Chap 17 : I Was Called a Piglet…
He was tall. Easily six feet, which in human terms was apparently considered impressive. His hair was brown, his eyes were brown, his face was arranged in an expression of such casual amusement that I felt my celestial glare bounce off him like water off stone.
He was smiling.
He was smiling at me.
"You were standing there for like five minutes," he said. "Just staring at the gate. I thought maybe you forgot how to walk."
"I did not forget how to walk," I said, my voice frost. "I was contemplating."
"Contemplating what? Whether gravity still works?"
"It is a complex matter. One that you would not understand."
He tilted his head, still smiling. His eyes crinkled at the corners in a way that should have been irritating but was instead—something else. Something I did not have a word for.
"You look like a piglet," he said.
I stared at him.
"A piglet?” I repeated.
"Yeah. When you scrunch your nose like that." He demonstrated, pushing his own nose up with one finger, squinting his eyes. "You know. Oink oink."
I just stared at him with my mouth open.
I had been called many things in my existence. Terrible. Magnificent. Daughter of the Abyss. Scourge of the Unworthy. Never, in all my centuries of celestial service, had anyone compared me to a piglet.
How dare this low-level peasant calls me that. I shall burn him with my fire incantation and show you to bow down to me. I thought.
“You—” I started, hand already raised, fully prepared to unleash a very dramatic incantation—
when a horrendous screech ripped through the air.
I froze.
It sounded exactly like grillides during mating season—loud, desperate, and aggressively unromantic. The kind of noise that could travel for miles and still make you question every life choice that led you to hearing it.
Ritual mating? Apparently beautiful.
The calling part? Absolutely not.
"SERA!"
Two voices, shrieking in unison, cut through my response. I turned—or rather, I was spun, because two bodies had attached themselves to my arms with the force of two overexcited Dooogies who had absolutely no concept of brakes.
"Sera! Oh my gawd, you're back!"
"Sera! We were so worried! Mina said you hit your head! She said you called your mum a peasant!"
"Sera, are you okay? Look at me. Are you okay? Do you remember us? You remember us, right? You have to remember us. I will be so offended if you don't remember us. Haejin will be offended too, she just won't say it because she's pretending to be cool but she's not cool, she cried…I lost count after twice… when she heard you were in the hospital—"
"I DID NOT CRY THAT MANY TIMES," the other one said. "I cried ONCE. And it was because I was cutting onions."
"It was ten in the morning."
"I was making breakfast."
"You don't cook."
"I was LEARNING to cook. For Sera. Because I was WORRIED."
The two girls—Jiyoung and Haejin, I realized, their faces matching the photographs from the albums—had attached themselves to either side of me with the tenacity of a long arm sea creatures with suction cups. They were both shorter than me, both wearing backpacks that seemed too large for their frames, both talking at a speed that made my head spin.
And then they looked up at the boy who had called me a piglet.
"What did you do to Sera?" Jiyoung demanded. She was the one with rounder cheeks and a mole beside her mouth, her one long rope that is on her head was swinging aggressively as she turned to face him.
The boy shrugged. "I gave her a push."
"You pushed her?!"
"She was blocking the gate. For five minutes."
"So you PUSHED her?!"
"She was about to be late for class. I was helping."
"HELPING," Haejin said, her voice raised into a screech, I winced at the pitch. She was the taller one, with sharper features and eyes that looked like they could cut glass. "You pushed our best friend who just got out of the hospital after hurting her head. You JERK."
The boy laughed.
He laughed like I hadn't just watched two mortal girls verbally eviscerate him. He laughed like he found the whole situation genuinely amusing. His eyes crinkled again, and he looked at me—looked at me, not at Jiyoung's fury or Haejin's glare—and said:
"She was fine. Look at her. She's fine."
"She is NOT fine, she—"
"Haejin," I said.
Everyone stopped.
Jiyoung's mouth snapped shut. Haejin's glare flickered. The boy's smile—if anything—widened.
I looked at the two girls who had attached themselves to my arms. Two girls who had sent messages about yogurt and cats and worry. Two girls who had, according to Mina, been calling every day to check on me. Two girls who had cried over me, who had learned to cook for me, who had shown up at my front door when I didn't answer their messages.
They were looking at me now with something that was very close to fear. Not fear of me. Fear for me. Fear that I would look at them and see strangers. Fear that the girl they had known was gone and would never come back.
I understood, suddenly, what Mum had meant when she said parents cried when their children succeeded.
It was not about the success.
It was about the relief. The release. The moment when you realize that something you love is still there, still whole, still yours.
I could not give them the girl they had known. I did not know how to be her. I did not know how to laugh at cat videos or remember yogurt debts or be the kind of friend that made people show up at front doors.
But I could give them something.
I looked at the boy. He was still watching me, still smiling, still radiating the kind of casual confidence that I had, in my celestial existence, found deeply irritating in lesser beings.
I raised my chin.
"I was not blocking the gate," I said, my voice carrying across the courtyard. "I was conducting a risk assessment of the premises. As a celestial being recently descended from the High Heavens, it is my duty to ensure that mortal institutions meet the minimum standards of structural integrity before I deign to enter them. The fact that you, a mere mortal, presumed to accelerate this process through physical contact is—" I paused, searching for the right word. "—an act of such breathtaking audacity that I am, against my better judgment, mildly impressed."
Silence.
Jiyoung's mouth was open. Haejin's glare had transformed into something that looked like stunned admiration. The boy's smile had frozen on his face, his eyes wide, his brain apparently still processing the words that had come out of my mouth.
And then—
Jiyoung burst out laughing.
It was not a polite laugh. It was a laugh that came from somewhere deep in her chest, a laugh that made her double over, a laugh that had tears streaming down her face before she even realized they were there.
Haejin followed a moment later, her sharp features softening into something that was almost warm, her shoulders shaking with the force of it.
"Sera—" Jiyoung gasped, clutching her stomach. "Sera, what—celestial being—"
"Structural integrity—" Haejin wheezed, leaning against Jiyoung for support. "—deigned to enter—"
The boy was still staring at me. But his smile had changed. It was no longer amused. It was something else. Something that made my skin prickle in a way that was not entirely unpleasant.
"Seraphyne," I said to him, because apparently, I had decided that he deserved to know my real name. "My name is Seraphyne."
"Seraphyne," he repeated, and the word sounded different in his mouth than it did in mine. Warmer. Slower. Like he was tasting it.
"Most people call me Sera," I added. "But you called me a piglet. So you do not get to use the short version."
He blinked.
Then he grinned.
It was a terrible grin. The kind of grin that had probably convinced people to do things they later regretted. The kind of grin that belonged on the face of someone who had never been told no and was therefore fascinated by the concept.
"Okay, Seraphyne," he said, and he made my name sound like a challenge. "I'll see you around."
He turned and walked away, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders relaxed, like he had all the time in the world and nothing to prove.
I watched him go.
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