Chap 24 : Celestial Being Has Inappropriate Thoughts About Two Separate Mortal Males, and Questions
Dad was driving. Mum was in the passenger seat. They were both looking at me with expressions of concern that I did not have the energy to decipher. It was like being examined by two very worried owls.
“Who was that young man?” Mum asked. Her voice was careful. Measured. The voice of a woman who was trying very hard not to sound like she was interrogating her brain-damaged daughter about strange boys who caught her when she was falling. She was failing at this, but I appreciated the effort.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You don’t know? He was holding you, Sera. Like he knew you. Like he had been practicing holding you.”
“I don’t know him.” The words came out flat. Tired. Like little exhausted slugs crawling out of my mouth. “I have never seen him before in my life. Or any of my previous lives. Or the lives before that. He is a stranger. A tall, annoyingly solid, warm-armed stranger who appeared out of nowhere and caught me like I was a falling leaf and he was the ground.”
Mum and Dad exchanged a look. It was the look they had been exchanging since I woke up in this world. TheO ur daughter is strange and we don’t know what to do about it look. I was becoming intimately familiar with this look. I suspected I would be seeing it a lot.
“He said he was looking for me,” I added, and I didn’t know why I said it. The words just came out, like they had been waiting to be spoken, like little traitors escaping from my brain without permission.
The car was very quiet. So quiet I could hear my own heartbeat, which was still doing that annoying oh no rhythm.
“Looking for you?” Dad’s voice was careful too. The carefulness was spreading. Soon the whole car would be made of carefulness. “What do you mean, looking for you?”
I closed my eyes. The world was still spinning slightly. The stranger’s arms were still warm around my shoulders in my memory. His words were still echoing in my skull like a song I couldn’t forget.
I have been looking for you.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know anything. I don’t know who he is. I don’t know why he was looking for me. I don’t know why Gate-Rammer keeps smiling at me. I don’t know why supply curves are called supply curves when they are straight lines. I don’t know anything about anything, and I used to know everything, and now I know nothing, and I am very tired and I would like to stop being awake now.”
No one spoke after that.
The car moved. The world blurred past the windows. Buildings and streets and trees and the small, ordinary details of human life that I had been trying so hard to understand all day blurred together into a smear of colour and light, and I closed my eyes and let them blur, because I could not hold them anymore. They were too heavy. Everything was too heavy.
When I opened my eyes again, I was in my room.
I did not remember walking up the stairs. I did not remember saying goodbye to my parents. I did not remember changing out of my school clothes or falling onto my bed or closing my eyes. My body had apparently gone into some kind of automatic survival mode, like a lizard that plays dead when threatened.
But I was here. In my room. In the bed that was too soft. Surrounded by walls that were too peachy pink. Staring at the ceiling that refused to become stars no matter how hard I glared at it.
And my body—my mortal, fragile, ridiculous, useless body—felt like it had been through a whirlwind.
A whirlwind.
I knew whirlwinds. I had chased one once, through the realm of Ignigant—the World of the Trees in old language, which was a terrible name because the trees there were actually made of fire and screamed when you touched them—after a creature that had no business being in that realm had escaped its containment and decided to terrorize the innocent.
It was a stupid creature. A horned bull with eyes like fire and a temper like a collapsing star and breath that smelled like rotten food. I had chased it for three days across the burning plains before I finally caught it and sent it back where it belonged, and I had done it while singing a sea shanty and juggling flaming rocks.
That chase had been easier than today.
Today had been harder than chasing a demon bull through a realm of fire monsters while singing.
Today had been sitting in a chair and looking at a book and trying to understand words that didn’t want to be understood.
Today had been being looked at by people who expected things from me that I didn’t know how to give.
Today had been existing in a world that was too loud and too bright and too much for a body that was still learning how to be a body.
And today, a stranger had caught me when I was falling, and he had said I have been looking for you, and he had looked at me like he knew something I didn’t. Like I was a puzzle he had been trying to solve and had finally found the last piece of, hidden under the sofa.
I lay in my bed.
I stared at the ceiling.
And I thought about Gate-Rammer.
Gate-Rammer, with his brown hair and his brown eyes and his smile that made me want to throw things at his head.
Gate-Rammer, who had pushed me and called me a piglet and then sat beside me and explained economics like it was the easiest thing in the world, which it was not, which it wasclearlynot.
Gate-Rammer, who had said you can ask me when you’re ready like he had all the time in the world to wait for me, like I was worth waiting for, like I was not a complete disaster in human form.
And then I thought about the stranger.
The stranger with no name.
The stranger with arms like steel and eyes like the void between stars.
The stranger who had caught me and held me and saidI have been looking for you with the certainty of someone who had found what they had been searching for and had no intention of letting it go. Possibly ever. Possibly for the rest of my mortal life, which at this rate would be approximately three more days if I kept collapsing in public.
Why was I thinking about them?
I was a celestial being. I had been alive for longer than human civilization had existed. I had seen empires rise and fall like sandcastles before the tide. I had watched stars be born and die, had attended their funerals and their birthday parties. I had existed on a scale that made mortal lives look like mayflies—here for a moment, gone the next, barely worth noticing.
And yet I was lying in my bed, thinking about two boys.
Two.
TWO!
This was unacceptable. This was an outrage. This was the kind of behaviour you would expect from a lovesick human in a badly written romance novel, not from a being who had once told the God of Thunder that his beard looked stupid to his face and lived to tell the tale.
This was the Tribunal’s fault. Those old, mostly wrinkled, joyless grumble-guts in their fancy robes!!
They had done something to me when they cast me into this body. They had scrambled my celestial mind and replaced it with mortal nonsense.
They had filled me with chemicals and hormones and whatever it was that made humans do stupid things like cry at advertisements and think about people they didn’t want to think about and eat food that was clearly bad for them because it tasted good.
That was it.
That was the only explanation.
I was not interested in Gate-Rammer. I was not interested in the stranger. I was simply experiencing the side effects of mortal biology, like a terrible allergic reaction to having a body.
Once my celestial nature reasserted itself—any day now, surely, the Tribunal couldn’t keep me trapped forever—I would look back on this moment and laugh.
I would laugh and laugh and then I would hunt down every member of the Tribunal and give them a stern talking-to about the ethics of turning cosmic beings into blushing schoolgirls.
I closed my eyes.
I tried to sleep.
But the stranger’s face swam behind my eyelids. His dark eyes. His light brown hair. The way he had said I have been looking for you like it was a promise. Like it was a warning. Like it was both. Like it was the beginning of something I was not sure I wanted to be in the middle of.
And underneath it, quieter but more persistent, like a dripping tap I couldn’t fix, was Gate-Rammer. Gate-Rammer’s smile. Gate-Rammer’s voice. You can ask me when you’re ready.
I turned onto my side. I pulled the blanket up to my chin. I stared at the poster on my wall—the tall one with the sharp eyes and the jaw that could cut glass, the one who was apparently in a group called BTS according to Tangled Menace, was going to marry me someday according to the previous occupant of this body.
“If you are going to marry me,” I whispered to his paper face, “you should probably do something about this. I cannot be thinking about mortal boys. It is beneath my dignity. I am a celestial being of immense power and sophistication. I once made a star apologize for being dim. I do not have crushes. I have cosmic alignments. And right now, my cosmic alignment is with a good night’s sleep and possibly a sandwich.”
The poster did not respond.
It never did.
I was beginning to think that the human Sera had made some questionable decisions about her future spouse. The man on the poster had excellent bone structure, yes, but he also had the conversational skills of a brick.
Somewhere in the darkness of my mind, a small voice—a voice that sounded very much like Mina, who was apparently going to be my internal conscience for the foreseeable future, which was delightful—said: You’re thinking about them again.
I was not thinking about them.
I was thinking about supply curves. And demand curves. And the point where they met, which was apparently called equilibrium, which was a word that meant something entirely different in the celestial realms (where it referred to the exact moment when two armies realize they have been fighting over a rock and give up out of embarrassment), but which here meant the place where two things that want each other finally come together.
I was not thinking about Gate-Rammer.
I was not thinking about the stranger.
I was not.
I fell asleep with two names on my lips—neither of which I actually knew, which was a problem I would have to deal with tomorrow—and I did not dream of whirlwinds or demons or the fall from the heavens.
I dreamed of brown eyes, crinkling at the corners, and dark eyes, burning like coals, and two voices that spoke in unison:
We’ve been looking for you.
And in the dream, I looked at them both and said, very calmly and with great dignity: “Well, you have found me. Now what?”
Neither of them answered.
Typical.
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