Michéle

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

We said our goodbyes in Hatfield.

I don’t know if that’s what Michéle meant them to be, but it’s what it felt like. He put his arms around me for the last time and I remembered the first time he held me, in a hotel near Verity’s house. I was less than a month away from my People and still scared of people seeing my scars. He was new to this world, the boy child in Korsten’s pack.

We were both children together, really, even if I was older by far according to the calendar. My extra years had been lost in locked rooms and attics and I felt very young and very alone. I was afraid then; afraid in a way that I don’t think I’ve ever been able to properly understand. I had lost everything which had ever made me me, I had lost everything I had ever known and was stranded amongst a people I’d always been raised to think of as monsters.

Michéle was the only person I knew who, for some reason, didn’t scare me.

“I’m sorry I hurt you,” he mumbled into my hair and I realized that he hadn’t hurt me as much as I had thought.

He’d healed more than he’d hurt, although he never knew quite what he did. Michéle was the first man with whom sex wasn’t something that hurt. There was no blood, no fear, no huge leap into the unknown. He offered me affection, he offered me comfort and he made me feel safe in another’s arms. He took the huge and overwhelming terror I had of physical contact and he soothed it away with a near-child’s faith in what he was doing.

“I’m sorry I hurt you too,” I mumbled into his chest, and realized that maybe I hadn’t hurt him that much either. He’s in love with someone else now, whether he admits to it or not. I can see it in his eyes, in the way he moves, in the way he reacts to me. Wolfgang was right. A man doesn’t go from looking at me the way Michéle used to look at me to the way he looks at me now unless he’s met someone special.

I thought that would hurt, but oddly, it doesn’t. Like I thought, for a while, I was in love with him. But I’m not. Perhaps I never was.

We talked a little more that evening, but there was nothing of note. He seemed happier and more relaxed than he had been in some time; but then, he’d been washed clean by the ritual bath that Johnny, Robin and I had found up in the north of England. I wonder if whatever had been between he and I had also been washed clean. Perhaps it had.

Later that night I went outside and tilted my face up to the sky. The fat white moon looked down on me, bloated and monstrous in the sky. When I was a child I was always told to keep the blinds tight shut at night or I’d get the moon fever. Of course, I believed it, and then secretly opened the blinds at the full moon to find out what moon fever felt like.

I was told a lot of things when I was a child. Some of them I still believe; I’ve felt the presence of the gods and when I make my prayers, they listen. Some of them, though, don’t feel as steady, as certain as they once did. By the teachings of my childhood I should hate Michéle for he made me into something dirty. He took me as used goods, then let me go when he was done. He tore into the precious remains of the Purity and Perfection that was once mine and left it more tattered than ever before. But I don’t.

He and I had a season, much like the flowers, or the trees. And then we were blown away by the wind. What he gave me then, I don’t need any more, and now he is cleansed, he doesn’t need me either. My heart isn’t broken and I don’t think it will be. Not by his hand anyway. And it’s possible to love and for that love to end and for the lover not to be lessened by it.

I bowed to the mad bitch in the sky.

“You aren’t my goddess,” I said out loud. “And you never will be. I’ll pray to the lesser gods until the day I die, but I thank you. I thank you for all that your children have given me and I thank you for all they have let me learn,”

She said nothing, but then, she wouldn’t, would she? Still I smiled none the less and bowed once again. Then I pushed my hair out of my face and went back inside, to the warm crowded room where the rest of the Urdaga had gathered.