persenche

content warning: intense horror imagery

Riley looked entirely out of place in the canteen on the Divination floor. He was fidgeting, and he was looking around like he was lost, and Therese could tell immediately that he was looking for her and had worked up his courage to make it even this far.

She took pity on him, and waved one arm over her head to signal him, and he spotted her and looked immediately grateful, though no less fidgety. He headed over to her table, where she was eating lunch as her first meal of the day, and looking over her notes from her recent failed attempts to triangulate the distortion in the Tree.

“Can I, I mean, is it okay if I join you?”

She gestured to the seat opposite her. The electrical prickle between them was as strong as ever, the hairs on her arm rising as she gestured into whatever field of empathetic electromagnetism surrounded him, or arose between their individual poles.

Was he north, and she south?

She mentally shook her head. What a pointless line of thought. He was so damn distracting to be around, this close.

“Yes, of course. I’m stuck anyway, and I’m frustrated by it, and could use a break.”

As he sat, he avoided her gaze. “I know.” He put his hands on the table. “That you’re frustrated and can use a break. It’s sort of why I decided now was the right time to come talk.”

She nodded. “I guess we both know that the other is ready to talk, huh?”

He looked pained, but finally met her gaze. “How much of yesterday did you—”

She shrugged. “I know that you and Eve had a conversation, and I know that a lot of it was on some kind of deep empathetic level that I couldn’t follow, and I’m guessing that’s something to do with a Worked object you were using in the Armory introduction.” She shook her head. “I’m not really happy that Marama decided to give you something that potentially dangerous to play with, but I guess other cadres wouldn’t have ended up quite that entangled. That’s a you thing, and she had no way to know.”

“Because you haven’t told anyone.”

“I’ve talked to Nora about it, because Nora is the only person I could imagine having any useful insight.”

“Did she?”

Therese shook her head. “Not really. She’s worried about it, just like I am, just like you are when you let yourself think about it.”

He blew air into his cheeks. “Okay, so letting myself think about things.”

She felt herself tense with anticipation. Are we going to talk about this, finally?

And she could feel the answering resignation from the empathetic link. He could feel her anticipation, and he knew why, and he was committed to the conversation.

“Yeah. Yeah, okay, so you know why I’m here.” He paused to collect himself. “Eve told me I had to come talk to you, and she’s right, and I’m trying to listen to people who give me good advice and pay attention when my friends call me on my bullshit.”

“You and Eve are friends now.” It started as a question but became a statement as she felt the confirmation from him. Talking to someone when you can feel their reactions before you even finish speaking is fucking weird.

“I hope so.” He sounded casual but she could feel the tension in him. “I’m not really good at friends, is the thing. Anyway, she told me to talk to you. After, uh. After I told her my.”

Therese felt her attention focus to a single sharp point. Had he? He must have, from how much terror is pouring off him right now.

“That I’m. That I’m uh, I’m a. A girl.”

She exhaled a breath she wasn’t even aware she was holding.

“That I’m a girl, and I’ve always been a girl.”

He looked up at her, his eyes huge and pleading for mercy. Expecting her to laugh, or be cruel, or something, some horrible conditioned response that had been passed down through their shared culture of Western gender misery and patriarchy and colonialism and repression.

She concentrated, trying to ensure the only emotion she allowed out was absolute and complete acceptance and happiness.

And it seemed to work, at least on the surface of things, because she felt him relax. Just a fraction, just the tiniest bit, but at least the instinctive flinch away from a blow had left his posture, the tension in his shoulders dropping to something more like a person under stress, and less like a person about to be beaten.

“I’m really, really happy for you, Riley. I can’t even begin to express how happy I am for you.”

His eyes had started to glisten, and when she put out her hands, he seized them both, and the tears began to trickle down his face. “I’ve been so scared for so long.”

She squeezed his hands in hers, feeling him trembling.

“You did this for me. You made this happen. And I hated you for it.” His voice had become choked, not quite a sob but not steady, either. “I wanted it so bad and then when I finally got it, I hated you for it.”

“Riley, it’s okay. It’s okay. I had no right to go stomping around in your emotions.”

“Y-you gave me everything I ever wanted and I couldn’t even manage to be fucking grateful for it,” he whispered, and she could feel the waves of self loathing rising in him.

“Riley, stop. Stop it. We’re here now, aren’t we? We’re talking? Can we just say we both fucked up?” She put all her intensity and compassion into it. Riley could not let this turn into another source of self-hatred. The boy could find ways to tear himself apart from the slightest provocation, and this moment should be joyful for him, not painful. He shouldn’t have to remember a revelation of this magnitude as anything except freeing.

He shuddered, bringing himself back under control, and then he continued in a somewhat steadier voice. “I let Eve inside, and that’s when it all kind of… poured out. Everything.” He looked up at her, meeting her eyes. “All the conversations we’ve had in my dreams, except they weren’t dreams. All the things you’ve said to me, inside where I couldn’t hear it.”

She squeezed again. “I’m sorry. I didn’t try to keep it from you. I just didn’t—”

“After how I reacted? The one time you tried to bring it up? I don’t blame you.” He shook his head. “I’m making it sound like I didn’t know, but that’s just it. I did. These memories didn’t just appear. I had them the whole time. I just refused to think about them. I refused to think about her.” He considered for a moment. “Me. Us. Whatever.”

“She didn’t really think of you as separate people.”

He snorted, humorless. “That’s because she had the advantage of being the actual person. Me? This, this persona, this mask? It’s not real. It never was. Just a bunch of reflexive behavior, douchebag shit, asshole masculinity. Like everything bad I’d ever thought about men, all in one bundle of defenses and aggression.”

He looked so hollow and lost in that moment that Therese pulled one hand away from his to brush his cheek with her knuckles. “That’s bullshit, and you know it. You can tell how I feel just like I can tell how you feel, and if all you were was fake and bullshit like you’re claiming, then why did I ever give a shit about you? Do you think I was faking that?”

He looked like he wanted to say something but couldn’t find the words.

“But even without that, you said you let Eve in. So I’m guessing you had a chance to see how she feels about you?”

He flushed. “That wasn’t… She didn’t know—”

“Stop trying to turn this into a chance to be the bad guy again, Riley. You, the you that you’ve been the whole time you were here, was a person that others wanted to know. We wanted to reach out to you. Not in spite of who you were, because of who you were. Own it. Own your whole self.” She gestured up and down at him. “The Riley who was scared and pretending to be an asshole to drive people away. And the confident girl who told me how bad she wanted to be real.”

Riley sat in silence for a long few minutes while Therese tidied her tray and handed it off to the lurking construct for cleanup.

Finally he nodded.

“There’s something… else.”

She leaned back, waiting.

“It’s… about my body.”

“We can probably get you hormones, if you want to do that. I mean, we definitely can get them, but we can probably get them like, immediately. I can put the word in with Supply this afternoon.”

He squirmed. “That’s kind of the thing.” He hunched over, and she realized how closed-off and defensive his body language had been, even more so than his usual attempt to make himself seem smaller. “I don’t think, uh. I don’t think I need them.”

“Oh?” Where the hell is this going?

“I um. I think I’m already changing. I’ve started to.” He gestured at his chest. “Develop.”

She blinked. And then she blinked again, more slowly. “Riley, can I do a Divination on you? Normally I would never— I mean, except in emergencies, but—” She trailed off as she saw that he was nodding.

“I didn’t really know how to ask, but I was hoping,” he started.

She held up a hand. “Okay, give me a moment to get my thoughts together.”

The Color of Our Regard, she thought, and the shape burned into existence in her mind. Quickly she broke it apart, moving one arc here, another there, a spiral into a grounding equation that would cancel it entirely, and then she had it. A basic magical-sight Working, one she’d used a hundred times. Scoped to a single person, tuned to only reveal celestial power at work, no other information to be gathered.

Detect Magic, she thought. Arcane cantrip.

She flooded the Working with the power of the Sigil’s destruction, and looked at Riley. Really looked at her, for the first time since she dropped the telltale she had used to track her during her recruitment.

Riley sat in the middle of an impossibly complex web of power. Hanging over her was a vast shape, unmistakable as the celestial presence of the Tower itself. Lines of celestial power tangled around her and through her, linking her back up to the Tower’s obelisk-form, and all of them had the same signature, familiar and pulsing with radioactive vibrancy.

become [Riley]
become [her]

The Tower was reshaping her into herself.

Like peeling back the illusions of common reality to reach a Platonic form of the true Riley inside. Washing off whatever mistake of fate or chance had put this girl into a boy’s body, whatever cosmic misstep had left her to wander for nearly two decades as someone other than herself.

The Tower was trying to fix what it saw as a mistake. And being the vast impersonal intelligence that it was, it wasn’t bothering to explain itself, get consent, or even inform the mere mortals that its powers might affect. It was scribbling out the old reality and replacing it with the new, ordering things according to its own plan, and taking no notice of the lives it was trampling.

She shuddered. The only thing saving this from being an utter horror was that it was doing what Riley would have wanted, anyway. What she did want, and was being given.

But fuck, what if the Tower decided to do this to someone and they didn’t want it?

What if Suliat had been right about the Tower changing her, and changing Eve, and forcing them to love Riley?

What wouldn’t the Tower do?

# # #

She knew it was a dream almost immediately. She knew the place; in Gas Works Park in Seattle, you could go right down to the water, and look south across Lake Union to the city skyline, the familiar skyline from television and movies, the Space Needle on the right, the office towers on the left. Lopsided by design and by statute.

But it was a dream, because the sky was all wrong. It was red and looked scoured, like it was illuminated by a distant fire. The clouds were black and they glowed from beneath with a red light. Like the city was burning, but it wasn’t.

She looked to each side, along the concrete walkway with the railing. Suliat was there, and Eve, and Himari. They were all looking out towards the city, not looking at her at all. Their faces were blank, expressionless.

Therese was next to her, behind her to the left. She was tugging Riley’s arm. Come on, she was saying. We have to go. If we stay here, we’ll end up like them.

But Riley didn’t want to leave the cadre. She knew they were beyond helping, that their bodies were alive but whatever had been inside them, whatever animated them and made them her best friends and lovers and her whole world and joy, it was gone now.

Riley, we have to go. They’re going to be here soon. We have to get back to the Tower before they make landfall.

She couldn’t see what they were, these things making landfall. She knew they were on the other side of those fiery clouds. They were hidden, mercifully, by the roiling atmospheric effects of their descent from orbit. Burning as they entered, their flesh peeling away as ablative heat shielding, incinerating, raining as a lethally toxic cloud of black resin. Even now it was falling along the coast, Portland already fallen to tumors and rotten growths erupting from the earth’s flesh, expelling pus and ichor and tangled many-limbed monstrosities that ate anything they encountered.

I can’t leave them. I love them.

Riley, they loved you, and that’s why they’re here, and they did what they could, and it wasn’t enough, but don’t let them die for nothing. Please. Don’t let their deaths have been for nothing.

She felt the hollow grief in her, imagining never hearing Suliat’s laugh or feeling Eve’s touch on her hand or smelling the clean sunlight scent of Himari’s hair. She let her mind reach back to the last moments together, all of them as one, their love and confidence filling her with certainty. Knowledge that she could do this, that she could save them all.

It had been a lie. She didn’t save anyone. She couldn’t save them, and she couldn’t save herself.

Riley, Therese said, the urgency in her voice becoming panic. Please.

Riley let herself be led back up the path to the park, where a portal of fire waited for them. The Tower holding it open to give them this last chance before it started its final plan, the one that would save everything but destroy everything at the same time, the one that ended with sorrow, death, and futility.

In that moment, Riley couldn’t see the difference between the Tower’s plan, and them, the two possibilities.

then
    they
        broke through
            the clouds
               and Riley shrieked
               knowing all at once how wrong she had been

Therese dragged her back to the portal, as her legs went limp, her body went slack. Grimly, heaving, nearly hauling Riley onto her back, refusing to look south towards the things that were emerging from the black and red clouds.

Riley saw them, though. She saw every twist and thrash and tear and blister of them. Every wet explosion of infected flesh and every thrashing, twitching claw of mechanical chitin. Every orifice opening to shower feces and bile onto the buildings of the city. Every lashing vine and clinging tentacle and grasping knot of bone and tooth.

Each of them the size of a mountain.

And there were dozens of them.

She couldn’t stop screaming.

She could feel the pressure building in her head, as she screamed. The scream was tearing at her throat, and she tried to scrabble at her neck with her fingernails, to tear it open to let more of the scream out.

She felt her eyes pool with blood, the gelatinous contents of them boiling with what they were being forced to witness.

Riley! Riley! Come on, Riley!

She felt the pull, the inexorable pull on her, the dragging, the inescapable dragging

Riley!

And then another voice, one she knew and also didn’t.

[Riley]
you must awaken
we will make a safe [place] for you
follow [Therese]
listen to her voice

And then everything was quiet, and she could hear a distant pounding which, after an endless moment in the dark, she realized was the sound of her own heart. Having found that anchoring sound, she could then hear the sound of crying.

That was also her, wasn’t it?

She considered it for a while. Mixed into it were words, that she couldn’t quite make out. It was a woman’s voice, one she thought she knew. Familiar? What was it saying, anyway? She strained to make it out.

Riley, come back to me. You fell in too deep. You went too deep. You have to come back. Follow my voice.

She tried to make sense of this, but only got as far as the idea that ‘Riley’ might be her, but then the awful dragging feeling came back. She tried to pull away, but it was too much, so she let herself be dragged.

That’s it. Come on. Come to my voice. It’s safe here.

Riley didn’t feel safe, but she had no more strength to fight, so she let the voice lead her. The voice had a name, didn’t it? It was ‘Therese’, she decided.

Come through, Riley. We’re almost there.

She had a tingling in her limbs and down to all her fingers and toes, and the tingling became fire, a wall of pins and needles, nerves howling into life. She convulsed in agony, thrashing to free herself from the flames, and then—

—she was out.

Therese had her cradled in her lap, on a high bluff overlooking a black plain, with the Tower looming above them both. Circling clouds lashed around the Tower, and lightning walked down its length and across the plain, but in this place atop the bluff, a circle of calm and quiet prevailed.

Therese was crying.

“I’m sorry, Riley. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know what would happen. I’m sorry.”

She blinked, trying to clear the blur from her eyes, feeling her muscles trembling as the pain left them. “T-Therese?” Her voice was a hoarse croak.

“I’m so sorry, Riley. I didn’t know. I’ve never tried to do that before, and I didn’t know.”

“Therese— I don’t. I don’t know what.” She coughed. “You’re talking about.”

“The divination,” Therese said, and Riley realized her head was cradled carefully in Therese’s hands, and Therese’s tears were falling on her cheeks from above. “You wanted to see it. You wanted to come along into the distortion. The thing I’ve been seeing in the Tree.”

Memory swam back towards Riley, slowly. She had asked, hadn’t she? They’d talked for a while, and Therese had explained something about what the Tower had wanted from her, and why, and that got them onto talking about the divination she’d had, and—

So she’d asked to see it. She’d asked to go on a dream divination to look at the distortion.

“Was that, was any of that true?” She knew there was an edge of panic in her voice now, that Therese had seen the memory rise out of the murky depths of her mind and onto her face, and she couldn’t stop it. “Was that the future?”

Therese shook her head, but she wasn’t saying ‘no’. She was saying, “I don’t know, Riley. I wish I did. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“The city. The— the things.” Her voice fell to a whisper. “Was that real?”

Therese was still crying, and between the tears she said, “I didn’t see it, Riley. I wasn’t there. The dream… It took you. You were gone. I couldn’t hold you. I let you go. I let it take you.” She sobbed again. “I had to ask the Tower to help. I didn’t even know if it, I didn’t know if anything, I thought I lost you— I—”

The voice in their heads was inexorable, overwhelming, unstoppable.

you are both safe but
you are not [safe]
you cannot stay here
you must sleep
you must dream
and not [dream]

And then the presence was on them, crushing the consciousness out of them, brooking no argument or opposition. What followed was oblivion, and peace. And when they woke, the memories were already fading to shredded nightmares and wisps of foreboding.

# # #

Is this the last time we’re going to talk like this? I don’t know. You’re going to be moving very quickly now, I suspect. Learning things. I don’t mean the magic; you never needed any help with that. I mean about us, about friends, about love, and about how to be a whole person.

We’re going to be together, at last. We sort of are, already. I’m having trouble even remembering the difference between ‘you’ and ‘me’, if I’m being entirely honest. It feels like conceit more than a real distinction. On the other hand, I’ve gotten used to these little moments of self-examination and honesty. Even if you’ve been calling them ‘nightmares’, and me a ‘nightmare voice’. If it weren’t so completely accurate I’d insist we be insulted.

So we’re going to do this, aren’t we?

We’re going to be a girl.

I mean, we already are a girl. And we’ve got our mysterious magical overlord working on our physical body, providing free, zero-effort hormone therapy. Just flooding us with estrogen and progesterone and shutting off all the little testosterone factories that were hard at work making us unhappy day after day.

That’s what Therese said, anyway, and I think she’s right. The lines of magical force were tucked directly into our various gender-relevant bits, and from what she could see, they were doing the same job as a weekly syringe. Convenient, really, given how we’ve come to feel about needles since the accident.

So we get to feel our body change, and we get to feel the euphoria of emotional range, and we get to cry all the goddamn time.

I knew all this was coming, of course. All the reading that we’ve done over the years, you know, just because we happened to be curious, no other reason, why do you ask? Then again, you also knew all this. We’re going to drop the pretense soon, that you and I were ever anything but the same person, that you were ever anything but me, with careful defenses erected to keep yourself from thinking about all these things we both knew were true.

‘You’ aren’t anything but ‘me’, and vice versa.

And just like you’re going to have to accept all the things I’ve known all along, about being a girl, about transition, about what this is all going to mean for us? I’m going to have to accept all the other things, the things you became to protect us from pain and hurt and rejection. I don’t get to pretend that you aren’t just as much part of this as I am. We’re confident and loving and sensitive and happy, sure. But we’re also angry and scared and defensive and kind of an asshole, if we’re going to be completely honest with ourselves.

We’re all those things. Every bit of feminine ‘weakness’ and masculine ‘toxicity’ all in one big messy fucking bundle.

I’m all those things.

I’m Riley.

And all I can think is, somehow, people still love me. I don’t get it. I don’t see how they can, but they do. I can feel it, Therese’s honest concern and deep affection; I can see it in Himari’s eyes and feel it in Suliat’s hand on mine and hear it in the catch in Eve’s voice when she says my name.

I probably don’t deserve it. But there it is.

So now it’s time to move forward. Now it’s time to just do this, to be a girl. Fuck, this is going to hurt so bad, and it’s going to be so rough, and I’m going to have to do it over and over again, coming out, telling people, learning to be me.

This is the last time we’re going to meet like this. I was right. I’m sorry, Riley. I hope you feel like it was worth it, to reach this place. I hope you’re not bitter or resentful. I hope the parts of you that are coming along on this journey are the best parts, the happy parts, the joyful parts. I hope you’re content.

I hope I can be content.

I hope I can forgive the world for keeping you and I apart for so long.

I hope I can live in the present.

I hope I can live.

persenche

And there we go. The trans part of this plot is far from over, but we've at least reached the tipping point of Riley's self-actualization. Surely, with that out of the way, everything will be smooth sailing from now on, right?

or, well, given that dream? Perhaps not. It remains to be seen what can be done about the impending doom that's approaching... Seattle, apparently? Listen, I write what I know, and what I know is how much I don't want cosmic horrors to poop on my city.

Thank you so much for reading my strange little novel. I'm so gratified by your continued interest. And if you like it? It would be so amazing if you'd share it with friends you think might also enjoy it? I really only have word of mouth to promote this thing, so every person you share it with is a huuuuuge help.

See you on Sunday for Chapter 9: Warning, in which Riley opens up, and Therese finds herself in danger!