The first time I saw Zephyr was at a pre-Christmas party hosted by the school. She was drunk and she was laughing and she was alive in a way I didn't completely understand. There was something about her that was bright, that was lovely, that glittered even more than her maquillage – which, believe you me, glittered plenty.
I was standing at the sidelines, as I always am, eyes vacant and cast out over the assembled humans, the mass of heat that chattered inanely and consumed a great deal of alcohol. I personally wasn't drinking, primarily out of snobbery – a cheap, lousy crémant had been provided, and I was not going to let that swill anywhere near my lips. I had water instead. I spoke to no one as far as I could help it, though I did manage to conduct a halfway intelligent conversation with one of my professors.
The next time I saw her was a different situation completely. As I sat in Church, waiting for the Christmas mass to begin, I spotted her in amongst the choir girls, dressed in their delicate whites. She wore eggshell, and she was looking down her neighbor's dress with a mildly clinical fascination, or so I would have thought if not for the fact that she was also smiling in a rather lecherous way. As we went through the religious formulae, I was straining to catch her voice in the polyphony. I needn't have bothered – she was the cantor for the Kyrie.
The third time I saw her was at my best friend's house, for said friend's birthday. It was a slumber party, but us being us, instead of wild, giggling horror stories, we whiled the night away reciting Shakespearean verse and swapping problem sums whilst folding origami. You could say we were a little old for this, but no seventeen-year-old truly thinks that they are amongst the aged. Since it was a group of adolescent girls, no matter how odd, sex was of course discussed. It was then that I got a chance to see how truly fascinating the girl with the fey eyes and the slim face was – when she was giggling even as she defended homoerotism. I wanted so, so desperately to talk to her about it in private, or at least in deeper detail, but her speech was lost and forgotten in amongst all the rather more explicit tales of sexuality as recounted by our mutual friends.
The fourth time I encountered her was the next day, when I got a friendly, innocuous e-mail from her, just saying how much she had enjoyed talking to me the other night. I was immediately suspicious, as the only thing of interest I had really offered was a short, blasé remark about how heteronormative our society is. Still, I answered as politely as I could. Within two minutes, I got a response.
That was really the progression, I guess. By the next time we met, at school, we were already fast friends, having swapped the most intimate of information and accompanied each other almost constantly through our day-to-day living for weeks. Even when she left to spend time in Japan to tend to her aging grandmother, we kept up the communication. To us, the time difference wasn't a curse, but a blessing, since we could speak even at the oddest hours, when everyone around us was occupied.
And then we finally met again, having spent a couple of years apart and graduated from college, already having procured jobs, I as a psychic in the mortal world and she as a bodyguard. By that time, we were so deeply in love that lust wasn't even in the equation anymore – we would be together until time itself ended, full stop. We didn't have to care about silly little things like dating and sex, because we had more than that. Even when she began to enter a relationship with her partner and I got married to a fellow psychic, a tattooist named Finbar Wrong, there was no jealousy involved, because we still loved each other more than anything.
I can't say that there wasn't a stab of regret in me when I heard of her death, of course, but it was washed away in all the pain that comes of losing the one you love the most.
A/N: I don't know why I enjoy minor characters quite this much, actually.
~Mademise Morte, December 3, 2011.