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“I want to be a genie,” Darren says, not taking his eyes from the screen. Disney’s ‘Aladdin’ is on again. He’s seen the movie before, and at this point, the tape in his VHS copy is wearing out. His mom barely lifts her head from her book this time.
“You can’t be a genie,” she says, eyes flicking to her son, sitting cross legged on the rug and then back to the page. “Genies have been extinct for centuries.”
Darren frowns, brows furrowing, and so she says, “Why do you want to be a genie, sweetie?” He considers the question for a long time, although all things are relative to a six year old and it takes him no more than two minutes to form a response.
“I want to make people happy,” he says, and this time his mom does lower the book she’s reading to her lap. Darren is staring at her, his eyes solemn and his usually smiling mouth a serious line, and she feels her heart melting all over again. He’ll grow into that, she thinks, but he doesn’t need the burden of it yet.
“Well, that genie is played by an actor,” she says instead, “Maybe you could be that instead?” He’s six. He’ll grow out of it.
The thing that surprises her the most is that he doesn’t.
-
Darren likes being different. He likes standing out amidst the sea of uniforms and assimilation. In many ways, his rebellions are small - bright socks peeking out from the hem of his pants, nail varnish when he can get away with it - but there’s also the stuff that’s immutable, that make him absolutely, irrefutably different.
“My mom’s Filipino,” he says, when challenged to list interesting facts about himself. He gets a smile for that one. “My dad’s a water nixie,” on the other hand, does not get him a smile. He has to have a conversation with his teacher about what constitutes ‘truth’. Eight year old Darren understands already that her truth and his differ. His world isn’t limited by the confines of the touchable. He’s half-Filipino, half-Irish, and 100% Faerie. He doesn’t need the belief of his teacher, with her brittle smile and earnest face, to make him real. His world is wider than hers can hope to be.
She doesn’t write home, and she does cast him in the class play, and - when Darren tells his mom - she tells him that it’s his magic already. Earlier than they’d have expected, perhaps, but there all the same. Loving Darren is easy, and it always will be.
-
He applies across the country to colleges, and gets into the University of Michigan. It’s with a sense of relief that he works out that it’s only an hour from the lake. Not every option would have been as optimal, and the calm that settles into his bones tells him he’s made the right decision. Whilst he knows that he would have found friends and cohorts wherever he ended up, Michigan presents him with a group of people who both accept him and come to know him well enough to be fundamentally unimpressed by the reality. It’s actually refreshing, he finds, to be around people who aren’t constantly enamoured by the Other in him.
In his senior year, he and a group of friends put together a musical parody of Harry Potter. Darren is playing Harry and really, it’s just a little thing that they’re doing for their friends, for anyone who can get a ticket. They film it just to send to their friends who can’t see it live. They put it online because it’s cheaper than making DVDs to send to people.
They wildly underestimate the power of Harry Potter.
Darren’s brother says, “Don’t you think that might be a little on the nose?”
He means playing a wizard, not playing with copyright. Darren thinks about it and says maybe, maybe not. Everyone knows that Harry Potter is fictional. Very few people suspect the truth at the heart of it - that there are older and scarier things in the world than the human eye can see.
“You sound like mom,” Chuck says, and Darren feels his skin prickle hot.
“Well, she’s not wrong,” he says, defensive and arch, and Chuck makes a soothing sound in his throat.
“Just be careful, hey?” he says. “Those older and scarier things can still hurt you.”
That may be true, Darren concedes. But he only has one life to live, and live it he will.
-
He meets the woman who will become his girlfriend in 2009. She’s not the first, but she’ll be the longest. They have friends in common, friends who think that, just maybe, they have things in common as well. They’re not wrong. From the places they’ve haunted as they’ve grown up to the interests they’ve both had whilst living on opposite coasts, unaware of the other’s existence, they have a lot to talk about. She makes him laugh. Love is, he understands, compromise and work, but he feels like she’s exactly the girl he wants to make those choices for and with. Her name is Mia, and she’s magnetic in a way that he finds familiar.
“My dad,” she says, holding his hand, their fingers interlocked. It’s the depth of winter and she’s dressed in her East Coaster blacks. She glows regardless. Darren hasn’t asked, but he knows she knows that he wonders. “My dad says it’s pixie magic.”
Darren laughs and ducks his head and she squeezes his hand. “Dad’s a Muggle, Mam’s a witch,” he says, and she tilts her head and looks at him, puzzled. He swings their hands for a moment and then leans in and presses a kiss to her winter-pink mouth. She kisses him back, and then buries her face in the scarf wrapped around her neck and jaw.
He says, “Pixie magic?” and she shrugs her shoulders and retrieves her hand from his. Pulling off one of her gloves, she snaps her fingers in front of his nose. He watches as snow sprinkles their boots and laughs, delighted.
“I wanted to be a genie when I was a kid,” he says, and she laughs as she tugs her gloves back on.
“There aren’t any genies left,” she says, and he nods amiably.
“I know,” he says. And then, “My mom’s a forest sprite. My dad’s people were boctogai, a long time ago.”
She doesn’t say anything for a moment, and then she takes his hand and continues walking. “Explains a lot,” she says. “Or it explains the way people are with you, at least.” She’s quiet for a little while and then she whispers, “Whatever happens, you blow me away.”
Love might be a choice, he decides, but this feels like a good one.
-
Darren’s magic is less visceral than pixie magic, than hand magic and trickery. For all that there is crossover in how people view him and think of him, his magic isn’t the magic of witches and wizards; he can’t fly, or move things, or change their inherent natural properties. His magic is softer. It resides in his laugh, in his voice, in the way he captures hearts and minds. Like the water sprites of legend, Darren draws people to him. They want to be in his presence, want to be close to him, and he loves being loved, loves returning it, brighter and stronger and ephemeral.
Sometimes, though, he worries that Mia’s love isn’t a choice she’s made. It’s been the death of every relationship he’s had, the unsettling realisation that often, people - human people - aren’t making the choices he does. He disengages and lets go. Mia only laughs when he asks, though.
“Oh, sweetie,” she says, and pushes the curls of his hair from his forehead, traces his eyebrows with her fingers. “There are more magical things than you in the world. The sun rises every morning. There are animals in the ocean so large you could drive through their veins. You’re just a boy.”
It’s oddly satisfying to hear. Her love is a choice she makes as well. He ducks his head when he feels his eyes grow wet, and she tilts his chin back up.
“I love you,” she tells him, emphatic and earnest. “Not the faerie.”
“I’m glad,” he says quietly, around the emotion balled in his throat. She’s the first person he’s laid himself this bare for, and he’s relieved that she hasn’t taken that trust for granted.
“Besides,” she grins. “It’s a two way thing. I’d hope that you’re not with me just because of the pixie.”
He’s not. He wouldn’t. He can’t make the words happen, so he kisses her instead, shakes his head. “Never,” he says, finally. “I love you, too.”
Relief uncoils in his chest like a rope. He breathes in, hard and deep, and she leads him through her apartment to her bedroom, where she shows him exactly what else her own magic can do.
-
He books a 6 episode gig on Glee. It’s a cultural phenomenon, a rollercoaster that’s been hard to ignore, for all that he hasn’t watched it. He’d auditioned - along with everyone else who could sing and dance - back when it first started, and then he’d forgotten about it again. He has no idea how very much it will change his life. He can’t have. For all that he’s Faerie, he can’t see the future. Six episodes becomes 90 and five years of his life. It opens doors he can’t believe he gets to walk through. It’s a whirlwind of emotion and joy, even when it’s hard.
It opens doors he’d genuinely thought would be closed forever. He’s offered the lead in How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying on Broadway. He says yes, but also that he can only do it for three weeks. He anticipates the offer being withdrawn, and is surprised when it is not. They’ll take three weeks. Sometimes the what of him astonishes him as well.
When Glee ends, he books his second stint on the Great White Way - he gets to play Hedwig. “I’m the new Berlin Wall,” he says, and winks at the camera. He’s young for it. So young. But they decide to take a gamble on him regardless. He says it’s having the confidence to be out there, to put yourself out there, to chase the things you want and to reach always for the stars. But part of it is also his magnetism, who he is. What he is.
It’s a lot to take in. He pinches himself to see if it’s real. The bruises on his shins tell him that it is.
-
The easiest place to hide, he comes to understand, as interview piles upon interview and as photoshoots blur into a shimmer of flashbulbs and fashion, is in plain sight. No one he knows would believe that he’s enkanto, that he’s drawn to bodies of water, to coasts and shores and lakes, for a reason. Truthfully, though, he can’t sleep if he’s more than a hundred miles from natural bodies of water, although man-made lakes will work in a pinch. When he travels - and travel becomes increasingly necessary - he can only sleep properly, deeply, by submerging himself in a bath or standing motionless underneath a rain shower as a last resort.
When he’d finally bought his own house, the pool had been mandatory. His dad helped him make sure it was suitable, but really, anything twice as long as him would have done. When he’s home, the pool is in constant use, and he likes that his friends use it when he’s not there - it means he doesn’t have to have it covered. It’s always there, clear and inviting, when he arrives home. He lets the water close over his head and opens his eyes, stares through the gloom and feels his body realign.
His eyes, which see so well in the depths of the water, don’t cope well with the bright flashes of light. He doesn’t see well on land, wears contacts to protect his eyes from the glare, to see further than three feet in front of his face. Light plays tricks in his eyes, turns the brown to gold and green, whiskey and tea and molten amber. It’s the clearest visual evidence of what he is that there is, and the easiest to dismiss, to deflect and obfuscate. He doesn’t lie about it, but honesty is hard to rationalise. When the subject comes up, he grins his wide Cheshire grin and says thanks.
“I got them from my mom,” he says. “She’s pretty magical too.”
He takes her to events, his mom. They’re photographed together. People look for the similarities between them, at her ageless face and infectious smile, and recognise his smile and his laugh and the way his eyes crease when he’s happy, and he thinks, that’s not at all what he means.
But no one believes in his people here, or - only the people who brought their gods and myths across the ocean with them. They take his hands and tell him that they know what he is. Exactly like that. “I know what you are,” they say, and press gifts into his palms. Tokens and trinkets. Wishes and prayers. He meets them again and again, familiar faces in the crowds, standing out in the melee. “You saved my life,” they say. “Thank you for being you.”
There’s no one else he knows how to be.
-
In his late 20s, Darren starts telling stories about his mom. He’s learned, with time, how to tell stories about her that are appealing without revealing what she is. He lands on one that raises a smile whenever he tells it - the one with her fear of dragons. No one believes in dragons, or not really. No one has seen one this side of the Pacific, so it seems harmless to relay the story of the small wire dragon of his that mysteriously vanished from amongst his possessions. People laugh with him, and not at her, and it’s nice to be able to talk about their lives, as if their lives are at all usual.
“My mom,” he says, “She has this real thing with like, dragons. She’s very Catholic, but also very Filipino. So she has this superstitious thing about dragons.” He pauses. He doesn’t want to throw her under the bus; when he was a child, she would happily watch Pete’s Dragon with him. She knows the difference between the fire lizards of her youth and the ones in cartoons. “It’s intense, this thing. But only with scary dragons.”
He won’t lie, though, and say he doesn’t know why she’s scared of them. His mom is diwata, after all. He’s seen the scars, fine and faint and almost invisible now, where her gossamer wings once were, before they were taken, seared from her body with dragon fire. She has her reasons to not wish to encourage her sons’ flights of fancy, even if the European dragons they enjoy are not the fire lizards of her youth.
-
He doesn’t know what the future holds. Each day unfurls for him the same way it does for everyone else. As his girlfriend once told him, the sun rises every single day, and that small miracle is only the first before breakfast. He keeps his heart open, and works hard, and tries each day to share his small magics with the people he encounters.
Some days it’s the best he can do.