I am humbled by the reception this tiny one-shot received and could not, in good conscious, let this story rest there. For all who have so kindly reviewed, I offer the flipside...
Xenization
Part Two
Where reason breeds calm, she births need. Her devices are fought in a darkened room, private hours consumed with piling mounds of restraint upon the grave of volatile emotions. Hands, stained in defects and failure, are forbidden to venture where she goes. But in the brightness of her dwelling, a look fractures the surface of control. Touch follows and as the fissure deepens with repetition, thin streams of ardor leak from its prison. And he aches to explore.
She speaks of freedom and self.
While she finds no fault in indulgences of feeling, he struggles to justify partaking in such excess. Centuries old lessons surge to protect all he has battled to gain; wisdom, respect, acceptance. Such impractical wanting tests his logic; the analytical striving to prove anarchy incorrect. And increasingly, the logic of generations stumbles against the path she pulls him toward. Retreat is impossible when she moves with a divinity that a fully human man might claim as a religion.
This cannot be healthy.
Yet, she reminds him, neither is stifling mourning or denying joy. The burden of a divided nature is taken on shared shoulders, the woman equal to his task of sustaining the weight. The obsessive needs defining him, to predict and dissect and hide, are sealed into a box she has cast aside. And he grants what she asks because her skin is cunningly smooth and her face is as welcoming as the womb. The liberty to stand in her flame begins the work of charring his reserve to fragile cinders.
And variations on feelings emerge.
The mindless pursuit that her kiss demands becomes his singular intention in secluded times. But it never lasts. Stubbornly digging himself deeper into tradition earns him no disappointment, as though the trait has been factored into her purposes. She lowers a ladder, then waits for him to climb. A few steps are cleared, solid ground stretching above his head but ultimately the folly is declined. Childhood training insists there is no reward for reaching into a careless moment.
But he has a new teacher now.
Prudence calls from him to hold fast to his people's nature and for a time he obeys. Safety in routine, however empty, is pursued until there exists no two molecules of his planet residing together. The farther from the place of his heartbreak, the nearer he comes to understanding. A heart is not mended in shadows nor healed in confinement.
Meditation loses its potency.
The daily exercise of purging the human-tainted flaws through forced silence lessens because contentment is manifested in her presence. The beckoning of disapproving elders grows dimmer as elusive approval is bestowed among amalgams like himself. She has sifted and churned his imperfections, refining them to purity and the man beneath his skin is no longer a stranger.