Banished Divinity: Learning to be Human

The hospital was the same as before.

White walls. White floors. The smell of antiseptic and fear. Fluorescent lights that hummed with the kind of aggression usually reserved for interrogation chambers. I walked through the doors with Mum on one side and Dad on the other, and I did not look for the Grim Reaper.

I had learned my lesson.

Doctor Kim's office was on the third floor. We rode the elevator in silence, Mum's hand on my arm, Dad's hand on Mum's back, the three of us arranged in a formation that I was beginning to recognize as family. We walked down a corridor. We stopped at a door. We waited.

And then, as we sat in the plastic chairs outside Doctor Kim's office, I saw something.

It was green.

Small. Fluffy. At the corner of my vision, where the light from the window met the shadow of a potted plant. It moved—a flicker, a flutter, a something that should not have been there and yet was.

I turned my head.

Nothing. Just the corridor. Just the chairs. Just Mum and Dad and the faint hum of the hospital going about its business.

I looked back at the corner.

There. Again. A flash of green. A shape that was round and fuzzy and—and—

No.

I stared harder. The thing was moving. Shifting. Almost invisible, like it was wrapped in something that bent the light around it, that made it hard to see, that made it easy to miss if you weren't looking for it.

But I was looking.

And I knew that shape. I knew that green. I knew the way it moved, the way it flickered, the way it was trying very hard to be invisible and not quite succeeding because it was too excited, too frantic, too—

"This cannot be," I breathed.

"What?" Mum said.

I didn't answer. I was staring at the corner, at the green thing that was now bouncing slightly, making small movements that were almost invisible but not quite, not to me, not to someone who had spent centuries with a creature who could not stay still when it was happy.

"No," I said. Louder this time.

"Sera?" Dad's voice was concerned now. "What's wrong?"

I looked at them. At Mum's worried face, at Dad's furrowed brow. They could not see it. They could not see the green fluff of a ball that was now hopping up and down in the corner, making small, squeaking sounds that only I could hear.

If I told them, they would think I was hallucinating. They would tell Doctor Kim. Doctor Kim would shine lights in my eyes and ask me questions and write things on his clipboard, and then he would tell Mum and Dad that their daughter was not just brain-damaged but also insane, and then they would—

"Bathroom," I said. "I need to go to the bathroom."

"Now?" Mum said. "We're about to be called in."

"Now," I said, and I was already standing, already walking, already moving toward the corridor where the green thing had disappeared.

"Sera—"

"I'll be right back!"

I walked fast. I did not run. Celestial beings did not run through hospitals chasing invisible green creatures. They walked. With purpose. And dignity. And a complete lack of the frantic energy that was currently thrumming through my veins.

I turned the corner. The corridor stretched out before me, empty, silent, the doors on either side closed, the lights humming their endless hum.

And there, at the end of the corridor, was a door.

The bathroom.

I pushed it open. Stepped inside. Closed the door behind me.

The bathroom was small. White. Sterile. A sink, a mirror, a toilet, a hand dryer that looked like it was designed to be as loud as possible.

I stood in the middle of the floor, my heart pounding, my hands clenched at my sides.

"Show yourself," I said.

For a moment, nothing.

And then—

A flicker. A shimmer. A shape that materialized out of the air like a thought becoming solid, like a memory becoming real.

Green. Small the size of my thumbs. Fluffy. With enormous eyes that were already filling with tears, with a round body that was trembling with the force of emotions too big for its tiny frame.

Moo Moo.

He launched himself at me before I could speak. His small body hit my chest with the force of a cannonball made of fur and desperation. His stubby arms wrapped around my neck. His face buried itself in my shoulder.

And then he began to cry.

"Moo," he wailed. "Moo moo moo moo MOO—"

I caught him. My arms closed around him automatically, years of instinct taking over where my brain had frozen. He was warm. He was real. He was here, in my arms, in this bathroom, in this world, and I had not even known—

"Moo Moo," I said, and my voice cracked in a way that was entirely unacceptable for a celestial being. "Moo Moo, what are you—how did you—"

"Moo moo moo moo moo—"

"I missed you too." I held him tighter, and he held me tighter, and for a long moment, we just stood there, a former celestial being and her small green friend, crying in a hospital bathroom.

It was, I reflected, a new low.

And also, somehow, the best thing that had happened since I fell.