Chapter 7
Chapter
Seven
Kyle
Ifinished pulling the magic out of the spell on my arm.
I coiled it up inside my core, storing it back inside of me to be used on something else.
Magical energy was a resource like any other, and resources were best when they could be reused.
The best thing that came out of going to this school was learning how to manipulate magical energy.
It was something that could be directed by thought, but the more active the thought, the less effective it was.
Magic was best cast with a quiet mind. I liked to think of the space between my thoughts as the listener, the part of me that could take the energy and shape it into reality.
The more I could tap into that quiet space, the more power I was able to gather and release.
I opened my eyes to a furious-looking minotaur.
Durom had pulled his head back and up, no longer leaning towards me in that comfortable, affable fashion he had been before.
His spine was rigid and straight, his nostrils flared as wide as his eyes as he let out a ragged snort.
One of his hooves dragged back across the stone floor before he stopped it, as if he was holding himself back from launching to his feet and charging.
I made a mistake.
I'd gotten so caught up in the idea that maybe I could escape down here, maybe there would be a place for me that was safe, away from the trials and tribulations of the trap on the surface that masqueraded as a school.
Durom, through both his blunt actions and his lack of them, had managed to make me hope for the first time in a long time that I could be open with someone.
He made me want to show myself.
Now, he looked like he was going to gore me.
But I was good at surviving, and even when I made mistakes, that wouldn't stop me.
My mind rapidly whipped through the worst-case scenario of what the next few moments could be, what he could do, what I would do.
I slowly reached out for my bowl and placed a hand on it, as if I were going to eat soup.
If he lunged at me, I would throw the remainder of the soup in his face, then scoop up embers and repeat the gesture.
Then I would rush towards him, not away, grab the pouch from his belt, and get through the vines, trapping him on one side with me on the other, with his only way out of the room.
Then I would run.
"I am not angry with you," Durom said, as if he could read my mind as I made a playbook of what I would have to do to survive his rage.
He wasn’t?
He sure looked like he was angry, and I had been around monsters pretending to be men long enough to recognize barely suppressed rage.
"Then why are you angry?" I asked, keeping my voice soft and low, avoiding antagonising him with my tone.
"Because I understand," he said, lifting his head up to look at the ceiling, exposing the long lines of the musculature that made up his neck as he gazed up at the vines overhead. "I understand, and therefore I am angry. Not at you. At them."
My shoulders relaxed. He acknowledged his emotions, while also stating I wasn’t the cause of them. Not that I was responsible for his anger in any case. The only one responsible for fury was the person feeling it, though that wouldn’t stop them from taking it out on everyone around them.
People who took responsibility for their feelings instead of blaming them on others were significantly safer to be around.
I lifted the bowl and began to eat again. It was still hot, kept warm by the fire.
If he wasn't going to attack me, then my next order of survival was eating more food. Good nutrition was essential for a functioning mind, body, and heart.
"What do you understand?" I asked.
I didn't know what he was going to say. Was he angry because I no longer had the mate scent on me?
I didn't know exactly how the spell altered my smell.
Maybe the spell mimicked the scent that was most likely to cause the hostile person to calm down and not attack me.
Maybe he was angry because he just got smell-related blue balls.
If that was the case, it was important for me to know that now.
From my experience, guys could be great at saying or doing all the right things for a little while, but the moment something bothered them, the mask would slip and reveal their true nature.
It was better to let someone speak and betray themselves than assign meaning with your own assumptions.
"That you were forced to hide yourself," he said. "I am angry because I understand that this is how you stayed safe. I am angry that you had to hide a part of yourself."
I was not prepared to have this conversation, but at the same time, I needed to.
It had been a weight on my chest from the moment I came out of orientation and realized that there was no going back.
I couldn't change my mind. I had to spend the rest of my life hiding every part of me because they would kill me for it.
It was illegal to be me.
Yet it was also safer in a strange and horrible way.
"This is a difficult thing for me to talk about," I said.
"I will listen," Durom said. "Speak, and I will hear your words."
I looked at his soft brown eyes, and I believed him.
I'd only just met him, but there was forcefulness about him, a strength that was directed towards immediate action.
As he looked at me, his hands on his knees, his shoulders relaxing, I knew that right now, his form of immediate action was to focus on me intently and listen to everything I had to say.
"My parents were always angry about how I dressed.
I was actually excited to come to the school because I thought I could start fresh, I thought I could try out a new name, and everyone would see me as this new person, a person I wanted to be," I said.
"I never thought of this as hiding myself; I just wanted to be comfortable.
I thought magic was going to make that more possible, not less.
Living like this, having to hide who I am, being unable to change in any direction. .."
That was the worst part. I spent years hating the idea of who society thought I should be, who my parents wanted me to be.
I hated the idea of being seen as less than just because of the way I was born.
I spent years thinking about changing the body I'd been born into, but the results of what the mundane offered for those changes didn’t seem right for me, especially since they weren’t reversible.
I spent years trying on names and outfits, trying to find the me that felt best.
In one fell swoop, all those choices, all those options were taken away.
I realized that what I loved most was the choice itself.
"In one moment I was becoming the person I always wanted to be, and in the next I was hiding," I said.
I gestured at my outfit, the one the school rules forbid someone like me from wearing, and in doing so, made it so I couldn't ever take it off.
"This is just another costume I've been forced to wear because revealing the body underneath would sentence me to death. "
It felt good to say that, all the words that I couldn't say to anyone else at the school.
I couldn't tell my fellow mundanes. I couldn't trust anyone.
"You can take it off," Durom said.
The seriousness of his tone was a juxtaposition against what he was proposing.
The minotaur, who had taken out his dick and stroked it in front of me, was now proposing I strip naked for him, after I confessed to the heavy weight of fear I'd been carrying around from the moment I got through Orientation.
He was such a guy.
"You just want to see me naked," I laughed.
"Yes," Durom agreed. "But you can change in the washroom, and I will not see you in there."
"Change into what?" I said. "I have no clothes. Besides, it's not the style of these ones I object to, it's the fact that I didn't have any choice but to wear them."
That was the crux of the matter that I identified after coming to the school, at least for me.
I wasn't the spokesperson for anyone other than me, and I knew that other people had different experiences with their own journeys. For me, it was the choice that was important. Style was an expression of the self, and this school labeled the exploration of self as illegal. I didn’t deserve death for simply having feelings about my own body.
Durom rubbed his chin.
"I didn't bring any extra clothing," he admitted. "I wash my own every night and hang it over the hearth to dry."
"Well then, I'm stuck like this," I said. “Because I’m not ready to strip in front of you.”
Those words were so easy to say because I already knew they wouldn’t offend him.
Durom wasn’t put off by my rejection or hesitancy.
He just rolled right along with it.
"No," he said. "My mate deserves options that will make him... him? That will make him happy."
I hadn't thought about pronouns in a long time. They were never the most important part of the equation for me, for one, because I couldn’t get my parents to use them, but also because my experience with my identity was more about my right to myself, to my body, to my self-expression.
I appreciated it if other people wanted to modify their words for me and what they thought would make me comfortable, but the idea of trying to control the use of other people's language felt like the same thing as them trying to control what I wore or who I loved.
For me, it was an expression of affection from those who cared about me, not a mandatory requirement for me to feel emotionally or mentally balanced.
Once I came to the school, there wasn’t a choice.
I had been registered as a man, and a man was how I had to stay.
But for the first time in several years, I had the option.