Chicken Scratch

At some point, I'm going to make a post with all of the veteran-fic so that it's easier to read than digging through the comments. At some point I'm going to do a *lot* of things; lately, I've been of drastically unsound mind and body. But hey, prompts are a nice distraction, so here's the first from the established-fic prompt call, This Old Routine

Pairing: Amulwara/Sun
Species: Gargoyle/Werewolf
Project: Raze
Relationship Type: Same-sex
Prompter: smw
Prompt: Harvest Moon

Sun twines her slender, delicate fingers through mine, her palm fever-hot and damp with sweat, and says, "Will you stay with me?"

She only means tonight, maybe, but we've had this moment over and over again, in one form or another. See, every relationship, if it lasts long enough, becomes a compromise settled at the intersection of, will you stay you? and will you stay with me? Except for most people, their partner might have a mid-life crisis and start believing in homoeopathy or Jesus or libertarianism, or might get fat or bald or saggy-titted. It's nothing earth-shattering, just the little degrees of seperation that naturally develop when young and new becomes old and routine.

Sun told me once that she liked for me to hug her with my wings because it reminded her of how big our love is - so of course, it's larger than life in every way possible, and that includes rough patches. Transitional phases. Those little moments that are actually big moments when you look at the person you love and wonder if they're still the person you love, and even if they aren't, if you love them still. Us was born out of that kind of moment the day I told her I was done being her patient, done being her anything if I wasn't going to be her lover. Will you stay with me? And the answer was yes.

We were different people back then - in her case, literally. Years down the road, I was pacing outside of a hospital they wouldn't let me into because back then they didn't even accept the legitimacy of lesbian relationships between two humans, forget interspecies relationships between two lesbians. One of the night nurses took pity on me and would feed me information that privacy acts didn't give me the right to know under the guise of smoke breaks. She said if, even if Sun ever woke up, she wouldn't be the same person. She was right - she was so fucking right, just not in the straight-forward, medical way she meant it.

It was so hard back then, and that intersection was more like a trainwreck. She didn't stay her so I didn't stay me, and will you stay with me was less a plea and more a dare. Those were days when we held hands the way children too old to drag baby blankets around still insist on clinging to the dirty little leftover scraps, even though they're just not enough to keep warm. But somewhere along the way, we put everything we had left into the notion that something, even something different, was still better than nothing. We stretched every little tatter of things we hoped could last to make a splint for what was badly broken, and damned if it didn't hold us together.

And now we're here: dusk collapsing into the plateaus, true night stretching big and black and star-spangled above us. A harvest moon, hanging so low and fat it looks like it was just too full to make that big climb the rest of the way up in the sky. Sun's skin prickling beneath mine in anticipation of yet another change in what's been, over the years, one hell of a long list. It should seem like a big thing: your girl leaves home, comes back a different species. It didn't bother me half as much as her smelling like someone else's bed, to be honest.

But there's the question, hanging in the darkness between us. I feel her palms going rough against mine the same time her fingers start shrinking away into something inhuman. I look into her eyes in time to seeing them go predatory, canine; to watch her soft cheek run coarse with fur, watch the lips I've kissed goodnight for the past fifteen years twist and stretch and get swallowed up into a snout, damp nose, sharp teeth. Werewolves are always less human on the full moon, and Sun's new at this even if some part of her is familiar with a different brand of therianthropy; she told me earlier on that she was afraid that she wouldn't recognize me. Imagine that: the woman who just turned into a wolf is afraid she won't recognize me.

For a moment, I think she might have been right to worry. This big, black-furred beast stares up at me with eyes that aren't someone I know, eyes that don't know me. When I tuck my wings in closer, the movement makes everything about her go predatory: alert ears, taut lips, that stillness that could spring into bloody-toothed action at any moment. There's a lesbian joke in here somewhere about getting eaten, but it's not funny right now; I don't doubt that I'd get away but I do doubt that she'd forgive herself, and that's one change we might not make it through.

So I go looking for help in Neil Young, 1992, Harvest Moon, a song called You And Me that a lifetime ago we got piss-drunk and danced to. I have a god-awful singing voice, and Sun's told me as much, but I start crooning, Open up your eyes/See how life time flies to the wolf that's staring me down like I'm more deer than dear. When I get to the line, Lookin' at you just the other night/Dancin' in the evening light, I finally see this spark: recognition. Her tail gives a slow wag, and she closes her mouth on my forearm as gentle as the kind of kiss you plant on lips to affectionately shut them up.

I stayed me. And even like this, she stayed her. And maybe she was only talking about tonight, but I mean more and trust her to know I mean more when I say, "Yeah, I'll stay with you."