do something to ease your hurt some, because I couldn't, for my own sake, continue to stand there and watch you suffer and not do anything about it. I couldn't do that, Sebastian, and I'm sorry for that fact, but the truth of the matter is I care too much about you to be unaffected by seeing you ache and I care too little about you to be with you in the way that you want. God, I just have a natural talent for finding the worst sort of balance, don't I?”
Gruffen went to shake his head in disgust at himself to instead have his eyes move onto Sebastian's when he felt his friend's hand on the side of his face, moving his stare back onto Sebastian's again. “Gruffen, you hate yourself far too much for the faults in your stars,” Sebastian murmured as he stared over at his friend, and again Gruffen could do nothing but bow his head in admittance because he knew his friend to be right, that he loathed himself over things he had no control over. “You cannot change how you feel for me, and I cannot change how I feel for you, and you cannot change how you feel for Sarah. If all of us were given the option to alter our emotions and fall in love with a different person, I believe that we probably would, but we do not have that choice and so all we can do is make the most of the abilities and opportunities that we have been given, and we have been granted marvelous abilities and opportunities indeed. Sarah has received a best friend of the sort that will never leave her or abandon her in her time of need and will always be there for her to take her side and help her when she needs assistance. You have received a best friend of a similar nature, I would like to think, even though I am probably not there for you nearly as much as you are for Sarah-” – Gruffen shook his head in disagreement with that statement, as he knew Sebastian to be there for him far more than he was for Sarah, just proof of how bad of a person Gruffen was – “-and I have received a best friend of the sort that I think will be my friend for the rest of my life. If I were able to change the mechanisms of the relationships that led to all of these outcomes, I think that perhaps I would, but I am glad for the results our perhaps-inconvenient feelings have produced, and I would not trade any of it for the world. I would not trade you for the world, Gruffen.”
Sebastian held Gruffen's gaze levelly for a long moment before Gruffen finally managed to clear the ball of emotion out of his throat and speak. “God, Sebastian, you're so ------- perfect,” Gruffen muttered, and he looked away from his friend for a moment as he forced a small smile onto his face because he knew himself to be unable to stare down at his incredible best friend and hate himself not quite enough to grin even falsely. “Maybe my sister's right: maybe it really is a crime against the female species that you're gay.”
Sebastian grinned slightly here too – not only was he best friends with Sarah but Lizzie as well, although Gruffen could understand that relationship better, because Lizzie and Sebastian had genuine compatibility that perhaps would have been romantic in nature if Sebastian weren't in love with Lizzie's older brother and Lizzie weren't married to and desperately in love with another man – but he allowed himself only the small comment of, “I do not think that I am so incredible as for my sexuality to be a crime against a race, but I thank you for the flattery.”
“You're doing it again: you're just being totally ------- perfect right now,” Gruffen said, referring to Sebastian's incredible speech – one of the things about Mr. Luna possessing a doctorate in English with a focus on old English literature and owning an IQ measuring 191 was that you could often very easily hear his intelligence and his education come through in his speech – and Gruffen couldn't help but shake his head at his friend and also at himself for not being even the slightest bit attracted to Sebastian, because in some ways, Sebastian was how he was for Sarah: in some ways, Sebastian was the best he was ever going to do, male or female. “You're... you're perfect and you're probably the best I'm ever going to do, male or female, and it's just... sometimes I wish I were gay just to be able to really love you like you deserve and to really have you like you want me to. God, Sebastian, you just... you and Sarah, you're really showing me what it's like to not know what the ---- to think or feel or do, that's for damn sure.”
Gruffen finished speaking with a shake of his head and a sigh, but he wasn't so much sad as just feeling completely overwhelmed and perhaps threatening to drown in the sea of his conflicting emotions, because it was true: with Sarah and Sebastian, he really didn't know what to think or feel or do most of the time, because most of the time he didn't even know who he should be serving with his thoughts and emotions and actions. He knew that it owed to Sarah and Sebastian to do things for them, after all that they had done for him, after all that they put up with and lived through just because they were his friends and so were always there for him, but yet, since he was a selfish, cowardly bastard, his first instinct was often to do what was best for himself, and that was usually running and hiding from how he felt, from the people he loved, from the pain that caring for them in the way that wasn't right caused him. Oh, God, if only he cared for Sebastian like a lover and Sarah like a friend. Oh, God, if only he didn't have that prophecy hanging over his head. Oh, God, if only he weren't such a consummate member of the Broken People's Club. Oh, God, if only he didn't have the hero's fate waiting for him at some point. Oh, God, if only he could just change his sexuality, his blood, his destiny, his heart. Oh God, if only he could just change his stars, for Sebastian and Sarah and Lizzie and his parents and everyone else he had hurt by just being as he was.
“Gruffen.” Sebastian's murmur brought Gruffen back into the present, and he pulled his mind out of his bitter longings to look up and find his friend standing there in front of him with a sad, knowing look, as if he recognized exactly what it was that Gruffen was thinking about and also knew that there wasn't a thing in the world he could do to help his friend, on his face. It was an expression that Gruffen recognized very supremely because he saw it in the mirror when he thought about Sebastian and Sarah often enough.
“Sorry, Sebastian,” Gruffen muttered, and he shook his head as he averted his gaze from his friend's because for the moment it was too painful to even look at Sebastian. “I've kind of ------ this whole thing of you coming over and things being happy, haven't I?”
“I don't mean to insert myself into your conversation, but there's still plenty of time for things to be happy,” a voice from the end of the room came, and both Gruffen and Sebastian turned in surprise to find Sarah there with the cup of coffee for Sebastian that she had left to get a while ago. Undoubtedly, Gruffen realized as his heart sank with guilt, she had been just standing in the kitchen listening to their conversation for a while, as obviously it doesn't take nearly as long to prepare a cup of coffee as it does for them to say all of the things that they had, yet Sarah didn't seem disturbed in the slightest by the fact that the two men had essentially forgotten her while exploring their own woes with one another.
Her eyes locked onto Gruffen's as she continued, “You say that you want to change your sexuality, that you wish that you could love Sebastian like he wants you to, and I have no doubt that you would love him like that, if you could. But like Sebastian said, you can't change how you feel for him, and he can't change how he feels for you, so there's truthfully no point in continuing to want things to be different, because, if they ever change, it will be on their own, not because of something you do. The stars will move only at their behest, Gruffen, not at yours, no matter how powerful or desperate your plea is.”
She paused for a moment, and, for all the things in the world, he felt her words actually sinking in and penetrating him to loosen the knot in his chest like nothing else anyone had ever said to him before had been able to. He looked over at her in astonishment, both stunned and positively joyous at the fact that perhaps he was not a completely lost cause after all, to have her continue, “And the same thing goes for our relationship, Gruffen: no matter how much either one of us would wish that we feel differently about the other one, no amount of desire or begging fate from our knees will make things change in the slightest. Feelings of this magnitude are their own masters, Gruffen, so all we can do is just try our best to not make ourselves miserable by wanting things to be different and also try our best to enjoy the good things about what we feel, like the fact that people we care about deeply care about us very deeply too. What we have to do, Gruffen, if we are to survive this without all of us being in unbearable agony, is to just accept how we feel, do our best to not focus on our desire to change it, and then just attempt to find happiness in our emotions. Because there really is a lot of happiness in the love that all of us have for one another.”
Sarah turned to Sebastian here to tell him, “Sebastian, you are one of the most dashing and charming people I have ever met, and being around you and having you quote things I've never even heard of that are in languages I can't even understand is just so incredible that I can't help but smile. And you know, I may be kind of jealous of you sometimes, honestly, when I think about how Gruffen would change the stars for you, if he could, but I'm still so incredibly happy that I've come to care for you as a friend, because even without Gruffen I think you and I have a lot in common and I think that we've helped each other by being friends like we have.”
Sarah gave him a smile as she ended, and she turned her gaze back onto Gruffen, who by this point was totally and completely stunned by the proceedings and the positive effects they were actually having on him, to say, “And Gruffen, God knows you make me smile, with your jokes and your witticisms and your mannerisms and the way you just do everything you can to make me happy. I really don't deserve you, for how much you care about me and everything that you've done for me in helping me come to accept myself even when it goes against what you yourself want with me, but I'm so, so glad that you're in my life, Gruffen, even if maybe in not the most ideal way.”
Here Gruffen could take it no longer and closed the gap between him and Sarah with three long strides to bend down and take her into his arms and hug her fiercely, burying his face against her shoulder and murmuring in her ear, feeling, for once in his life, the true goodness of those words, “I love you, Sarah Rachel Parker.”
“I love you too, Gruffen Mitchell Lightning,” she responded in her own murmur, and when he set her down after a few moments her smile was so beautiful and real that he couldn't help but give her a kiss on the forehead, and it was astonishing how much better that felt than looking away in self-loathing.
Gruffen then turned to Sebastian and embraced his friend with the same ferocity he had held Sarah, whispering in Sebastian's ear, “I love you, Sebastian Alexander Luna,” and Sebastian's grin as Gruffen pulled away was so genuine that, for once in his life, Gruffen found himself content with how he felt for Sebastian and Sebastian felt for him.
“I love you too, Gruffen Mitchell Lightning,” Sebastian replied, giving a perfect echo of Sarah's words, and there was no self-loathing, no disgust at how he felt for his best friend, no pervasive desire to feel differently, in Sebastian's gaze for once.
As Gruffen looked between Sebastian and Sarah, the woman and the best friend he would change the stars for, if he could, he found himself realizing how truly happy he was with them, and he thought that perhaps the stars didn't need changing, that all that needed altering was his perception of them, because there was plenty of goodness to be found in the night sky as it was if he just taught himself how to see it.

[Tabuu]

Yeah, it's super confusing.... Especially since my ex might still like me. Which doesn't make sense. Cause he broke up with me. Gah.........

[tedford123]

Hi all,
Here are all of my fave pets.
Enjoy!!
My Wild Dog Family:


Pet's name: Kodiak__________________Pet's name: Nymeria

Pet's name: Kuro
My Horses From Real Life:


Pet's name: Blaze_______________________Pet's name: Echo
My Dog From Real Life:


Pet's name: Charlie
My Lion-Tail Dogs:


Pet's name: Aslan____________________Pet's name: Griffin
My Cerberuses:


Pet's name: Cerberus______________________Pet's name: Fenris
My Dreamie:


Pet's name: Cepheus
And Finally, Last AND Best, My Fursona:


Pet's name: Siona

I hoped you liked my fave pets!
Thanks for looking!!

awww!!soo cute!!

[Sonmi-451]

Reserved for other pieces of writing.