[New Mutants] Halfway Home
Sep. 28th, 2012 04:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
duckwhatduckFandom: New Mutants
Characters: Dani Moonstar, Rahne Sinclair
Pairing: Dani/Rahne
Wordcount: 2081
Also posted at: AO3
Notes: For thinlizzy2 @ rarepairfest
Summary: Sometimes you have to stop running.
I
There were things that were sinful, evil, forbidden, wrong. Things she wouldn't do, or think, or feel, or be, if she were truly a good, God-fearing child. So Reverend Craig had told her, time and again, and so she couldn't but believe.
Reverend Craig didn't know everything she felt, everything she thought, everything she was...but if he did, she knew what he would think. She could see him in her mind's eye, every night when she prayed (prayed for forgiveness, prayed to no longer be such a sinful child as she was, prayed as hard as she'd been taught). The face of judgement. God was good, and right, she knew. God loved her. But God was not always kind, and nor was he easy to serve rightly, and Reverend Craig was always the face of that side of God, for her. The side that sent you trials to test your faith, that would punish you for failure.
To be as she was was a trial of faith. To be a mutant, a creature not fully human. To feel unnatural desires, temptations to resist. But she would live her life as best she could, be strong in the face of the world's prejudices and her own failings. She would be a good, God-fearing child. She would.
So she swore, and she prayed for strength, because she was so very weak, and it would be so easy to fall. To fall quietly, gently, without even noticing, into the sound of Dani's voice, the curve of her lips, the silky black fall of her hair. Into a daydream where her hands ran through that long, heavy hair, black locks sliding sleekly between her fingers, as Dani's own hands stroked over the short red bristle of Rahne's own hair, cupped the back of her head, pulled her gently closer, until their lips met. Dani's lips would be soft, Rahne was sure. They would be soft and warm as they pressed against hers, as Dani's breath ghosted across Rahne's skin, as her lips parted slightly –
Rahne bit the inside of her own cheek sharply, banished the fantasy. Tore her gaze away from Dani, dragging her eyes back to the book she was trying to study, though she barely saw the words on the page as she internally chastised herself. Sinful enough to think lustful thoughts about boys, but about a girl? And a girl who was her friend, at that, and whose friendship she treasured. What kind of person must she be, to corrupt that this way?
Suddenly the room was stifling, too small, too full of people and temptations and constraints and feelings. Rahne wished, suddenly, intensely, she could just run. Wished she could just slip out of this body and run, run far enough and fast enough to leave these feelings behind. Everything, she felt, would be so much easier if she could just shift, take on her wolf form, and just go; leave the human Rahne, all her weakness and her worry and her sins, behind.
But when you were a person, you couldn't just run. You couldn't just give in to every wish that flitted through your head.
If she were merely an animal, a true wolf, it would be simple. Animals didn't bear the burden of good and evil, animals had no desire or capacity for sin. Animals were lucky.
When she was an animal, everything was simpler, clearer, gladder. When she was a wolf, the world was brighter, sharper, cleaner – not physically, though the wolf's different senses were a joy in themselves, but mentally, emotionally. Each of the wolf's feelings were clean and sharp and unadulterated – joy was joy, anger anger, love love, each distinct and different and bright, like primary colours. The human's feelings were those same colours, yes, but all smudged together into shades of unappealing brown. There was no joy without anxiety, no anger untouched by fear, no love without guilt, nothing without reservation. Nothing so clear and clean and bright. And she could have lived with that, with what it was to be human – always had done, before her mutation manifested – if she hadn't known there was something else. That that kind of freedom existed.
And that was why, she thought, Reverend Craig was right that her power, her mutation, was a gift from Satan if it was a gift at all. Not that she was a mutant, but that this was her mutation. That she held within her this ability, this power, this temptation to leap beyond the bonds of human nature, into the clean sharp fresh simple world of the wolf, to forget to hold herself in check, be vigilant against her own sinful urges.
Rahne kept an animal within herself, was in part an animal – for the wolf was as much Rahne as the girl. And animals, she'd been taught, were without souls, without the knowledge of good and evil, the capacity for sin and grace, to be tempted and to resist temptation as humans were. Wasn't it, then, abandoning her soul to abandon herself to the wolf? And surely it only made her sinful lusts and desires and temptations worse if, instead of wrestling with them, resisting them, she became the beast to flee from them, or, worse, to give herself an excuse to give in to them?
Eventually, overwhelmed by the turmoil of her thoughts, she mumbled excuses and left, and did, in the end, run. But she ran as herself, not as her wolf. Both because, now, the wolf was almost one of the things she wanted to run from, and because Dani was, and if she were the wolf, she couldn't run from Dani, would always have her in her head, a bond she welcomed as a matter of course but, in moments like this, couldn't bear.
Rahne ran until her legs were shaking and her face was as red as her hair, her breath coming in sharp pants that tore at her throat. It was a warm, sunny day in late July, and she was drenched in sweat when she finally stopped, unable to go further, and dropped down to sit on a grassy bank, flopping down on her back to stare up at the sky as her breathing settled out.
There were grey clouds menacing on the horizon, but the school and its surroundings lay at the centre of a great pool of blue sky, the sun blazing overhead, and only a few wispy white clouds drifting across the great blue dome. It was the kind of sky you could lose yourself in, watching the clouds float by, the sun stream dazzlingly down. Let the infinite depth of the blue carry you away from yourself. Which was exactly what Rahne endeavoured to do, and gradually, the endless spinning of thoughts in her head slipped away, bit by bit. Her guilt, her shame, her fear, her thwarted desires, all her anxieties and misgivings gradually slipped away, leaving her feeling drained and empty as she lay on the bank in the sun, drifting wearily in that endless blue sea.
She woke to the spatter of rain against her face. The sun had gone down, leaving only a dim glow to the west, and the clouds that had been massing on the horizon last she remembered had rolled in. The sky above was dark, and a cold breeze had sprung up. A hundred yards or so away, a stand of trees rustled in the wind, as if whispering dark secrets. Rahne climbed to her feet, shivering in her thin – and now damp – dress, looked around in the twilight, and realized she had no idea where she was. She had run blindly, earlier, with no direction in mind, and now she was paying for it. This, she thought, with a vague sense of inevitability, was what she got for rushing off on impulse, for giving in to the blind desire to run, without thinking of consequences.
Rahne looked around and shivered. Then, gritting her teeth, she set off up the hill, back the way she had come, and hoped she'd be back on familiar ground soon.
It was full dark when she found the road. She had shifted to wolf form shortly before, after catching her foot in a rabbit hole, tripping and landing face-first in the soaking grass with a twisted ankle. And it was as a wolf that she limped down the road, fur dripping, leg throbbing, too weary to think. She wasn't even entirely sure she was going the right way, but there seemed to be no other option but to keep putting one paw in front of the other, over and over and over, through the dark and the wind and the rain.
Then, as she came up a rise, Dani's voice blossomed in her head, sudden and anxious and as bright and warm and welcome as the sun. Rahne hardly heard what her friend was saying in her mind, over the sheer pounding relief that she had found her. That she was no longer alone in the dark and the rain and the cold.
And then over the hill she heard Dani's voice, her external voice as well as her mind-voice, shouting, and the others answering, and the lights of the mansion blossomed in the distance as Rahne came over the hill. Home.
II
There were things that were sinful, evil, forbidden, wrong. Things a good, God-fearing child wouldn't do. But she is no child any longer, and she struggles to believe she is good. And with so many things to be feared, God had ceased to be foremost among them years ago. Besides, if everything she'd been taught as a child were true, she was damned long ago. There are so many sins on her head, now. So many mistakes, so many wrong turns. So much blood on her hands.
Could the worst thing she could do with this mouth of hers be a kiss?
That is no longer something she can believe. That it is sinful, that she can believe. But she no longer believes she is one who can escape sinning, and if she cannot escape it she might as well embrace it. It is only a little sin, after all. A quiet, tender, sin. A sin, perhaps, to treasure.
Dani's lips are as soft and warm as she first dreamed they would be, years ago, and damned herself for dreaming.
And if this is sin, it is the sweetest of all Rahne's many sins.
She is tentative at first, shy (as she used to be, when she was a child). Gives Dani (and perhaps herself) a chance to pull away. Rahne has known for years that she wants this, wants women – no, wants Dani – since long before she would have allowed her to do it. Dani, though, Rahne is pretty sure Dani is straight, and has loved Rahne as a friend and a sister, but not like this. Dani doesn't, can't want this. But she has to try.
And Dani doesn't pull away.
“Rahne...” she whispers, and Rahne breaks the kiss, nuzzling against Dani's neck instead, at once to breathe in her scent and to avoid meeting her eyes. She doesn't want to see the reproach there, the confusion, the betrayal she is sure she'll see.
She waits for recrimination.
It doesn't come.
Instead, Dani, cautiously, shy herself in a way that strikes Rahne as uncharacteristic, threads her fingers through Rahne's hair, gently pulls Rahne's head around until Rahne's mouth is back against hers. And she kisses Rahne, tentative at first, light, then deeper, firmer, needier. Rahne gasps into her mouth, her heart leaping in her chest, her hands coming up to fist in Dani's hair as they lose themselves in each other.
It is just as she used to dream, when she was a child, though both of them are so much older now.
And the next part, her child-self would never have even dreamt of. Would have been scandalized at the very thought, Rahne is sure, but then there was so much her child-self was scandalized by. She was so innocent then, in so many ways, and so afraid of the world and of herself. Well, perhaps she was right: the world is a scary thing, and so, as it turned out, is Rahne Sinclair. But the world can be wonderful, exciting, joyful, too, and so can Rahne, if she lets herself.
And she does.
It feels like coming home.
Characters: Dani Moonstar, Rahne Sinclair
Pairing: Dani/Rahne
Wordcount: 2081
Also posted at: AO3
Notes: For thinlizzy2 @ rarepairfest
Summary: Sometimes you have to stop running.
I
There were things that were sinful, evil, forbidden, wrong. Things she wouldn't do, or think, or feel, or be, if she were truly a good, God-fearing child. So Reverend Craig had told her, time and again, and so she couldn't but believe.
Reverend Craig didn't know everything she felt, everything she thought, everything she was...but if he did, she knew what he would think. She could see him in her mind's eye, every night when she prayed (prayed for forgiveness, prayed to no longer be such a sinful child as she was, prayed as hard as she'd been taught). The face of judgement. God was good, and right, she knew. God loved her. But God was not always kind, and nor was he easy to serve rightly, and Reverend Craig was always the face of that side of God, for her. The side that sent you trials to test your faith, that would punish you for failure.
To be as she was was a trial of faith. To be a mutant, a creature not fully human. To feel unnatural desires, temptations to resist. But she would live her life as best she could, be strong in the face of the world's prejudices and her own failings. She would be a good, God-fearing child. She would.
So she swore, and she prayed for strength, because she was so very weak, and it would be so easy to fall. To fall quietly, gently, without even noticing, into the sound of Dani's voice, the curve of her lips, the silky black fall of her hair. Into a daydream where her hands ran through that long, heavy hair, black locks sliding sleekly between her fingers, as Dani's own hands stroked over the short red bristle of Rahne's own hair, cupped the back of her head, pulled her gently closer, until their lips met. Dani's lips would be soft, Rahne was sure. They would be soft and warm as they pressed against hers, as Dani's breath ghosted across Rahne's skin, as her lips parted slightly –
Rahne bit the inside of her own cheek sharply, banished the fantasy. Tore her gaze away from Dani, dragging her eyes back to the book she was trying to study, though she barely saw the words on the page as she internally chastised herself. Sinful enough to think lustful thoughts about boys, but about a girl? And a girl who was her friend, at that, and whose friendship she treasured. What kind of person must she be, to corrupt that this way?
Suddenly the room was stifling, too small, too full of people and temptations and constraints and feelings. Rahne wished, suddenly, intensely, she could just run. Wished she could just slip out of this body and run, run far enough and fast enough to leave these feelings behind. Everything, she felt, would be so much easier if she could just shift, take on her wolf form, and just go; leave the human Rahne, all her weakness and her worry and her sins, behind.
But when you were a person, you couldn't just run. You couldn't just give in to every wish that flitted through your head.
If she were merely an animal, a true wolf, it would be simple. Animals didn't bear the burden of good and evil, animals had no desire or capacity for sin. Animals were lucky.
When she was an animal, everything was simpler, clearer, gladder. When she was a wolf, the world was brighter, sharper, cleaner – not physically, though the wolf's different senses were a joy in themselves, but mentally, emotionally. Each of the wolf's feelings were clean and sharp and unadulterated – joy was joy, anger anger, love love, each distinct and different and bright, like primary colours. The human's feelings were those same colours, yes, but all smudged together into shades of unappealing brown. There was no joy without anxiety, no anger untouched by fear, no love without guilt, nothing without reservation. Nothing so clear and clean and bright. And she could have lived with that, with what it was to be human – always had done, before her mutation manifested – if she hadn't known there was something else. That that kind of freedom existed.
And that was why, she thought, Reverend Craig was right that her power, her mutation, was a gift from Satan if it was a gift at all. Not that she was a mutant, but that this was her mutation. That she held within her this ability, this power, this temptation to leap beyond the bonds of human nature, into the clean sharp fresh simple world of the wolf, to forget to hold herself in check, be vigilant against her own sinful urges.
Rahne kept an animal within herself, was in part an animal – for the wolf was as much Rahne as the girl. And animals, she'd been taught, were without souls, without the knowledge of good and evil, the capacity for sin and grace, to be tempted and to resist temptation as humans were. Wasn't it, then, abandoning her soul to abandon herself to the wolf? And surely it only made her sinful lusts and desires and temptations worse if, instead of wrestling with them, resisting them, she became the beast to flee from them, or, worse, to give herself an excuse to give in to them?
Eventually, overwhelmed by the turmoil of her thoughts, she mumbled excuses and left, and did, in the end, run. But she ran as herself, not as her wolf. Both because, now, the wolf was almost one of the things she wanted to run from, and because Dani was, and if she were the wolf, she couldn't run from Dani, would always have her in her head, a bond she welcomed as a matter of course but, in moments like this, couldn't bear.
Rahne ran until her legs were shaking and her face was as red as her hair, her breath coming in sharp pants that tore at her throat. It was a warm, sunny day in late July, and she was drenched in sweat when she finally stopped, unable to go further, and dropped down to sit on a grassy bank, flopping down on her back to stare up at the sky as her breathing settled out.
There were grey clouds menacing on the horizon, but the school and its surroundings lay at the centre of a great pool of blue sky, the sun blazing overhead, and only a few wispy white clouds drifting across the great blue dome. It was the kind of sky you could lose yourself in, watching the clouds float by, the sun stream dazzlingly down. Let the infinite depth of the blue carry you away from yourself. Which was exactly what Rahne endeavoured to do, and gradually, the endless spinning of thoughts in her head slipped away, bit by bit. Her guilt, her shame, her fear, her thwarted desires, all her anxieties and misgivings gradually slipped away, leaving her feeling drained and empty as she lay on the bank in the sun, drifting wearily in that endless blue sea.
She woke to the spatter of rain against her face. The sun had gone down, leaving only a dim glow to the west, and the clouds that had been massing on the horizon last she remembered had rolled in. The sky above was dark, and a cold breeze had sprung up. A hundred yards or so away, a stand of trees rustled in the wind, as if whispering dark secrets. Rahne climbed to her feet, shivering in her thin – and now damp – dress, looked around in the twilight, and realized she had no idea where she was. She had run blindly, earlier, with no direction in mind, and now she was paying for it. This, she thought, with a vague sense of inevitability, was what she got for rushing off on impulse, for giving in to the blind desire to run, without thinking of consequences.
Rahne looked around and shivered. Then, gritting her teeth, she set off up the hill, back the way she had come, and hoped she'd be back on familiar ground soon.
It was full dark when she found the road. She had shifted to wolf form shortly before, after catching her foot in a rabbit hole, tripping and landing face-first in the soaking grass with a twisted ankle. And it was as a wolf that she limped down the road, fur dripping, leg throbbing, too weary to think. She wasn't even entirely sure she was going the right way, but there seemed to be no other option but to keep putting one paw in front of the other, over and over and over, through the dark and the wind and the rain.
Then, as she came up a rise, Dani's voice blossomed in her head, sudden and anxious and as bright and warm and welcome as the sun. Rahne hardly heard what her friend was saying in her mind, over the sheer pounding relief that she had found her. That she was no longer alone in the dark and the rain and the cold.
And then over the hill she heard Dani's voice, her external voice as well as her mind-voice, shouting, and the others answering, and the lights of the mansion blossomed in the distance as Rahne came over the hill. Home.
II
There were things that were sinful, evil, forbidden, wrong. Things a good, God-fearing child wouldn't do. But she is no child any longer, and she struggles to believe she is good. And with so many things to be feared, God had ceased to be foremost among them years ago. Besides, if everything she'd been taught as a child were true, she was damned long ago. There are so many sins on her head, now. So many mistakes, so many wrong turns. So much blood on her hands.
Could the worst thing she could do with this mouth of hers be a kiss?
That is no longer something she can believe. That it is sinful, that she can believe. But she no longer believes she is one who can escape sinning, and if she cannot escape it she might as well embrace it. It is only a little sin, after all. A quiet, tender, sin. A sin, perhaps, to treasure.
Dani's lips are as soft and warm as she first dreamed they would be, years ago, and damned herself for dreaming.
And if this is sin, it is the sweetest of all Rahne's many sins.
She is tentative at first, shy (as she used to be, when she was a child). Gives Dani (and perhaps herself) a chance to pull away. Rahne has known for years that she wants this, wants women – no, wants Dani – since long before she would have allowed her to do it. Dani, though, Rahne is pretty sure Dani is straight, and has loved Rahne as a friend and a sister, but not like this. Dani doesn't, can't want this. But she has to try.
And Dani doesn't pull away.
“Rahne...” she whispers, and Rahne breaks the kiss, nuzzling against Dani's neck instead, at once to breathe in her scent and to avoid meeting her eyes. She doesn't want to see the reproach there, the confusion, the betrayal she is sure she'll see.
She waits for recrimination.
It doesn't come.
Instead, Dani, cautiously, shy herself in a way that strikes Rahne as uncharacteristic, threads her fingers through Rahne's hair, gently pulls Rahne's head around until Rahne's mouth is back against hers. And she kisses Rahne, tentative at first, light, then deeper, firmer, needier. Rahne gasps into her mouth, her heart leaping in her chest, her hands coming up to fist in Dani's hair as they lose themselves in each other.
It is just as she used to dream, when she was a child, though both of them are so much older now.
And the next part, her child-self would never have even dreamt of. Would have been scandalized at the very thought, Rahne is sure, but then there was so much her child-self was scandalized by. She was so innocent then, in so many ways, and so afraid of the world and of herself. Well, perhaps she was right: the world is a scary thing, and so, as it turned out, is Rahne Sinclair. But the world can be wonderful, exciting, joyful, too, and so can Rahne, if she lets herself.
And she does.
It feels like coming home.