|
Most often, when Vasya is remotely accessing Philadelphia, he is doing it from his wheat field. Few obstacles, few eyeballs. Plenty of connection to the land. So it's not unusual for him to spend most of a day out there, just sitting on the cold ground with his rifle on his shoulder, staring up at the sky.
He holds court out there. Resolves disputes, metes out justice. Pays off concessions. Absolves debts. When they first moved here, Myrne was crumbling. And now, at least, it is doing so while feeding its people. The elderly have clean water. And fire wood. And peopl emaking sure of it.
He doesn't come in at his usual time, though. He stays out there, which isn't too unusual. Until it's nearing the time for bed and he's still sitting out there, visibly glowing in the wheat. At least when she looks at him. Surrounded by a dim halo of constantly wasping spirit motes.
She leaves him to his work a lot of the time, though sometimes she just goes out and sits and listens, or stops out to see if he needs anything while he's doing his work. On the days that she's here, she keeps an eye on him. You never know when Seers might just drop out of the sky into the middle of a wheat field.
But he doesn't come in at his usual time, so she looks out there, and he's still sitting there, so she heats up the leftover fried chicken with a wiggle of her left hand and snaps her right hand's fingers to turn water into perfect coffee (it takes less time, shh) before putting the coffee in a thermos and carrying out the container of chicken. It's cold, but she ups her tolerance for it by shifting her shoulders lazily on her way out the door. No, she'll never be Wisdom 8, and she doesn't much care. Her bare, muddy footsteps bring her out next to him, and she flips out a blanket next to him, setting the fried chicken and thermos of coffee down next to his knee and opening the container to take out a drumstick for herself.
Companionable silence is a thing in Vasya's world. In the world of most slavs. Friendships are rated by how long you can brood in someone's presence without need of speech or eye contact. So it's not unusual that arriving is met with an affectionate greeting, but also more silence. He looks like him, for all that his body crawls with information. The mortal mask. Or one of the. His voice is off when he speaks, sounding far off and out of phase.
"You were with me when I learned some things about myself, Fox. Some new things that I needed some time, distance, and conversation with others to work out entirely. I'm sorry if you need to give it values like right or wrong, I only know it as necessary."
She's used to this part of him -- the silent, broody part, the part that needs to be in silence with whatever it's going through. So she's fine with that, but she does nudge the chicken towards him. It's good fried chicken. The Thyrsus crunches through the breaded coating, eating a good half-dozen pieces (there are plenty more) and lazily flinging each bone high into the air and a long way off for the farm's scavengers to get at. "Okay," Fox answers, her forehead wrinkling up slightly. She unscrews the top of the thermos, pours some coffee into the cap.
To start to uderscore the point, the spirit reaches over to accept what has now been offered to it. The plate is lifted and the chicken taken up. But as it seems to be eaten, it flares up in fire and fries off into essence. Technically eaten. Technically burned. But she can see it passing into the corpus of the spirit, all the same. "Thank you, that was actually really pleasant."
"The body I was born in feels small now. Closed off and alone. I thought I knew what dysphoria was, and what being trans was like. Because I could imagine what it would be like to be a woman, but all that was colored by my psycho-sexual understandings of woman. My world was so rigidly gendered. You just fall into your roles. I was good at being a man, I thought. But I'm not a man. I'm." A hand gestures around at everything.
"So much bigger than I let myself believe."
A lot of things play across Fox's face as Vaysa technically eats the chicken and continues to talk. Amusement and mild delight, watching him enjoy things in a way that seems familiar and intuitive to her. Of course one can be a spirit and eat in this way.
And there's a sort of ... well yes, of course that passes across her face when he explains, but she doesn't say that. You don't say that about people's gender journeys -- but it is probably fair to say this is a conversation she was, in some fashion, expecting. Who knows his background better than Fox, and knows better than Fox the way that these things can change you? A bunch of other little fluttery emotions pass across her face, too.
"Yes," she agrees. "We all are. But you are, and always have been."
This is answered with a long and silent stare from him and another of those prolonged, affectionate silences. Another piece of chicken boils away in flickering flame, its essence suffusing not into his mouth so much as into face and forehead and cheek. It's just the idea of eating, in the end. But, yes. It's obviously a pleasant thing to feel and do.
"Anyway. You don't seem terribly surprised. I'm Myrne. I am Myrne. Myrne is me. We are. We're Myrne. I'm." He hasn't quite mastered the pronouns he even likes yet. "I don't like having a body right now. I don't like having to choose. Being a man is tiring. Being a woman is tourism. I'd rather just be myself. I'm we. I'm they. I'm it. I'm he, sometimes, and she too. But. I'm not exactly who and what you married, so. Hi. Surprise."
"Of course I'm not surprised, My Heart," the Thyrsus answers, her sharp little teeth tearing into the chicken, pulling it away from the bone. "You are reiterating to me one of the central teachings of my Legacy. We are not so small as man or woman. We are ourselves and the sum of our experiences and also the lives of our tribes and the food we eat and the birds we see flying past, and without any of those things, we could not be ourselves, whatever those selves are. Woman or man has little to do with body, but that is... a whole other conversation, and perhaps irrelevant to you. Certainly in this moment."
She ticks her tongue against the roof of her mouth. "This is, in part, a thing I have been trying to show you for a very long time. Which is not to say that I am diminishing the profundity of the moment for you. It's extremely profound and beautiful and also probably scary and disconcerting." A small gesture of her hand. "Well, tourism is part of Myrne, too," she offers, in her mildly-teasing way. "Everyone comes to see the stone penis." This is a true fact about Myrne tourism: the Stone Graves have carved stoned dicks. People come to Myrne to look at the stone dicks.
The stone dick jaggling may or may not figure in Vasya's spirit court by another name.
"It's not that I didn't believe you. It's that I never belonged in any of those forms, either. It wasn't the being of all things that I doubted. Ever. Not really ever since you first changed my form for me. You're an excellent teacher, please don't misunderstand." Myrne drops the mortal mask because it can, leaving the face of war stretched over a gaunt and hungry body. Their gear is gone, too. And leaning against it is a bit like leaning against the ground and a stiff wind and a sleeping elk and a river's ice all at the same time.
She leans against it still, contented and lazy in her own way. "I know." Knowing is as simple as understanding that if those things didn't make her realize it, then they weren't his experiences, weren't the forms that belong to him. All of this is just so much sense-talking to Fox. "And I didn't take it as an insult." Her hand pats him gently and she snakes her other out to take the second-to-last piece of chicken, tearing into it with their teeth. "You're beautiful." But they always have been.
"Did you think I would react badly to this?"
"Just because you're happy for me does not necessarily mean you are going to be happy for yourself. Or for us. Or for our family. I have made selfish decisions in the past for my own health and benefit that have left you very angry with me, Naika." It's just true it's not bad. Just illustrating the point.
"And I know that what I say next is going to hurt you to hear. Somewhere inside you. What was missing all of those times was connection. Not with minds. If anything, Mind only proved more alienating for me. But. On a more fundamental level. A oneness. A connection that transcends the self. Something I didn't know I didn't know how to feel. Something that once I felt it, I never wanted to stop feeling. Maybe it would have been different. If I'd ever gotten a chance to reall get to know who I was trying to be. And now it feels like none of that matters because this is what I am. And I don't know if that's progress or not. Or just more fear. More hiding. Or just. Chase this rabbit all the way down like Balm did."
"I know that," Fox answers. "But this moment, this now, is not about the future or me or our family or any of that. It is about you, and about your revelation, and my reaction to that revelation." She stops, sits up, raises her head and blinks a few times.
And what he says next doesn't seem to test that, not at first. Maybe it's the invocation of Balm that makes his words sink through, or gives her pause. But pause now she does, biting the last bit of meat off of the bone. Fox flings the denuded drumstick off into the field, nodding slowly, and looks off across the empty space, watching the projectile spin and fall. She doesn't verbally respond.
That's what it was worried about. This is a conversation with some weights to it. "I've four Masteries. I've perfected two legacies in myself. I've had membership now in three orders, technically. And technical orders are the best kind, as you are aware. I've traveled the world. I've been in war. I've strove for peace. I've had a life. And now here I am, talking with the reason I am trying to be here and not there."
"I am sorry, Naika. I am so sorry that they never let me be who I am," it's such a pained and hollow statement. "I didn't know-- that was the point, I never knew-- I swear I didn't know. I thought it was normal. I thought it was fine. I was programmed to think it was fine. I never knew why you loved me because I never knew who I even was. And now I'm this. And I feel like... I feel like... fine? With that? I don't resent it? And if you can find your way past never having the husband you deserved. Never having the life with that young officer by the trash can, I can find my way past being so fucking tired of the expectations of this world. Its doubts. Its hypocricies."
"When I met our daughter, she looked so-- It was like she was seeing something that rhymed with what had sired her. But also like she was meeting me for the first time. And she was, I think. I have reason to hope that if we set our minds to it, we can do what needs doing together. In this life. Here. Not like we planned, but still good. I'm just... I'm done carrying people's baggage for them. I'm through with it. It's Acanthus truth train from here on out. Myrne express to self-actualization town, population you or get the fuck out of the dining car." (edited)
"I don't -- " Fox pauses, frowning, and gnaws at her lower lip with those sharp little teeth. "I'm not sure exactly what is wanted or expected of me. Or what I'm supposed to take away from all of this. Of course I don't expect you to be the officer on the banks of the river. I never thought you were just that in the first place. I always knew there was more of you, the things you were denied. Starting with queer, starting with full of emotions you didn't know how to speak or express. And I hoped if I stuck around and just kept loving you and seeing there was more of you, that you'd be able to climb out of the cave your father made for you."
She looks down at her hands. "But there are things you have said that I did not expect to hear in the process." The Thyrsus absently picks at her nails, then shakes her hands once, twice, and Matters them clean, including under her fingernails. "It's never been about what I deserved, at any rate. All I've ever wanted was you."
"What do you need from me now?"
"I keep starting over. Starting again. I feel like I'm building sand castles of myself. Over and over again. What do I need from you now?" Vasya's clearly not sure how to answer that question, or perhaps he's trying to answer it in all the ways it could be interpreted. What the fuck is now, anyway.
So it is after some silent deliberation that Myrne extends one pseudopodynous appendage over to Fox. It's not a hand. But if held, it melds itself into the contours of the hand in ways his human hand never could have in the first place. It's like being suckled by an amoeba.
"Spend time with me like this. So I can stuff myself back in a shoebox when I must. Make it okay for me to explore all the wonderful corners that remain for me in this world. Show me what I have been missing. Help me learn. Love me. We can talk about what I'll need from you later... then."
There isn't silence around them. It's only city people who think that the country is silent. It isn't, not even when it's quiet. Wind rustles through the broken stems of cut-down grasses. A long way away, a fox calls for its skulk in the winter night. Water trickles distantly along the creek. An owl's velvet-soft wings beat at the cold air. All of that soft nocturnal chorus wraps them both up, holds them in a sort of glass bubble of a moment underneath the glittering Odessa sky.
And through all of that, she listens, and she doesn't say anything. "The trick," she tells it softly, "is learning that it isn't a shoebox. But that is another lesson, and you can't get to that one without this one."
She tips her head to the side, looks at it through her dark hair. "I have always been your accomplice," she repeats, something she first said to it six months and change ago, when it told her about leaving the Guardians, and meeting their daughter. "That does not change."
Myrne oozes up their arm slowly, pouring over her the way it had over the parking garage, or the ground, or the Mark II itself. Cool energy and warm information tickle over skin as the osmosis plays out. It doesn't stop until the face of war crawls across Myrne, leaving a black scar and cracked stone boiling behind in its corpus. The face resolves onto a head that bloops up out next to Fox's shoulder. It's sort of like being hugged from behind.
By a gelatinous cube.
And then it looks up at the sky, at the stars and the cold wind of the night. After a time, Myrne rasps.
"I'm touching your butt."
This? This is a new experience, and one which Fox just sort of... revels in. Her eyes close, and her shoulders relax, and she lets herself sort of... slide into the moment, as the moment slides around her. So to speak.
Her golden eyes close, and she leans back into the gelatinous cube which is her ??husband?? with a sort of contentment which is also -- somehow -- so very alive. Not contentment as in simply existing in the moment, but contentment as in actively engaging with it. It's a fine and wonderful thing.
And then she laughs, so loud and so raucous, disrupting all of that perfect Myrne nighttime quiet. Because it is, in fact, touching her butt.
|