Demigod 12: Tinkered Starsong by Gail Carriger

Author:Gail Carriger [Carriger, Gail]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781944751562
Publisher: GAIL CARRIGER LLC
Published: 2023-07-31T18:30:00+00:00

10

FEAR ENDS WHERE FIXATION BEGINS

“Couldn’t you tell what we had together? Back then, on Divinity 36, when you were hugging me late at night?” Missit twisted his jaw, dipped his head then quickly brought it back up. A move like the twitching of an ear crest, full of discomfort.

Phex looked down at his feet, encased in high-quality practice booties that the acolytes had purchased for him. His legs covered in a high-tech practice suit the divinity had provided to him. Even his skin and his hair were of their making. He was their creature – the Dyesi had manufactured him, as his family had done first, tailoring him to fit their needs. Like the Wheel, the divinity would cut him loose based on some arbitrary fatal flaw that they alone decided upon. He knew this for certain. Because they already had.

They had made him feel wanted and then rejected him. Was all his fear of Missit based on the premise that this god was doing the same thing?

Phex did remember all too well. He remembered curling with Missit in the old practice studio on Divinity 36, hugging him close as if it were the only way to keep a god from breaking into stardust. “I thought it was a crazy, special, momentous thing, to hold a god because he needed me. And that it would never last. I never let myself expect more than that.”

“You thought I was using you?” Now Missit looked very hurt, flecked eyes filling with tears.

Phex realized he was messing everything up. And maybe he should have pushed that messiness forward intentionally, letting the thing between them get distorted and broken. But he couldn’t bear Missit’s face in that moment.

As if Missit had been betrayed.

As if Missit were the lonely one.

“I like to be useful,” Phex said, timidly. “I don’t mind being made use of.”

“You can be a little cruel, can’t you, when you eventually speak?” Missit tugged on one ear. Missit’s ears had been adjusted into perfection by Dyesi medics just like Phex’s. Had they made Missit feel wanted and then rejected him?

What was it like to be ten years divine, constantly altered to their needs, paying tribute with one’s body for the privilege of having talent?

Phex sighed and stepped to the god, pulling him close and feeling Missit instantly melt. Breathing out against Phex’s shoulder as if his flesh were a safe place for someone else to inhabit.

Phex couldn’t see a way to make this work, but he also knew he would let Missit win if that was what it took to make him happy. To wipe that sorrow away and replace it with the reassurance of his arms had already become instinct. Missit was right – this was more than desire, there was something else there that Phex had been intentionally ignoring. He’d been forming excuses and building walls out of Missit being too great a god, or too capricious, or just too much.

Maybe Missit was all those things, and he was certainly a great risk, but Phex had ignored the familiar in Missit.

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