Jaidon (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cridecoeur) wrote2009-12-01 09:54 pm
cridecoeur) wrote2009-12-01 09:54 pm
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title: i left your heartbeat in the ground
author:cridecoeur, though i'm tempted to disown this story entirely.
pairing: alskdhglkh gul/kettil, apparently.
prompt: Things My Son Should Know After I've Died, by Brian Tromboli. whoo,![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
stayintheroom!
a/n: this is the paranormal romance story that won't stay het, no matter what i do. i switch gender, they switch sexual preference. it's possible i'm just incapable of writing het, i don't know.
My memories of my Mother are distant, time-faded, saturated with light, muted by color. She had red hair that she tossed across her shoulder whenever she laughed. She stood with her hands on her cocked hips, watching me play on the kitchen floor, and sometimes she got down on her knees to play with me, though I was an ugly, scorching thing, nothing she’d planned to birth before she met my Father, ever the trickster, the Ifrit in men’s clothing. She once hauled me out of the river by the scruff of my neck when I’d waddled in too far and swallowed water enough to make me heavy, skin steaming, lucky I’d not gone out, and still she let me go back to the river again, foolish or maybe reckless. She drove a fast car with the top down and the wind whipping her hair, with me pinned in the passenger’s seat watching the landscape blurring past, a wash of green. She smelled like lilies in the spring and like apple’s in the fall and in summer smelt simply of warmth and dirt and human sweat. That was the whole of her: human with nothing magic or celestial in her blood, nothing that should have tied her to Deathbridge.
I was her secret until the neighbors started talking, until the night the police came and sat her at the kitchen table while I played with blocks at her feet and asked her careful questions which she must have answered counter to their liking because that was the night they took me away. I don’t remember her fighting them or arguing or crying, though she might have done all three. I just remember the whisper of the wind in the trees when the shortest of the police men took my hand and walked me out of the house, telling me we were only going for a short trip. Only a short trip and then we’d be back.
The lights went out in the house as we drove away.
I never saw my Mother again. That’s the sort of thing that happens in Deathbridge: humans go missing, and any of the fire-forged celestials, either part or whole, the Shaitan, the Ghul, the Marid, the Ifrit, and the Djinn, are taken from their homes and given to the Angels to raise. They got my classification wrong of course, like they do most of the fire-forged. I don’t mind particularly. The name Gul suits me as well as anything else, or as poorly as anything else would. I don’t remember the name my Mother gave me, so what does any of it matter?
They paired me off with Kettil, a half-Angel to my half-Ifrit. Whatever else they intended for us to be, we were young, and we were restless. Their Answers never were enough, from On-High though they may have been. Kettil carried his Book with him, always, but otherwise you might not have known he had Angelic blood in him. He looked more human than most in Deathbridge, in a way that might have been dangerous, were he left to the City alone. He had a shock of blond hair, frizzy, in-his-eyes - blue, as they were - and baby-fat not yet eaten by boyhood. We used to walk to the very edge of the Compound and eat blackberries from the bushes, warm and juicy and straight into our mouths. I never saw his wings until we’d grown through childhood and into those adolescent years when Nature truly asserted herself, when Kettil’s skin began to take on that faint, luminescent glow, and the fire of my eyes became engulfing, my skin toughening to leather, wings growing bony from my shoulder blades. Where mine were red on black, his were baby blue, the color of the sky in early morning, when the sun streaks have just faded away. His baby fat melted away to reveal fine-boned features, delicate as they were. He was every bit as beautiful as I was ugly. These were the days before I’d learned how to look human, even though I wasn’t, the days before his laughter had taken on an edge, when it was light and airy.
Every child is foolish thinking that childhood will last. Perhaps we’re born naive so that we can say we were happy, once, and hope to be again. Whatever the cause of our happiness was, we were soon to lose it: trouble came to Deathbridge, not trouble like I am, sometimes a Believer and sometimes not, but trouble like the true fire-forged, the ones the Angels won’t take, won’t even open their doors to, let alone their City.
Turns out Demons will come in uninvited and stay however long they like and bring all their sorrows with them.
author:
cridecoeur, though i'm tempted to disown this story entirely.pairing: alskdhglkh gul/kettil, apparently.
prompt: Things My Son Should Know After I've Died, by Brian Tromboli. whoo,
stayintheroom!a/n: this is the paranormal romance story that won't stay het, no matter what i do. i switch gender, they switch sexual preference. it's possible i'm just incapable of writing het, i don't know.
My memories of my Mother are distant, time-faded, saturated with light, muted by color. She had red hair that she tossed across her shoulder whenever she laughed. She stood with her hands on her cocked hips, watching me play on the kitchen floor, and sometimes she got down on her knees to play with me, though I was an ugly, scorching thing, nothing she’d planned to birth before she met my Father, ever the trickster, the Ifrit in men’s clothing. She once hauled me out of the river by the scruff of my neck when I’d waddled in too far and swallowed water enough to make me heavy, skin steaming, lucky I’d not gone out, and still she let me go back to the river again, foolish or maybe reckless. She drove a fast car with the top down and the wind whipping her hair, with me pinned in the passenger’s seat watching the landscape blurring past, a wash of green. She smelled like lilies in the spring and like apple’s in the fall and in summer smelt simply of warmth and dirt and human sweat. That was the whole of her: human with nothing magic or celestial in her blood, nothing that should have tied her to Deathbridge.
I was her secret until the neighbors started talking, until the night the police came and sat her at the kitchen table while I played with blocks at her feet and asked her careful questions which she must have answered counter to their liking because that was the night they took me away. I don’t remember her fighting them or arguing or crying, though she might have done all three. I just remember the whisper of the wind in the trees when the shortest of the police men took my hand and walked me out of the house, telling me we were only going for a short trip. Only a short trip and then we’d be back.
The lights went out in the house as we drove away.
I never saw my Mother again. That’s the sort of thing that happens in Deathbridge: humans go missing, and any of the fire-forged celestials, either part or whole, the Shaitan, the Ghul, the Marid, the Ifrit, and the Djinn, are taken from their homes and given to the Angels to raise. They got my classification wrong of course, like they do most of the fire-forged. I don’t mind particularly. The name Gul suits me as well as anything else, or as poorly as anything else would. I don’t remember the name my Mother gave me, so what does any of it matter?
They paired me off with Kettil, a half-Angel to my half-Ifrit. Whatever else they intended for us to be, we were young, and we were restless. Their Answers never were enough, from On-High though they may have been. Kettil carried his Book with him, always, but otherwise you might not have known he had Angelic blood in him. He looked more human than most in Deathbridge, in a way that might have been dangerous, were he left to the City alone. He had a shock of blond hair, frizzy, in-his-eyes - blue, as they were - and baby-fat not yet eaten by boyhood. We used to walk to the very edge of the Compound and eat blackberries from the bushes, warm and juicy and straight into our mouths. I never saw his wings until we’d grown through childhood and into those adolescent years when Nature truly asserted herself, when Kettil’s skin began to take on that faint, luminescent glow, and the fire of my eyes became engulfing, my skin toughening to leather, wings growing bony from my shoulder blades. Where mine were red on black, his were baby blue, the color of the sky in early morning, when the sun streaks have just faded away. His baby fat melted away to reveal fine-boned features, delicate as they were. He was every bit as beautiful as I was ugly. These were the days before I’d learned how to look human, even though I wasn’t, the days before his laughter had taken on an edge, when it was light and airy.
Every child is foolish thinking that childhood will last. Perhaps we’re born naive so that we can say we were happy, once, and hope to be again. Whatever the cause of our happiness was, we were soon to lose it: trouble came to Deathbridge, not trouble like I am, sometimes a Believer and sometimes not, but trouble like the true fire-forged, the ones the Angels won’t take, won’t even open their doors to, let alone their City.
Turns out Demons will come in uninvited and stay however long they like and bring all their sorrows with them.