Work Text:
Things keep changing.
This is not exactly new to you: small things are always changing. Your favorite pen is snapped in half. Smears of candy appear across your keyboard. The book you've left open is on a different page.
Sometimes you feel sleepy when you woke up not three hours ago. Sometimes you blink and the clock's hands have jumped forward. Your existence has always been burdened by these things, and you accommodate your lapses. You make four friends and apologize in advance for any abrupt silences. You memorize page numbers, chess board layouts, sentences you want to finish writing down.
--
One day you wake to find splashes of color on the wall: WHO. ARE YOu?
You stare at the words, flipping through a variety of emotions before settling on resignation. You knew you couldn't avoid it forever.
Still, you take the time to remove the writing. The smell of the soap is sharp against your nose and your shoulders ache from all the scrubbing. Even after all your hard work the wall is never the same.
--
If we're going to continUe on, you write back—not rudely on the wall, but on a piece of paper ripped from one of your precious books and laid neatly on your chest when you lay down to sleep, so that the other can't possibly miss it—we will have to lay down some rUles.
The other is amenable to the idea, of course. The texts you've found say that cherubs do not love anything, except for games and the rules that govern them. A cherub's life, said your reference, is war: against their other selves, against their mates. Games are to be your training grounds.
But if this is a game, it does not feel like one.
The rules develop over the course of a few weeks. You both gravitate towards complements: choosing different colors, genders, sides of the room. You design systems of leg restraints and unique clothing to divide you. The widening gap comforts you even as it infuriates you. How could someone this different, this crude, this monstrous, be sharing a body with you? You never wanted this.
You think of the reference you found, how its dry writing treated your species like a footnote, a passing curiosity. You cover your snarl with a demure hand.
--
Sometimes you feel him pressing against you as you go about learning, creating, dreaming.
Not yet, you whisper, and hold back the dark. It is not your time.