Archive | December 25, 2012

On the Water

Dec25

For [personal profile] imaginaryfiend‘s prompt.

My twin and I were born on the same day, but on different planes of existence.

My father is a boatwright, you see, and while my mother was carrying me, my father – our father – was creating a boat. Building it from the felled trees to the shaped hull to the sails. Building her, my twin.

Our mother – who sewed the sails and shaped the carvings – told my father that it was a foolish conceit, when we were young. “You’ll turn her brain, telling her the boat is her sister.”

My father, who would not sell that boat, of all the boats he had crafted, smiled, agreed, and persisted in calling the ship his daughter, my twin.

“You’ve got to stop,” my mother said, when I was seven, and running along the boards more evenly than on solid ground, swimming in the ocean rather than playing in the park. “You’re twisting her.”

My father, who had watched me learn from my twin how to swim, smiled, nodded, agreed, and continued calling her my twin and my sister.

He couldn’t see her, the way I could, but I don’t think he needed to. He had brought forth the shape of my sister, and, in that shaping, he knew where her soul was – and that she had as much soul as I did.

“Stop it, or she’ll be ruined for anything but sailing.” My mother was not shouting, but it was a close thing. I was a teenager, and I had taken to the seas like I had been born with a keel as much as my sister had.

“Yes.” My father nodded, and smiled, and agreed. “She has been ruined for aught but the sea since she and her sister were begun.”

“She. Is. Not. Her. Sister.” And now my mother shouted. And now my sister and I shouted back, with her keel slapping the water and my voice rising up across the water.

“Yes. We. Are.”

And that was when things truly got complicated.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/436692.html. You can comment here or there.

Sister Trouble

Dec25

This is to @DaHob’s request for something involving Joff and Ivette in school. This takes place in Year 7 of the Addergoole School, in some poor unsuspecting college.

“Man, your sister….” Nathan shook his head. “I don’t know how you live with her, man. If she was my sister…”

Joff could feel the waves of lust coming off of Nathan. He looked away, hiding a smirk with a mumble about “Man, s’my sister.” His sister, the succubus.

Because his sister (and housemate, in the apartment he’d insisted they get) was who she was, he did ask, curiously, “you haven’t?”

He found the way Nathan flushed – and his nervous expression – to be very interesting. What was Ivette up to? “What? No, man, I mean… I know she’s saving herself for marriage.”

“She’s what?” Joff sprayed his beer, and then had to hastily adjust Nathan’s emotions before the bigger kid could freak out. “Sorry. I mean,” he concocted a lie hastily, “she’s mentioned that before, but I didn’t think she’d go through with it. At home, sure, but here, you know, college, all these handsome guys around…”

Aaaand now Nathan thought he was gay. Well, a lot of the small-town types couldn’t tell “gay” from “pansexual” anyway, and it wasn’t like Joff wasn’t sleeping with Oliver and Mark from Nathan’s fraternity (and Alice and Amy from the sister sorority. Letting him and his sister loose on a college campus might have been Regine’s worst mistake yet).

Nathan’s funny colors didn’t seem to be ack, gay funny colors, though. They were still lust colors. Interesting lust colors.

“Look.” Joff stood up. “I gotta study for tomorrow’s class. But I’ll tell you what, I’ll have a talk with Ivette, okay?” He patted Nathan’s shoulder, and watched how the boy’s emotions swirled. He should go out drinking more.

No, he should study more. He had promised Zeke he was going to try a real career, something he really wanted to do.

“You’ll talk to her? For me?”

“She can’t stick to this ‘saving herself’ thing forever. I know my sister.”

In more ways than I ought to. He dodged before Nathan could drunk-hug him, and headed home, wondering what the hell Ivette was up to.

Next: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/441413.html

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