Title: Prodigal

Author: Thaumocracy

Fandom: "The Neverending Story"

Pairing: Bastian/Atreyu

Rating: R for non-explicit m/m sex and one or two swear words

Summary: Bastian and Atreyu, years away and between...

Archive: Yes to Rareslash and the WWOMB, please ask before archiving anywhere else; I can provide an HTMLized version upon request

E-mail: thaumocracy@hotmail.com

Miscellany: Takes place a few years after the events of the first movie, hence them not being underage - Bastian's a college man now, though he's still the antisocial bookworm we all know and love. I'm disregarding all events that take place in any movies thereafter (except for me imagining an older Jonathan Brandis as Bastian ^_^"). This is set within the movie'verse, but if anybody'd like to fill me in on book canon I'd be more than happy to listen. It goes without saying that Bastian and Atreyu aren't mine (*sigh*...), and I'm not making any money off of this. There's also a quote from "Six Feet Under", just to give credit where credit's due. Anyway, enough of this, hope y'all enjoy!


Prodigal
by Thaumocracy

This story, like so many other stories, begins with a boy.

This is not, though, a story about a boy like many other boys, for indeed if the boy of whom I speak were much like other boys then this would not be a story worth telling. In typical boy fashion was he hewn, in typical boy fashion was he raised, but in atypical boy fashion did he (and, to this day, does he) think, and feel, and pine. This, then, is a story about that most atypical of boys (though he never did and never would understand, for his exceptionality was in that he would never recognize himself as such), Bastian Balthazar Bux.

This is the story of Bastian Balthazar Bux and the figures that stalk his dreams and skulk about the corners of his awareness.

This is the story of Bastian Balthazar Bux and the ephemeral visions of a royal girl swathed in white.

This is the story of Bastian Balthazar Bux and the warrior prince Atreyu of the Plains People, he whom Bastian would come to love and hate and love again in the course of time.

This is the story of Bastian Balthazar Bux and his childhood preoccupation with, emigration in his adolescent years from and eventual cathartic rediscovery of the land known to the very privileged few to walk its sacred plains and behold its majestic spires as Fantasia.

And ultimately, when all is said and done, this is the story of a boy and a book.

***

Bastian grimaces at the face in the mirror.

He's pleased to see it grimace back at him.

Bastian Balthazar Bux knows that the only way to start his day is to make sure that the face in the mirror is a face he can call his own.

Chaz, his roommate, thinks he needs help. But Chaz is tall and blond and has a charismatic smile, so Bastian doesn't give much thought to what Chaz thinks. When they first met and Bastian was eager to make new friends, or, for that matter friends period, he did a lot to try to get to know Chaz, but the more he learned about the man the less he found he wanted to know him at all. They're cordial, of course, and in all candor Chaz is a considerate and thoughtful roommate, but - friend? Bastian isn't quite willing to go that far. Chaz is just Too Different for Bastian.

Chaz is from San Diego, California and was on his high school's junior varsity basketball team; not varsity, a fact which Chaz apparently took in his usual good humor, though Bastian sometimes catches Chaz flipping through his high school yearbook wistfully. There's a girlfriend - of course there's a girlfriend, Bastian thought when he first met Chaz - and a best friend - a son of preternaturally cheery Southern California just like Chaz, tall and friendly and with an expansive sense of humor - and a circle of friends that come into and out of their room like stellar objects moving in their orbits. Chaz listens to Jimmy Eat World and the Goo Goo Dolls and Bastian is pretty sure he once walked in on Chaz just as he was taking a Vertical Horizon CD out of the stereo system.

In short, Chaz just Doesn't Understand.

Chaz probably never had to deal with midnight delusions or low-grade ambient paranoia.

Chaz probably never had to deal with kleptomania or schizophrenia or pseudologia fantasia or any of the other things that Bastian's sure _he_ has.

Chaz probably never had to deal with the gnawing fear that unless he was in constant contact with the universe it would evanesce into nothingness.

Chaz can't get what it's like to be Bastian, to be a walking bundle of neuroses and psychoses lashed together by willpower and chemical covalent bonds.

Bastian has pills to help him with his anxiety. They're small and yellow and bitter when he chews them; he doesn't think he's supposed to chew them, but he does so anyway. The pills don't do much to help him, but at least he's no longer absently touching lamp posts when he passes them on the street, and he doesn't try to open doors with his hands wrapped up in his shirtsleeves, and those two triumphs are very precious ones indeed.

The compulsive blinking at stoplights he's working on.

It's almost sunrise, and Chaz is snoring gently in his bed across the room from Bastian. Bastian looks at his roommate, sleeping the sleep of the righteous and content, and feels nothing but pity for him.

Bastian does his scarf up around his face, pulls his hunter's cap down over his ears and takes care not to make any loud noises as he leaves the room. Pats his left breast pocket once, feels a reassuring knot of beads there, pats his right back pocket, feels the weight of his wallet, bends down to check his shoelaces and finds them still tied. Checks off each action in his head like a pilot preparing to taxi down a runway. Once he's satisfied that he isn't forgetting anything, he makes for the door and turns the handle.

"See ya, Chaz," he says softly.

Chaz lets out a snore of farewell.

***

Bastian makes his way across campus, across freshly fallen snow that suggests a pastorality he knows would not accurately depict the debaucherous denizens of the dorms lining Commonwealth Avenue, and makes it to Marsh Chapel in a little under five minutes. He glances once, quickly, at the watch he wears upside down on his left wrist - still has half an hour before services start, which is fine. Exactly within schedule. He's calculated it before, and it takes him about a minute to walk down to the pew he's come to think of as his, to the left and back of the sacristy, and it takes him another minute or two to finish genuflecting and settle himself upon the wooden bench, and twenty-five minutes to say the Holy Rosary three times, which leaves him with three minutes to gather himself and his thoughts before a priest, usually either either Father O'Malley or Heinzelman but lately that new one Kemp, gets to the front of the chapel and begins holding services.

Religion is a new thing in Bastian's life; he remembers his mother pressing a rosary into his tiny palm whe she was in the hospital, but never really taking it for anything more than an expression of maternal love. Bastian would recite it with her every time he visited the hospital, would count off the various stations of divine suffering and longanimity in rhythym with the beeping of the machines that regulated her body and her life. It seemed to ease her, those words of faith, make the dissolution of her digestive system seem bearable and within the scope of her own experience, as if the assumption of a divinity's agony and death made his mother's worthwhile by proxy.

Bastian would not deny the therapeutic effects that prayer had on his mother, but therapy was all that it seemed to offer her. After she died Bastian found himself moving further and further away from the Church and its sundry proscribings and prohibitions. Bastian started looking at the institution with a goodly amount of skepticism and disdain. His mother's fervor did nothing for her in the end; he resolved to invest his faith in something more tangible, in the revelations of gospels written by and for catharsis and enlightenment on a more mortal plane, resolved to believe more in humanity than divinity. Bastian substituted many books for The Book, and eventually he found himself completely detached from notions of spirituality.

All that changed, though, when Bastian started slipping into and out of elaborately constructed fantasies about a wondrous world with dragons and halfling creatures and an Empress ruling from on high in an ivory tower that scraped against a star-strewn sky. More times than he'd care to admit Bastian would slip into his fantasy world in the middle of classes, bus rides home, dinner with his father. Thankfully the hallucinations rarely lasted more than an hour or two, but that was small recompense for the frequency of their onset. Random stretches of vacant emptiness became one of the qualities ascribed to him by what few friends he had, and between that and the increasing number of panic attacks he found himself alone and disconsolate for much of his adolescent life.

After one of the worst delusions, a fevered thing of painfully vivid colors and fey picaresques that seized him for the better part of a whole day, Bastian came across his mother's rosary lying on his nightstand. To this day, Bastian can't say what made him pick the thing up and start counting off the invocations of divine suffering, but the act left him feeling more controlled and temperate; his wanderlust-stricken mind was eased by the structure of the prayer, the breadth of his mind collapsed into a single pinpoint of belief and confidence. Bastian set a routine for himself, kneeling before the makeshift altar in his room at every quarter-day's passing, and marveled when the delusions were successfully held in abeyance. Nowadays Bastian wears a scapular around his neck and carries his mother's rosary on him at all times; he finds it comforting to squeeze the beads between his fingers in lieu of randomly touching the universe to make sure it still exists.

The arrival of Father Kemp shakes Bastian out of his reverie, and he only barely remembers to divest himself of his cap and scarf before the priest begins with the confession of sins.

"I confess to Almighty God, and to you my brothers and sisters, that I have sinned..." Bastian bows his head and presses his clasped hands to his forehead in prostration.

***

It's almost nine o'clock when Bastian finishes his prayers. He generally stays after in the empty chapel; he always takes that extra time to calm his nerves, to subdue the host of impulses that would otherwise assume control of him. When he readies himself to leave, the only other people left are a pair of befrocked novitiates and they're supposed to be there the entire day. It's their duty to stay in the warm little chapel that smells of incense; Bastian has no such excuse, so he figures he might as well start on his way out.

He tugs the cap down low over his ears and pushes the heavy oak door open, moving a hand up to shield himself from the glare of sunlight refracted from snow. The rest of campus is just barely starting to stir when Bastian starts on back towards his room. His mind is always a little bit more together, a little bit more composed after morning services; he runs the rosary beads through his fingers as he walks, but he’s doing a lot better now than he was when he first woke up. He always ends up doing more twitchy things in the first thirty minutes upon waking up in the morning than in the twenty three and a half other hours of the day combined. That half-state of light and dark, of indecision and confusion dressed up in a murky gray, never goes over well with him.

Chaz is still asleep when Bastian gets back to their room; his eyes flutter open slightly when Bastian shuts the door behind him. The nascent sunlight comes down in slats around Chaz's prone form, and Bastian has to blink once before his eyes adjust to the low-grade light in the room.

"You're going to be late for your nine o'clock," Bastian says conversationally.

Chaz lifts his head to glance up at the clock on his nightstand and just as quickly returns it to his bed. He grabs a pillow with his arm and buries his face in it, letting out a low keening wail of distress. "Aww, shit, you're right. Why didn't you wake me up when you left for your jog?" Chaz swings his feet onto the ground, stretches and gives his spine an experimental twist. Bastian looks away from the play of muscles along Chaz's torso.

"I'm sorry, it's just that you came in so late last night that I thought you might want some sleep." He's not really apologetic, but Chaz doesn't seem to notice. He never seems to notice.

"Oh. Well, would you wake me up next time?"

"Sure, no problem." Bastian sits down at his desk and boots up his laptop. "Off to the gym?"

"But of course, oh roomie mine. I think I'll skip my nine o'clock today, I've got work to catch up on."

"Not like you've really got much of a choice," Bastian says dryly. "See ya, Chaz."

Bastian used to wonder what he'd say if Chaz ever saw him kneeling in Marsh Chapel instead of taking a run around Cambridge like he's said he's been doing since the semester started - "Oh, I just got tired on my way back and decided to sit down for a spell," except he doesn't think even Chaz would buy that. But he's come to the conclusion that if Chaz were a little more peceptive, he'd realize that Bastian leaves for his jogs dressed in combat boots and khaki slacks, and in almost four months of living together he has yet to notice, so Bastian thinks he doesn't have to worry about that happening at all.

***

Bastian leaves his room exactly once the rest of the day, and that's to step down to the dining common to get himself a bowl of Captain Crunch and sneak it back upstairs to his room. He spends the day studying for his finals, curled up on the far corner of his bed with his bowl of Crunchberries and a bottle of soy milk gripped between his knees. Chaz comes into and out of the room between classes, but he's used to Bastian curled up on his bed with a bowl of Crunchberries and a bottle of soy milk gripped between his knees so he merely inclines his head at Bastian politely at each of his entries.

At the moment, Bastian is immersed in the chapter in his organic chemistry textbook about polymerization. "A wide variety of molecules can react to form different polymers," he reads. "Many contain chains of carbon atoms although links with other atoms such as oxygen, silicon and sulphur are common. Some polymers will form crystalline or semi-crystalline solids with regular structural arrangements. Frequently the polymers will form crystals with the molecular chains predominantly arranged in a parallel configuration. Polymers can also exist with random or amorphous structures - these are often glassy solids. Other polymers are liquids or metals. The only state in which long molecules are not usually found is that of a gas - they are too massive to move as a gas without having energy sufficient for molecules to break. The physical properties of these materials are not always the same as that of low molecular mass materials and so they can be exploited in unusual--"

"...Bastian? Hey Bastian?"

He blinks rapidly and glances up; Chaz is crouched on his haunches by Bastian's bed. When did Chaz get back? A small group of his interchangeable friends is standing around in the hallway, and Chaz's best friend is framed in the open door with one arm slung over Chaz's girlfriend's shoulders. All of Chaz's friends are comfortable with one another like that.

"Hey, Chaz," Bastian grunts, rubbing one hand across the back of his eyes sleepily. "Sorry, I was out of it for a second there."

"I came by to get you for dinner but you were kind of asleep."

"Kind of asleep?"

"Okay, a lot of asleep. You were holding onto your o-chem textbook and cuddling around it like it was a teddy bear." Chaz smirks, a quick upturning of his lips. Glances quickly at the shapely form of his girlfriend standing in the door frame. "Personally, I think soft things make better pillows, but to each his own."

Bastian doesn't laugh.

Chaz shifts his stance and sighs almost imperceptibly. "Well, listen, I brought you up a few of those Boca Burgers you like and a glass of orange juice from the dining common. Me and everyone are gonna run down to Ben & Jerry's for some dessert - d'you want anything?"

Bastian shakes his head. "No, I'm good. Thanks for the dinner save, though." He tries on a small smile for Chaz, and finds it not difficult to maintain. "How'd you know I was going to forget dinner?"

Chaz turns his kilowatt grin on Bastian. "Hey, we both know how you get when you start studying." He rises and brushes his pants off absently. "All right, I'll be back in a little bit."

He should be nicer to Chaz, Bastian thinks as he munches idly on a Boca Burger, but then he remembers the "She's All That" poster hanging from Chaz's side of the room and the abundance of Hawaiian shirts in Chaz's wardrobe and Bastian decides that pity really is the best way to go when it comes to his roommate.

He drains the orange juice and returns to his o-chem textbook reluctantly. Bastian's just getting back into the studious mindset, reading fifteen-syllable long chemical processes aloud to get the feel of the phrases, when the phone rings. "Hey Bastian," the voice on the other end of the phone says, and Bastian suppresses the urge to let out a swear word under his breath.

"Hi Dad," he replies as casually as he can, standing up and pacing the room with the cordless pinched between his head and his shoulder. "What's up?"

"Just calling to let you know that I'll be in the area this weekend."

"Just in the area? How often are you 'just' in the Boston area, Dad? It's not like it's a hop, skip and a jump away."

"Well, it's not like it's _that_ far."

"Oh, at least three hops, a skip and two jumps. At least."

"Ha ha, Bastian. I see that college hasn't dulled your razor-sharp wit like I was hoping. Anyway, I was thinking we could get dinner and a movie or something."

Bastian doesn't quite know how to respond, so he gapes. It's something he does really well, gaping.

"I know we didn't really get to be with one another a lot the last time I was in Boston, so--"

Klaxons go off in Bastian's head, and he desperately tries to head his father off before he can finish his sentence. "Oh, but Dad, see, I'm really busy this weekend. It's almost finals, you know, and I've just been so busy with studying and everything that I don't know if that's--"

He can hear the stern frown creasing his father's brow from across the phone. "Bastian, I know you're not saying I can't spend time with my only son on one of those rare instances when I'm going to be in the city he spends seven months out of the year living in."

A lost cause, Bastian can tell already. "...No, guess not."

"Great, wonderful. Listen, I've got to finish a few things here before I leave, but I'll be on a train to Boston first thing tomorrow morning."

"Okay, fine. Should I try to meet you at the train station?"

"No, that's fine, I'm going to be catching a cab to the Marriott in town. Bizarre as it does seem, I do have business to take care of in Boston. I'll give you a call once I'm all settled in, okay? Keep tomorrow free, kiddo. Feel free to bring any of those young ladies I'm sure you're seeing right now," his father says. Somehow, his father's able to wink with his voice. Bastian's never been able to figure it out.

"Sure, Dad," he says. Bastian's learned the futility of actually _saying_ anything to his father about that sort of thing, so he just acquiesces with him. It uncomplicates both of their lives to a marvelous degree. "I'll see you this weekend, then."

"Love you, kiddo," his father says.

"Love you too Dad."

Bastian moans once, loudly in the empty room, and collapses in a heap on his bed.

***

He's not sure how long he's like that, with an arm flung over his eyes piteously, because he's pretty sure he fell asleep at least twice during that time, but when he finally comes to it's almost midnight and Chaz still isn't back. It's a good thing he didn't ask Chaz for that ice cream, he thinks.

Bastian's got far too much to take care of and far too little time to do it in. He's two weeks behind on his o-chem work, his final paper on the import of Diocletian upon Western civilization is due on Wednesday - Wednesday! - and he hasn't even started it yet, and now this business with his dad coming into town for the weekend. He knows the drill with his father; his father will take a good solid day of the time that Bastian needs to study, and of course Bastian can't do anything like _cancel_ on his father because they're having enough trouble as it is, because neither of them had expected that college would take such a toll on their otherwise healthy and fine relationship, but now Bastian has to worry about trying to repair that on top of all the work he's got to finish, all in one weekend. It's a little much for him, and before he realizes it he's sketched a dark and angry nebulous form over his notes on polymerization. Bastian grinds his teeth and scrubs his hands through his hair. He needs to clear his mind, even out his arrhythymic breathing. He needs a sense of balance, he needs--

Yes, of course. That reliable bastion of his sanity. Bastian grabs his rosary, dons his hat and scarf and heads out the door towards Marsh Chapel.

The campus is pretty much empty at this time of night during finals crunch week; it being a Friday night he'd expected at least a few parties to be spilling out onto Commonwealth by now, but nothing. He passes by one or two other people bundled up in layers of weather-resistant gear, but otherwise the campus is silent and serene. It calms him, and before he's halfway to the church his breathing has evened and his thinking isn't so erratic and scattered.

He sits down on a bench overlooking the Charles River, counting off rosary beads in the moonlight. He finishes off the ninth station - Christ falling a third time on his way to Golgotha - and is about ready to leave when something catches his eye, in the shrubbery growing on the bank of the Charles. He squints at the glint in the light. It's a book, thick and leather-bound with...a pair of enmeshed snakes on its cover...

Nobody's around, not that Bastian can see, and there are no footprints in the snow around it; if somebody lost the book here, it was a while ago, at least before the snow settled around it. Bastian pads through the shrubbery, taking care not to let his scarf snag on the ensnaring branches. He bends down to pick the book up - strange, he thinks. There's no snow on it, and the cover is only slightly damp from the surrounding wetness, which doesn't make sense since there aren't any footprints around it.

He runs his fingers over the intertwined snakes on the book's cover. Bastian smiles - he knows how this story starts. It would be midnight in the Howling Forest, with a fierce wind whistling through the ancient trees, when suddenly, the great Rockbiter would--

Bastian shakes his head. The words on the page - not what he'd...

"This story," he reads aloud in the empty night, not quite liking the strange resonances his voice is taking on, "like so many other stories, begins with a boy..."

Something strikes Bastian then, a great wracking headache that causes him to reach up to his temples and clutch at them blindly. His other hand convulses, sending the book flying away from him. It arcs high in the air before falling into the Charles River. It starts to sink, slowly but inexorably, from view. The book shouldn't sink so slowly, Bastian thinks, but then another headache comes crashing down upon him and he no longer has the inclination to ponder the peculiar physics of a bizarrely buoyant book.

Bastian cries out with a piercing note of pain. A keening vibration starts from somewhere within him, like his internal organs are stepping out of synch with one another all at once, and he grabs fistfuls of snow with desperate hands to try and steady himself. After a moment, the pain subsides and he's left there gasping for breath in erratic fits.

Bastian clutches his chest with a tremulous hand - he hopes to God that wasn't a heart attack. He wonders if it's even possible to get a heart attack at eighteen. He feels he should look into in, when he's a little calmer and a little less feeling like he's dying.

Just as he staggers to his still-shaky knees, he feels another vibration within him - painless this time, though, like standing on the side of the road and being jarred by passing cars. The world before him turns into a glittering flurry of flecks and specks, like light refracted through a prism into its component parts. Bastian shuts his eyes and passes out with a noiseless groan.

And just like that, the night is empty once more. The snow lies undisturbed and pristine on the banks of the Charles River.

***

When he comes to, he's laying sprawled face-down upon a bank of sand with sea foam cresting along his calves. He blinks his eyes experimentally. No longer in the searing agony that sent him into unconsciousness, but that's a small comfort when he realizes that he's no longer on campus. In fact, he's on a beach that looks like it's seen the rise and fall of civilizations long past; broken stone columns litter the beach a little further down from where Bastian's lying in the sand, and a little to his left a marbled walkway leads to a crumbling veranda.

Bastian spits out a mouthful of sand and pushes himself up to a crouching position. He pulls his cap off and scrubs a hand through his hair in confusion. Cautiously, he moves towards the crumbling pillars, eyes scanning about in quick sweeps of the land.

Not Boston. He figures he needs to establish that, first.

This isn't happening this isn't happening this isn't happening this isn't happening, a frantic part of him jabbers.

Not productive, another part of him snarls viciously.

This isn't happening this isn't happening this isn't happening...

Right. Well, that part of him isn't being helpful at _all_, so Bastian decides to ignore hysteria in favor of logic, which ultimately is the only way he's going to figure out what's going on.

The logical thing would be to survey the terrain, see if perhaps he's just in a part of Boston he's unfamiliar with. He does remember having a seizure-like attack, so it's altogether possible that he...he...he what, sleepwalked out of Boston and onto some beach with great Grecian colonnades dotting its length? Bah. Unlikely. He's not Prince Caspian, he tells himself.

His next thought is that he's hallucinating. It's entirely possible; Bastian does have a history of vivid and layered hallucinations. But the sand along the curve of his cheek where he hasn't wiped himself clean is textured and abrasive to the touch, and besides, Bastian's on pills to hold those at arm's length too.

Then again, he has been skipping those pills lately too. It's hard enough to remember to take the tiny yellow ones every day...

He tells himself it's a stress-induced construct, and that all he needs to do is ride it out, and that a sufficient trauma to his person while in this unconscious state should shock him awake.

Dropping a series of weighty stones on his feet isn't the way to regain consciousness, he finds, after an experimental bout with the stuff yields nothing but a throbbing, painful foot.

A sharp noise startles Bastian, and he spins around and catches a fleeting glimpse of a figure running through the thick brush growing where the sand ends and soil begins.

"Hello?" Bastian calls tentatively, limping forward with a hitching gait. Rocks definitely not a good plan, Bastian thinks. If he'll need to run - but, of course, running would mean that he'd be afraid of something. Which, obviously, he cannot be if he's a logical, rational person who realizes that he's merely suffering from an elaborate and intricate delusion.

The shadowy figure flits out of his vision just as he turns to catch it. "Hey! Please, just wait a minute - come back here, please! I just want to know where I am. What is this place?" A gust rustles the trees behind him, and Bastian shoots a quick glance over his shoulder.

Bastian screams loudly in frustration. "What the _fuck_ is going on here?" He picks up one of the larger rocks by his heel and hurls it, hard as he can, at the retreating form.

Bastian prides himself on his stalwartness nowadays; he's come a long way from the tenderness of his youth, when he'd cry over losing his lunch money. He tries to suppress such immoderate displays of emotion, schooling his life around a rigid structure of prayer and scholasticism and meditation, but there's only so much a guy can take before he snaps. Finding himself awake on a desolate, eerily empty beach with Boston nowhere in sight is pretty much his breaking point, though to his credit Bastian'd been doing a good job up till now.

So Bastian, with little else he can do, decides that perhaps a good immoderate display of emotion is called for, and stumbles to the ground and clutches his knees to his chest.

***

After he calms down, Bastian spends the rest of the day scouting around his surroundings. He grows increasingly frustrated as he wanders up and down the beach; the ruins stop about a mile down from either direction of him, trailing off into thick and wild brush. The ruins themselves are limned with some foreign glyphs, angled and precise things that look more like something out of Norse mythology than Boston proper.

He's not sure how long he's been walking up and down the beach, but when he finally returns to his point of origin the sun has dipped beneath the horizon and the clear blue has yielded to a purple-black stretch of sky.

Bastian's rapidly losing faith in the notion that he'll regain his senses on his own anytime soon.

He's alone and lost in a land that seems deserted save for a shadow-like presence that darts into and out of his range of vision. There's still a chance that it's just an elaborate hallucination, but even so the last place Bastian remembers being was on the bank of the Charles, right off an often-used road, so somebody should have found him and woken him by now. Every passing second eats away at Bastian's well-developed sense of rationality and faith in a tangible world.

Rain, he realizes, is falling upon his hunched shoulders, and he cups his hands and feels the spattering of drops upon his upturned palms. Bastian's always liked the rain, the feel of it along his skin, the weight of his wet hair, the cleansing aspect of the entire process. He smiles, tilts his head back and lets the rain come down upon him in heavy beads.

The winds pick up and start carrying the rain in rivulents down the back of his shirt. Bastian shivers and glances up at the sky. It's only then that he notices thunderheads have massed and cords of lightning leap from cloud to cloud. Great claps of thunder start bearing down upon him from the ocean, and the sea roils with a malevolence Bastian's only seen in the popular media when talking heads report from some benighted eastern seaboard port city being leveled by hurricane-force winds. The storm is deafening and comes completely out of nowhere.

"In here," a voice calls out through the cacophony of the storm, "quickly!"

It's difficult to see through the winds that whip across his vision, but Bastian can make out a man waving madly at him from the relative shelter of the mouth of a cave. Bastian wonders if it's the same one that's been stalking him for the past day, but he figures as he dashes towards the cave's entrance that anybody who's trying to save his life probably deserves a chance to explain himself.

There's a crack in the dome over them, and through clouds loom ominously. The rain catches on the lip of the crack, so the ground isn't terribly wet beneath it. There's a fire burning beneath an overhang, the thick coils of smoke curling up and around the rock. A small knapsack sits by the fire, leather and held together by a single drawstring that loops around and through the straps. The man quickly moves towards it, back turned to Bastian. He shoots a quick glance at Bastian over his shoulder, motions him closer to the fire with a roll of his head.

The man crosses his arms in front of his chest - bare, Bastian finds himself noticing despite himself, long and trim and burnished-bright in the moonlight - and leans against the flat plane of a ruined column that runs into the wall. His words, when he finally stops grinning at Bastian with an oddly familiar twist to his mouth, come out lilting and mellifluous, a loping cadence to their delivery.

"Well well, the prodigal returns. This is what you've been running away from your whole life, lost one. You thought you'd escaped? Well, guess what - nobody escapes."

That accent...he's sure he's heard it before. Bastian blinks once, twice, catches his hand before it closes the space of - inches, Bastian thinks, mere inches - between him and the smiling bare-chested man before him.

"I know you," he says slowly, trying the phrases and the couching thereof in his mind before saying the name that he's known all his life. "I...I _do_ know you, don't I?"

"Indeed." Firelight's reflected in the eyes of the bare-chested man. "What am I called, Bastian Balthazar Bux whose name I know like the lay of this land?"

"Atreyu?" It comes slowly to him, the name of this long-forgotten shadow, but once Bastian says it worlds unfold in his mind.

Atreyu grins wide like the crescent moon hanging overhead.

***

"Here," Atreyu says, handing Bastian a strip of jerkied meat. "You haven't eaten all day. You must be tired."

Bastian frowns. "I, uhh, I don't eat meat," he says sheepishly, "but thank you."

Atreyu eyes Bastian sternly. "You are weak. You should eat." His expression tells Bastian that he'll brook no quarrel on the subject, and Bastian glumly considers the proffered meat; his objection to the consumption of meat is rooted in indifference to it, not in any moral conceptions about the rightness or wrongness of eating meat, so he thinks that perhaps it's not such a big deal if he has a piece of potentially imaginary meat. He takes the food silently and tears a chunk off with his teeth. A moment passes where the only sounds are the thinning of the rain outside and the snap of wood in Atreyu's fire.

"How do you know I haven't eaten all day?" Bastian says, curious despite himself.

Atreyu glances sideways at Bastian. "I've been following you," he says casually.

"Oh."

Bastian gnaws on his food with quick, rough motions of his jaw. It's dry and tough and tastes like what he imagines rawhide leather must be like, but he hasn't eaten all day long and to his ravenous stomach taste matters little.

His inordinately sensitive palate though, he realizes as he coughs around the surprisingly spicy meat, is something else altogether.

"Do you have anything to drink?" he chokes out between coughs.

Atreyu fishes a tin out of his knapsack and extends it outward, into the path of a thin trickle of rainwater that falls down from the shelter of the rock overhang. He sets it on the fire for a few moments, then passes it to Bastian.

"It's fresh rainwater, so it shouldn't be too unsafe, but you can't be too sure," he offers by way of explanation. Bastian merely takes a small sip and, finding the water warm and pleasant, takes a longer pull from the tin.

"Thank you," Bastian says softly.

The silence between them grows uncomfortable, though Atreyu doesn't seem to mind. He's perfectly fine just sitting there banking his fire as it grows, Bastian grouses to himself.

"...So. What's this storm all about?"

"What do you mean, 'all about'?"

"I mean, it just...it's pretty intense, no?"

Atreyu sets his elbows on his thighs and temples his fingers under his chin. He stares into the fire with an unreadable expression on his face. "This is no worse than it usually gets."

"Huh, it's like one minute the night was clear and empty, the next there were all those - well, storm clouds crashing down around us. Like it came out of nowhere."

"Nowhere is its birthing place," Atreyu says cryptically.

"I'm sorry, what did you say?"

"Nothing, nothing you'd understand."

Bastian moves over next to Atreyu and fixes him with a glare. "Try me."

"Fine." Atreyu rises to his feet and twists his spine. His back cracks audibly. "The storm came from nowhere because it came from outside of Fantasia, which while generally patently impossible, is not so in this instance since you created it the last time you stepped into Fantasia."

"What? What're you talking about?"

You," he says, pointing down at Bastian, "recreated Fantasia. Now you hasten its dissolution."

"What?"

"Years ago, when Fantasia was threatened by the Nothing," and here Atreyu jabs angrily at the crack in the cave, at the storm clouds still looming in the sky, "the Child-Like Empress entrusted you with a sacred charge. You were to be this generation's Steward. You were to be the nexus through which Fantasia drew its energies. You were to be the wellspring of imagination, the lifeblood of a land _predicated upon_ imagination."

An image comes to Bastian's mind, of Denethor and Gandalf and the _other_ fantasy world that dominated his adolescent life, bringing a smile to his face. Bastian, an Istari? He thinks that Atreyu would find it offensive if he chuckled in the middle of his speech, but the idea is amusing nevertheless.

"For a while, it worked. You, with the powers of your imagination, recreated Fantasia grain of sand by grain of sand. Beasts like the G'mork no longer stalked the plains, and we knew a prosperity unheard of even in Fantasia's long and storied history.

"And then, you left."

Atreyu's face darkens, a furrowing of the brow and ugly twist of his lips. "There was to be a ceremony, officially ushering you in as Steward, and me as your Herald. But you grew frightened; we all saw it in you, in the weeks leading up to the ceremony. You had started to doubt Fantasia, repudiating its existence deep within the core of your beliefs. You started crossing over less and less frequently. And when you left for good and renounced the onus of responsibility, it all started to crumble. Without you as the nexus through which it's all processed, the intricate lattice of belief that is Fantasia began to deteriotate. The Sea of Possibilities began to spill over its traditional boundaries, till it reached the very heart of diaphanous Fantasia." Atreyu's eyes move upward, towards the storm that still rages over their heads. "The Nothing returned, and slowly consumed the land - grain of sand by grain of sand. You're destroying us now, surely as you saved us all those years ago."

Bastian shakes his head in disbelief. "This is absurd. Completely absurd. I've gone mad again and I'm manifesting a Messiah complex while talking to a figment of my imagination." He glances up at Atreyu, eyes narrowed to incredulous slits. "You're just a random firing of synapses and nerve endings." Bastian moans into his hands. "Oh God, I've completely lost it. I'm conversing with a fucking _storybook character_." As he says it, the land buckles underneath their feet and the storm roars with renewed ferocity.

"See?" The smirk on Atreyu's face is a bizarre combination of crestfallen and triumphant. "The land revolts when you lose faith." He rounds on Bastian, grabs his shoulders with - God, those are strong hands. "_Think_, Bastian - did you not bear witness to Fantasia in your own world? Falkor told us stories of it, of his incursions into your world so very long ago. You have witnesses to his ingress into it! Think, Bastian - what happened to those three bullies?"

A memory comes to life in Bastian's head, of a Luck Dragon lifting him high in the skies over his home and down through a warren of streets. Three - bullies, yes, who had picked on him with the vicious abandon that only children are capable of, three bullies being forced into a garbage bin. Answering to his father about that when he'd gotten home, half-convincing him that he had spirited away a horse from some stables just outside of town and disguised it as a fearsome monstrosity to exact vengeance upon his tormentors; his father had believed him, because the story that the three bullies had presented didn't make sense to an adult's jaded, cloistered mind.

"And damn you," Atreyu says, voice slipping into the tiniest of whispers, "you left me." He suddenly deflates, his shoulders slumped and weary. "You were supposed to stay with me, Bastian," he says piteously. "I was to be your Herald, and you left me."

Bastian sits for a moment, reeling with the memories flooding his mind. Falkor, crossing over more times than he can recall at once, taking him places. Chasing down jet planes and the far-away sun in equal turns. Bastian grinds his teeth in frustration; his hallucinations were vivid, true, and his doctors wrote them off with medication intended to balance his chemically-convoluted mind, but...so _much_, so detailed, so intense.

He has a memory, of slinking through skyscrapers against the nighttime sky in far-off New York. He can remember the smell of New York smog in his lungs, the taste of a bag of street vendor-purchased nuts on his tongue. How can he have memories of visiting New York on the back of a Luck Dragon if he's never been to the place?

The information he has yet to even process daunts him.

"So. You're my Herald."

"Was to be, yes."

"So. Umm, like, what does being my, uhh, Herald entail?" He tries a small grin on for Atreyu, in an attempt to lighten the palpable tension between them.

Atreyu's eyes lighten, and his voice takes on a proud timbre. "It is an office of servitude and companionship, but not without its own rewards. Since you reside in the human world, I would assume your responsibilities when you aren't in Fantasia. I would act on your behalf, negotiating terms of peace with warring peoples, engaging in battle in your honor if need be. Act as your liason with the Child-Like Empress. Minister to your spirit. Tend to your more, ahh, physical concerns if necessary." He pauses, and his face contorts to accomodate the ear-splitting grin that spreads across it. "I was most looking forward to performing that last service, when duty called."

"Oh." It strikes him a second later, when he realizes that Atreyu is still _leering_ at him with that crooked grin. "_OH_. You wanted. To umm. With, uhh. Me?"

"Why do you say it with such an inflection in your tone, Bastian? Do you question this? Yes, I do want to, umm, with you as you put it. Is there something wrong with that? We are removed by almost a decade of experience with one another from the day of our first meeting; there is much history between us. I have never been untoward with you, but nor have I ever disguised my desire for you. I have shared water and shade with you; I shall continue to do so, regardless of whether or not we act upon our impulses. Is that what bothers you?"

"No, I just, well, I mean--"

"Did you not want me, Bastian? I'd assumed all this time that my feelings were not unrequited, but perhaps I was mistaken..."

"No! I mean, oh God no, look at you, how could I not - err, well, that is to say, I don't, umm, yes. Yes. Yes, I do want to. Umm. With you. It's just, well, where I come from, this isn't all that common of a thing."

Atreyu chuckles. "You spoke in the present tense, Bastian."

Bastian's face flushes with color. "I misspoke, that's all. I'm just - well - you got me all flustered, damn you!"

"Bastian, there is no shame in this. If you have physical concerns," and Atreyu's eyes bore into Bastian's, "then know that I would be more than glad to address them."

"Christ, Atreyu, I wouldn't even know where to begin. I don't think I'm supposed to. My priests - they're our, well, _my_ holy men - wouldn't approve, I think."

"You mean, it is unacceptable for two men to have relations in your culture?" Atreyu shakes his head and frowns at Bastian. "What a strange, sad world you come from."

"No, I mean, well, yes, err, no, it's not unacceptable. Not that much, not anymore. But it used to be. It's...it's difficult to explain. And umm, complicated. Very complicated."

"Ahh. We do not have this problem among my people. Among us we have a long and honored tradition of two-spirit natures."

"Two-spirit natures?"

"Well, nàdleehé is the more appropriate word, although two-spirited and two-spirit natures are the more common phrases. It means 'transformed', and it is a high honor to be a nàdleehé. The transformed have the essence of all being within them, a duality of man and woman commingling in one body. He has the whole gamut of experience available to him, a distinction to which few others may lay claim. If one is nàdleehé it is evident from a very early age. Parents will take the child to a sacred ceremony where he communicates with the spirits of all the nàdleehé who have come before, to verify the veracity of his transfiguration. If the child sees the proper and sacred visions, and a nàdleehé from times past manifests and speaks to the child's authenticity, then he assumes the duties and responsibilities of a nàdleehé. I am mediator, counselor, and arbiter of conflict within my clan, and serve on a greater council for the tribe as a whole. Bastian, this is an honorable thing, to be a two-spirited man.

"That is why I was to be your Herald," he says almost - what, wistfully? Regretfully? "When the Child-Like Empress chose me as your man-at-arms, She knew I would do it for more than duty towards Fantasia. We are kin, you and I, and She thought that I...perhaps that I could keep you closer than we knew you'd stay."

Bastian is silent for a while, letting what Atreyu's just told him settle in his mind. "I don't know, that doesn't sound like me. This doesn't feel sacred, and it doesn't feel like I've known this all my life, nor does it for that matter feel special. All I can really say for sure is..." Atreyu motions at the beat in his speech, urging Bastian to continue. "I know that I really want this to happen. And that's all I know for sure."

"Then that too is fine, my friend." He gestures to the break in the cavern ceiling, casting his eyes upwards at the sliver of moon that pokes out through the thinning storm clouds. "Cat's claw moons do strange and awesome things to the mind and spirit."

"So."

"So."

Atreyu comes close to him and tugs Bastian's cap off, and if he weren't so damn _nervous_ right then it would seem such a ridiculous act and Bastian would start laughing, but as it is it's all Bastian can do to keep the jackhammer pounding of his heart in check. A little silly thing like his hat isn't going to break his concentration. Atreyu snaps his hand once, flings it out and away from them.

"This does not suit you, Bastian. I enjoy seeing your face whole and unencumbered." He slowly, deliberately, unwraps the scarf around Bastian's neck and drops it to the floor beneath them.

A pause, just enough for Bastian to break away from Atreyu and catch his breath.

"I should tell you," he begins, unsure of the way to explain, to even begin to explain. "I'm not quite convinced you're real. I mean, the whole repressed-memory thing kind of tips the balance of my thought towards this not being a hallucination, and God you feel real when I touch you, but I'm still not one hundred percent sure that you're real."

"Neither am I you, so wherein lies the problem?"

"And," Bastian continues, oblivious to Atreyu's growing amusement, "I have these issues. With, y'know. Stuff."

"Ahh, yes," Atreyu says, nodding sagely and rocking backwards on his heels. "Stuff."

"Shh. I'm in the middle of an important monologue here. You can't interrupt me."

"I can't?"

"Yes, it's a dramatic convention. Now shut up so I can continue." He takes in a deep breath and drums his fingers along his thighs, face steadfastly solemn despite the twitching motion of Atreyu's lips. "I have this thing in the real...err, human world...that we call a compulsive disorder. It means I, uhh, I do things without thinking about them."

"Ahh, like breathing?"

"Yes - no! No, not like breathing. That's not what I meant. It's like, well - okay, I have this issue with things being clean. I can't stand dirty things, though all things considered the fact that we're probably about to do it in the crumbling ruins of some long-forgotten temple isn't bothering me anywhere near as much as it should. And you should know if this goes anywhere that I get nervous really quickly and I'm really jealous about certain things, well, okay, everything and I need to touch things or else they don't exist and I stutter a lot when I'm nervous which is a lot because I get nervous really quickly I just said that, didn't I, well, it's true, and all things considered you guys could've picked a _much_ healthier Steward than me because there's a whole lot of other stuff you should--"

Atreyu laughs then, a pleasant and fluid sound like his speaking voice. He presses his lips to Bastian's and makes sure Bastian's done talking before he lets go. "Bastian. This is just one night. It may or may not mean more - or less - than that."

"You're right. You're absolutely, one hundred percent right. Th-th-there's no reason to expect anything, no sort of _commitment_, nothing like that at all, right? Yes?"

Atreyu cocks his head and tucks his hair behind his ears. "Yes, indeed. No commitments, no expectations, nothing but the here and now." And then, in the here and now, Atreyu strips himself bare and spreads his arms open invitingly. Moonlight plays along the contours of his body. "Nothing but a Herald tending to his Steward."

The naked want on Bastian's face would elicit most disapproving stares from Fathers O'Malley and Heinzelman and Kemp, but Bastian finds himself not terribly caring at the moment.

***

It's not really like everything he'd imagined, Bastian finds himself thinking at some point in the night, during an intermission of sorts. Their bodies are still tangled up with one another, appendages done up like a Gordian knot, and they're still sweat-slick and damnably hot, but at least they're not contributing to the process of sweat production anymore and their breathing has somewhat evened out, so it's got to count for a break of sorts.

Bastian never imagined he'd have to explain the accoutrements of his religious fervor to his first partner - "This is called a rosary, and it's about as far removed from what we're about to do as the Southern Oracle is from the Swamps of Sadness."

He also wasn't quite sure it'd be with another man, though in light of the impulses that the sight of Chaz's body would conjure up he has to admit that perhaps the notion wasn't as far-fetched as he thought.

He also, and this was the big thing, didn't think it would be with his childhood not-so-imaginary-after-all friend.

It's _definitely_ different, that's what it is.

But (and here Bastian chuckles, causing Atreyu to worry if perhaps he's doing something wrong though he _knows_ he's doing everything right because men do not make the sounds Bastian was making unless everything is wonderfully, deliriously right), different isn't always a bad thing.

Different is...

Different is...

Is...

Figuing out what's different about it is suddenly not on his mind as Atreyu decides that their intermission has lasted long enough. His breath catches as Atreyu's hands start gliding up and down the expanse of his body, and his mouth opens in a rictus of a pleasant sort of agony. Mother Mary, stations of the Cross, a beatific God and Atreyu's mouth upon his flesh. Bastian arches his back and raises his hands to his forehead in prostration.

Outside, the hungry ocean begins to recede.

***

"And that is Corde Nur," Atreyu said, pointing up through the crack at the clear night sky, "the Navigator's Star, which I would use to guide me back to my people whenever I'd been away for too long hunting the purple buffalo. Corde Nur is a comfort to me, when I am alone and unsure of the ground beneath my feet."

"Ahh, that would have been great for me. I used to think I was alone all the time as a kid."

"Alone? How so?"

"Well, you know, I never really got the hang of being social. I always preferred the company of a good book to the sort of stress that being around people laid upon me." Bastian smiles into Atreyu's shoulder. "God, I remember those days. It came to the point where I was sure my only friends were imaginary. But, then my dad said I had to grow up, be a man, stop lollygagging in Never-Never Land."

"Oh, see, there your father was mistaken. You were never lollygagging in Never-Never Land."

"Somehow, I don't think that telling him it was Fantasia and not Never-Never Land would have comforted him all that much."

Atreyu laughs and runs one hand up the length of Bastian's spine. "You never really thought you were alone, did you?" Atreyu says to him lightly. They're lying upon a tarmac made of their discarded clothing, and Atreyu's laying on his back with one hand cupping the back of his head and the other trailing up and down Bastian's back. For his part, Bastian's rolled over on his side and playing with the muscles of Atreyu's torso - God, what he wouldn't give to have this, to have a taut rigidity born of a warrior's life, to have this elegant and lean body to play with as long as he wanted--

"Bastian?"

"Hmm, what was that?"

"I said, you never really thought you were alone, did you? You must have known on some level that Fantasia was waiting for you still." The question is loaded, Bastian can tell, one of those damned complicated life things that he tries so much to avoid. But this is a different sort of situation than any he's been in before, and maybe it merits a different sort of answer.

"God, but see, that's the thing. I used to think I wasn't, then I thought I was, and now...now I can't really say. Like I said, I was never really sure if Fantasia was real or not; I'm pretty sure it is now," he says, goosing Atreyu lightly along his side. Atreyu yelps, and ruffles Bastian's hair in response. "Maybe on some level I knew I wasn't? I guess the best I can offer you on that is that maybe, I was never really alone. I guess I was alone-but-not, if you've got to call it anything."

Atreyu turns his head towards Bastian. "Alone-but-not. I like that." He rolls over on top of Bastian and props himself up on one elbow, stares down into Bastian's eyes with what Bastian can only hope are the best of intentions. "Now, let me show you just how alone-but-not you are, Bastian Balthazar Bux."

***

Daylight's just beginning to stretch furtive fingers towards them, from across the eastern horizon. From behind Bastian, the land of Fantasia catches fire in the face of the advancing dawn. Everything is in riotous colors, like a land done up in tempera paints and neon mosaic tiles, like Heaven as conceived of by Cezanne after too many shots of absinthe.

He and Atreyu are standing on the far edge of the Sea of Possibilities, water lapping at their bare feet. He's got his scarf draped loosely around his neck, like a prayer shawl; they're not sure where his hat got to, but Atreyu's promised to look for it and return it to Bastian. Bastian doesn't think he'd mind if he doesn't get it back.

They're not quite looking at each other, eyes fixed instead upon the whorls of clouds and the uneven lines of the ocean, though they both know that the sky and sea and everything in-between do not dominate their thoughts. Atreyu sweeps a wing of hair behind his ear and tilts his head at Bastian - nonchalantly, but with expectancy in the crook of his form.

"So," Bastian begins.

"So," Atreyu agrees.

They look at each other for several heartbeats; Bastian thinks something's gone wrong with him because the amount of time that passes between pumps of that peculiar organ surely must define him as clinically dead.

Bastian nods once, slow like his heartbeat, then extends a hand out to Atreyu. Atreyu looks at it for a moment too long, just enough so that Bastian starts to wonder if he should open his arms and embrace him, when Atreyu takes his hand and pumps it, once.

"I shall perhaps see you around, then?" It's not really a question, this sloppily composed farewell, and goes against everything that he was speaking of last night, and they both know it. Atreyu still hasn't let go of Bastian's hand.

"Yeah, sure. See you," Bastian replies, and places his other hand over Atreyu's. Atreyu smiles, lopsided and easy and free, and turns away from Bastian without another word.

Perhaps, Bastian thinks as he watches Atreyu climb over the ruins of civilizations long faded from mortal mind, there is more than a here and more than a now to be had.

And Bastian is alone-but-not on the shores of diaphanous Fantasia, with the breaking of ponderous waves and caresses of the too-sweet breeze all around him. He closes his eyes and feels a _wrenching_ sensation somewhere deep within him and shivers when the motes of the world alight upon him as it dissolves into the ether.

And Atreyu makes his way, alone-but-not, back to the land of the Plains People, past the heart of diaphanous Fantasia.

***

Chaz lets out a small yelp of surprise when Bastian finally makes it back to their room. "Dude! Where've you been all weekend long?" It's something like 1 o'clock in the morning, and Chaz is sitting on the floor with a small clutch of friends around him. Bastian smiles at them and waves politely before moving towards his bed and setting his overcoat and scarf down upon it. He can see, out of the corner of his eye, Chaz's friends look at one another at this unaccustomed familiarity from him.

"Oh, out with friends," Bastian says, and he can't quite hide the smile on his face so he dips his head low till it goes away, and he can't quite refrain from running his tongue once over his lips; if he tries hard enough, he can still taste that heady first kiss on his lips. There's woodsmoke in the traces of that kiss, and crisp night air and Atreyu and the length and breadth of his mind.

"Out with friends? All weekend long? What kind of an excuse is that, Bastian?"

"The truth," he says vaguely, and Chaz fortunately takes the hint and drops the subject of his whereabouts.

"Your dad called about fifteen million times, you know," Chaz says, getting up from the floor to come stand by Bastian. "He's probably had a heart attack or something by now. I didn't know what to tell him, so I kept on saying you were at the library." He pauses, a thoughtful expression coming across his face. "I don't think he really believed me."

"Yeah, you are a pretty shitty liar," Bastian interjects, a wry grin on his face.

Chaz stares blankly at his roommate. "Are you sure you're all right?" Chaz's voice lowers a little, affording them a modicum of privacy. "You didn't call once all weekend long. I was starting to worry."

Bastian laughs and claps a hand on Chaz's shoulder. "Chaz, m'boy, I am fan-fucking-tastic."

He's never touched Chaz before, ever. He's never cussed in front of Chaz, for that matter. Chaz doesn't even make the pretense of understanding, just gapes at him in open incredulity and concern.

Bastian laughs again, louder and more fully this time, and punches Chaz lightly on his right arm, and when Chaz stares blankly at that too he continues his barrage until Chaz grins and moves back to his dumbstruck circle of friends. They all arch their eyebrows, but Chaz waves off their unspoken questions and splays his knees cross-leggedly.

"And where's that stupid hat of yours?" Chaz says after a moment, amusement and mirth still written all along the angles of his face.

"Hmm? What was that?"

"Your hat, Bastian, where's your hat?"

Bastian reaches up and absently scrubs a hand through his disheveled hair. "Oh," he replies, turning his back to Chaz, "the wind must've caught it."



END

Notes: My apologies to Msr. Tolkein for blatantly stealing the notion of "Steward"; I tried to come up with a synonym but I just couldn't do it. Nàdleehé and two-spiritedness is a real concept, if inflated in importance somewhat here, and is taken from the Navajo and various other Native American tribes. Nàdleehé in Navajo culture really were considered special and sacred members of the tribe. If you want to read more (God I sound like an after-school special), you can hit up http://www.androphile.org/preview/Culture/NativeAmerica/amerindian.htm for more info. This is for Adri, mwah, much love chere.