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“Hey, so… when were you planning on telling me?”
Knowing Kristen, the question could mean anything and everything, all at once. She’s always been like this, for as long as Riz has known her, even in the single-minded grip of the cult; easily distracted, prone to flights of fancy, mind darting down rhetorical alleyways and swimming through segues. Riz doesn’t look up from the paper they’re (okay, he’s) working on, though he taps his claws against the table to show that he’s listening until he’s finished his sentence.
“Tell you what?”
“That you’re aroace.”
Riz’s blood runs cold. He knows what it means. Of course he knows what it means. He’s read enough books on it by now, furtively sneaking in booklets with the rest of his literature from the library, searching it up on his crystal and then deleting his history, dwelling on dry, academic texts that make it seem as matter-of-fact as he’d like it to be. The specimen is a male goblin, 16. He is three foot eight. He is missing one fang that got punched out during a fight, and is of slightly below average weight. He is asexual and aromantic. He has dark green hair. Easy. Simple.
This is the first time he’s heard someone say the words out loud. He wasn’t expecting it to be so scary. Somehow, he’s able to barely hear Kristen talking over the roar of his heartbeat in his ears.
“...thought I of all people would be the first to know! Come on, Riz, I’m basically, like, the queen of lesbians at Aguefort.”
Riz’s tongue is numb. “I don’t think that’s a role you can just give yourself.”
“Uh, I’m pretty sure I can.” Kristen frowns, just now catching onto Riz’s unease. “You okay there, Riz?”
“Yeah – I’m – of course, yeah. Totally. How did you…”
“Your rings. White.” She taps one of them. “And black. Middle finger. I know I”m not exactly a detective or whatever, but I’ve got my queer history down-pat.”
He’d picked them up in a fit of pique, like wearing them would bring him one step closer to just being cool with it. Despite hanging out with possibly the queerest group of kids (and, arguably, adults) in Elmville, he hadn’t thought anyone would notice.
“I thought you were more for reading about world religions and philosophy. The, uh, queer–stuff is more lived experience.”
“Oh no. I read everything I could get my hands on about being a lesbian. I know I was pretty subtle about it in freshman year, but I was kind of going through it. I knew I liked girls wayyyy before I came out to you guys.” Kristen gives him the wide sort of grin that either means she’s still utterly delusional about her glass closet, or that she’s perfectly aware of it and is just fucking with him. Riz can’t tell, on account of the fact that he’s starting to feel kind of sweaty, his shirt beginning to cling unpleasantly to his back.
“Right. Well.” He clears his throat. “There’s really nothing to tell. We should just get back to work.”
“Hey, no. Shit. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be, like, flippant about this. I just thought since you were wearing the rings…” Kristen grabs the back of his chair and swivels it so that he’s facing her, something he immediately tries to combat, ears lowering in discomfort and gripping onto the edge of the table. “I figured you were out. Come on, Riz, it’s me. I accept you for whatever you are! I just wanted to congratulate you on finding yourself! You know, when you’re here, you’re family!”
“Yeah,” Riz says tersely. “Sure. Which means this isn’t a big deal. Right?”
“Right,” Kristen says slowly. “Did you… mean for this to be a secret?”
“No! No, it’s not a secret. It’s just private. I’m a private guy. And there’s nothing to keep secret.” A laugh bubbles up in his chest. “It’s the opposite of a secret.”
“Okay, but it’s not like I’m gonna go around blabbing if you don’t want me to. No one’s gonna care, Riz. Half of us are queer already. I mean, I’m a huge lesbian, obviously, Fig and Ayda are already together, and between you and me, I think Fabian’s a little…” She takes a hand and flips it down effeminately, winking and clicking her tongue. “So, like I said! You should be proud of it!”
Riz shuts the textbook with a quiet thump, realizing now that he’s not getting out of this conversation unscathed. “Proud of what?” He says quietly.
“Of your identity!”
It’s not Kristen’s fault. It’s not. Any other person would be deeply, incredibly grateful for having someone like her on their side. She’s a goddamn saint, is what she is, her life unutterably difficult; raised in a cult, groomed as the chosen one for a bunch of homophobic bigots, ousted from her family and everything she had ever known for the crime of daring to look beyond, the crime of loving women, forced to go it alone when she should still by all rights be cradled in the bosom of her family, breaking bread with her parents, playing with her little brothers. She did all that, and came through the other side, bright and beautiful and brimming with love. And Riz – Riz has everything that she deserved, doesn’t he? His mom, while busy, is loving, supportive, kind, accepting of all of his little flaws and foibles. His dad on the other side, listening patiently to his every story, dealing with the fact that the first thing his son started talking about when they were finally reunited was not wanting to – to – well, he’s lucky. He’s stable. He’s loved and cherished and accepted for who he is, while Kristen’s family just tried to beat it out of her.
Of course Kristen’s proud. She should be. She has every right to be. And it makes Riz an absolute monster that he has the gall to feel angry about that. Still, he feels the anger simmering in his veins, crawling up his chest, that familiar old feeling where he’s begging, pleading himself just to shut the fuck up (nobody ever liked it when he talked, he talked too much, too bright, too loud, it always went wrong before he met the Bad Kids, he should have learned his old lessons), but he can’t seem to stop himself. His voice is louder than he wants it to be. “There is nothing to be proud of, Kristen,” he snaps. “I’m not like you, or Ragh, or Fig, or any of the rest of them, okay?!”
Kristen looks confused. Small. “We’re all under the same umbrella, dude.”
“No, we’re not!” He runs his fingers through his unruly hair, his claws snagging on his curls. “All that pride stuff is about – about kissing and, and love-is-love, and the celebration of love and s- suh-sex, and in finding, like, your person. Multiple persons. Whatever. Getting married, having babies, being in love, never being alone again. Nobody ever celebrates the absence of something. Who in their right mind would want to celebrate not having love?”
“Riz…”
“You talk about ff–fucking more than anyone else I know! And that’s fine, that’s cool! I’m glad that you’re, like, that you’ve – you’ve found something that’s good for you, it’s a good thing! But you can’t talk about it like it’s the most important thing in the entire world and suddenly decide that it’s fine not to… to not.”
They’re all thoughts he’s had, circling around the drain of his buzzing brain, never quite normal, never quite enough. He’s good at spiraling. He has it down to an art. Spiraling out loud is the part that feels distasteful to him, his traitorous tongue wagging longer than it has any right to. He has no right to complain. That look on Kristen’s face makes him feel even worse. He’s fucked it all up. “Sorry. Sorry, I shouldn’t have…” His eyes dart around the room, as though searching for an exit point. “It’s stupid. And it doesn’t matter.” His smile, unnatural, strains at his cheeks. “We’ve got more important stuff to work on anyway, right? Even if I was… I mean, I wouldn’t have time for it. So it’s cool, it’s fine.”
Kristen looks deeply uncomfortable. It’s not unusual for people to look uncomfortable around Riz. It’s unusual for Kristen to look that way. Her voice is painfully earnest when she says, “Riz, it’s not stupid. There’s a whole community of people like you. They think it’s worth celebrating too.”
Then they’re stupid too, Riz thinks. Stupid, and also not here. Not where he’s ever been able to see them. He’s had to spend his whole life trying to be proud of being a goblin, of sticking out like a sore thumb, of being a monster to the bigots, cobbling together his pride in absence of any real community outside of the Mountains of Chaos. That wretched forest was wrong about most things; they love Fig the way she is, Gorgug is smarter than he thinks he is, Adaine is inherently lovable. But it was right about him. That the people he looked up to to have pride in who he is are different from him. He will never be able to be like his mom, to be like his dad, to know the love that had been so cruelly ripped from them. It’s not a taunt, preying on his insecurities. It’s just fact. And to have to build a sense of pride for this broken part of him too, a community from afar, standing staunchly in the face of what’s normal again, but this time without even his parents to use as a guide…
It’s not fair. He can’t do it twice. He refuses to do it twice.
He’s still smiling. He wishes that he’d stop. “I shouldn’t have said it was stupid. It’s fine. But I don’t need to celebrate it, personally. It doesn’t matter. It’s not like people are gonna hassle me in the streets for not holding someone’s hand, right? So.” He looks down at his hands, at his claws curling and digging into his palms. “So it’s all good. Okay?”
“Um… okay, dude. Maybe you might want to talk to Jawbone about this? He’s pretty up-to-date–”
Riz’s crystal chimes, and he practically leaps on it, melting in the relief that this conversation can be over. “Sorry, Kristen, I gotta go. I totally forgot one of my clubs was having an evening meeting this time. I’ll see you soon, okay? I’ve got some time between, um – well, I’ll make some time.”
He hastily shoves his books and papers into his briefcase and takes off before Kristen can say anything else, running as quickly as his feet can take him and slapping his cheeks, willing the trembling of his body to stop.
It does. He performs well with the club, as he always does. Nice and quiet and personable, a pleasure to have around to crunch numbers and do the shit nobody really feels like doing, which keeps his brain busy while he ignores the way his crystal keeps chiming with texts from Kristen, concern bleeding through her clumsy misspellings and rapid-fire sentence fragments. He ignores them even as he gets home (there’s a note taped to the refrigerator door; “Night classes today, left some money on the table to order some food”; he takes the money and slips it back into his Mom’s spare bag), yanks off his rings, and angrily tosses them into their dish.
Then there’s more schoolwork, and essays, and mysteries to think about, so he does that instead. He wasn’t lying to Kristen, after all. It’s not a big deal. It’s fine. Even if he was interested, nobody would be interested in him, anyway, so nobody even knows anything is wrong with him. By the time it’s midnight, he sends Kristen a quick message:
Sorry for freaking out at you earlier. Been under a lot of stress. We good?
Her response comes quickly enough to make guilt crawl underneath Riz’s skin, hot and heavy.
no im sorry i shouldn’t have been pushy about it
we good
He sends her a series of nautical emojis (mostly shrimp), just to impress how good they really are, turns off his crystal, and gets back to work. When he wakes in the morning - if dozing at his desk could really be called sleeping enough to count as waking from much of anything at all - he lets out a quiet groan. He never regrets his sartorial choices of wanting to look professional more than he does in the morning, when he wants nothing less than to fumble his way through the buttons on his vest, the loop of his tie, but at least now he has it down to a fine art. He puts them on mechanically. Dress shirt, vest, trousers, bracelets, glasses, watch, holster, belt bag, rings –
Rings–
He doesn’t just wear the two rings. He wears a bunch of them, as though nobody would notice what he was trying to say in a whisper if it was surrounded by enough noise. It’s a technique he’s used before. Nobody notices the things he’d rather people not notice about him as long as they’re distracted by his everything else – which is a lot.
Fuck it. He takes two of the rings, white and black, and shoves them into a drawer before putting the rest on and heading out the door to the smell of coffee and the sight of his mother, the bags under her eyes mimicking his own.
“Morning, sweetie.”
“Hey, Mom – you haven’t gone to sleep yet?”
She smiles, shrugs. “I will soon. Coffee’s on.” She holds up the cash she’d left out on the counter the night before. Riz should have known she’d check her bag. “You didn’t eat?”
“I was with Kristen at the Manor last night, remember?” Riz lies, filling his thermos up with coffee, shooting his mother a grateful nod. He knows she stayed up just long enough so that they could steal a couple minutes this morning, so that he could go to school feeling loved and taken care of in a way that makes his chest ache, makes him want to do her proud. “Thanks for the coffee. I gotta go – get some sleep, okay?”
“I could say the same for you – wait, Riz! No breakfast?”
“Soil Club’s meeting early. Something about the last moon beams on soil they imported from Fallinell? I dunno the specifics, really. But I gotta go.”
His mom hastily gets to her feet, grabs the heel of their dwindling supply of bread, scrapes the last dregs of peanut butter out of the jar and shoves it into his hand. “At least two meals a day, at least four hours a night,” she says firmly, then plants a kiss on the top of his head. “Have a good day at school, kiddo. Knock ‘em dead. See if you can’t catch a few Zs during one of your extracurriculars.”
He offers her a fanged grin. “Gukgaks don’t nap, you know that.”
She conceals a yawn behind her hand. “This one does.”
“It’s not napping if you were in class all night long,” Riz points out, slipping on his shoes. He pokes his head back in on his way out to call out: “Bye Mom, love you!”
“Love you too!”
After that, he almost forgets about his talk with Kristen. There’s Soil Club, and classes, and a study session crammed into lunch, a quick meeting stolen with Fig over break to look over the essay she’d - okay, he’d - written the night before, and a million other things that need doing. When he stumbles into Kristen in between classes, it feels almost normal to just smile and wave at her. “Hey! How’s it going?”
“Hey, Riz!” She cuffs his shoulder, a little harder than he thinks she meant to; she’s been working out like she’s got the devil on her back these days, and it shows. “Can’t complain, can’t complain…”
And then she looks at his hand, his bare finger, and her face just falls. She’s never been much good at disguising her emotions. He wishes he could comfort her, tell her it’s not her fault and it was stupid to wear them when he wasn’t ready to talk about it anyway, but that would mean having to talk about it, and he can’t do that. So he just keeps that smile on his face and nods a little too enthusiastically. “Good, good! Listen, I gotta run to class, but uh, I’ll catch you tomorrow after school? To work on the campaign some more?”
“Uh, yeah.” She looks like she wants to say more. Thankfully, she doesn’t. “See you then.”
He grabs her wrist on his way to his next class, squeezes it, hopes she can tell what he’s trying to tell her.
The next couple of times they meet up, things are more or less back to normal. Riz works while Kristen shuffles through music on her crystal, limbs splayed out in front of her, skipping to the next song almost immediately after the first chorus is done and offering the occasional non-sequitur. He knows it drives other people crazy, the way she does that, but Riz has always found it oddly reassuring. Sometimes his brain feels like a wall of impenetrable noise, focus that drags him down, tethers him to where he is, and Kristen is the only one capable of saying the dumbest shit that snaps him out of it.
At the end of the night, Riz stretches his limbs out with a grunt, head flung back as he lets out a sigh of exhaustion. “Okay. I think that’s all we’re getting done tonight. I gotta head home.” He holds out his fist for Kristen to bump. “Good job today.”
Their knuckles brush against each other. “Wait, hold on, before you go! Just promise not to get mad.”
“I’m not gonna promise that. That’s idiotic. When has asking someone to promise that ever worked?”
“Ugh! Then just promise to hear me out. Okay?”
“Okay, fine.”
Kristen reaches into her pocket and unearths a chain with two rings hanging off of it: black and white. “I know you don’t want to talk about it. But I thought this way, it could just be for you. You could wear these underneath your shirt, or maybe in that little pocket you have in your tie. Nobody else needs to know. Just you.”
Wordlessly, Riz holds his palm out, and Kristen drops it in his hand. They’re far nicer than the cheap ones that Riz bought on a whim, made of fine, weighty material, still warm from where they’d been pressed against Kristen’s thigh all evening. He can imagine Kristen prowling through jewelry stores to find just the right shade of pearly white and deep black, spending more money than she really ought to be spending on someone else. Riz’s eyes begin to sting.
“You don’t have to, like… process your stuff the same way I did. You don’t have to come out, if you don’t want to. You can just be Riz. But you shouldn’t have to hide it from yourself too.”
“Jawbone’s been rubbing off on you,” Riz says, pretending like his voice isn’t wobbling.
“I’ve had worse role models,” Kristen says with a crooked grin.
He makes the decision all at once. He puts the necklace on, does up the clasp, and tucks it underneath his shirt to sit right next to his friendship necklace with Fabian. He swallows hard, trying to find the right words. “I – I still don’t think I can be proud of it, Kristen. I just don’t.”
“And that’s okay!” Kristen says, though Riz thinks it’s pretty clear that she doesn’t think that’s actually okay. “But you should be proud of being Riz! You’re, like, the best Rogue in the entire school. You’re smart, and you’re funny, and you’re brave, and you’re a fucking amazing friend, and a million other things that have nothing to do with any of that other stuff.”
There’s nothing else Riz can do but tackle Kristen in the tightest hug he can, a sob torn from his throat, shoulders shaking, and Kristen hugs him back. She’s always given the best hugs, tight and warm and all encompassing, like there’s nowhere she’d rather be. “I didn’t like the way you talked about yourself not having love,” she mumbles into the crown of his head. “You know that I love you, right?”
“Of course. Of course I know that. I love you too.”
“No matter how many hot babes I hook up with?”
“No matter how many hot babes you hook up with,” Riz agrees, pulling away from her and wiping his nose on his sleeve. “And no matter how much you talk about sixty-nining.”
“Thank god, because I’d really hate to have to stop,” Kristen laughs. “We might not have matching friendship necklaces like you and Fabian, but we’re still best buds. That’s never gonna change.”
It’s funny. None of this is anything Riz didn’t already know. He knows that his friends love him, that his parents love him, that that love isn’t lesser, that that love won’t disappear. That them finding other people, new people, doesn’t lessen that love – it only means they have more people to give it to. And if he knows anything about his friends, about Kristen, it’s that their ability to love is endless. But hearing Kristen say it out loud feels like a sudden weight lifting from his chest. It’s something he didn’t know he needed to hear.
“Thanks, Kristen. You’re a really good friend. Eughhh.” He scrubs at his face. “I’m all nasty and snotty now.”
“Wanna hit up Basrar’s before you have to head home?”
“You’re on.” He holds his arm out. “Madam President?”
She hooks her arm in his. “Sir Campaign Manager!”
They walk off with a stilted, wobbly gait, the discrepancy in their heights too great to really pull it off, but they don’t mind, cackling and tripping all the way to Basrar’s. Maybe one day he’ll feel brave enough to scream out who he is, or maybe he’ll remain a mysterious bachelor for the rest of his life. But here and now, with Kristen’s arm as warm as her smile, the weight of the rings heavy and comforting against his heart, he feels lighter than he’s been in a long time.