So I’m pretty sure I’m gay for Sour Sweet.
That probably shouldn’t surprise me, but it does, and I blame that on the fact that my preferences, vis a vis romantic partners, has never been something I’ve put much thought into for a variety of reasons.
First off, there’s my various and sundry complexes and neuroses to deal with (thanks mom), and that’s not counting my actual psychological disorders.
Secondly, I spent two years in a psych ward and then an indeterminate amount of time being chased by supernatural murder-hobos in a demiplane of despair and torment, so romance wasn’t my primary concern.
Third, and maybe most relevant now, I never imagined I’d meet somebody who was actually willing to put up with me for any period of time.
Not even my own parents wanted to do that.
All of that leads to this point.
It’s early March, and for the past week Sour Sweet has been coming out to the Everfree Verge to practice her archery.
Apparently she was some kind of triathlon sports ace back at Crystal Prep Academy, and archery was her speciality.
Watching her now, I can see it, and it’s also how I discovered my more… physical attractions to her because, wow, pulling back a bow does fun things to the muscles in her back.
Her stance is perfect. She looks like a sculpture of some ancient warrioress as she’s standing in the field some forty meters from the target she hung off of a tree at the edge of the forest.
The model she’s using is a black, carbon fiber compound bow. She talked about it the whole drive down to the Verge and I only understood about a quarter of it. She lost me somewhere around the adjustable draw weight and the axle-to-axle specs, but the way her face lit up talking about it was enough for me.
It’s sunny today, and Sour Sweet is wearing a deliciously flattering outfit. Her torso is clad in a black, form-fitting top that leaves her arms and shoulders bare, and as she draws the arrow across the string of the bow I’m mesmerized by the way her lean muscles flex and pull. She has a kind of long skirt with Neighponese flower patterns inked across it hanging over black leggings that contrast well with her calf-high, side-laced leather boots.
She has a style I can’t help but envy.
THUNK
And a level of skill that leaves me staring.
The moment the arrow leaves her bow, she’s reaching for another. Sour’s quiver is belted to her waist just below the small of her back and hangs at a slight angle, leaving the arrows tipped up just enough to let her pluck one out with two fingers.
She sets it, pulls it back, and my face warms a little as I watch the muscles in her shoulders roll and flex from where I’m sitting on a stump nearby.
Mmm… yup.
Definitely gay for Sour Sweet.
The look on her face is otherworldly too. It’s a kind of calm I never see her wear. Her face is totally relaxed, completely focused, and just…
Beautiful.
She breathes in deep, her chest and back swelling for a moment before she lets out the air and in that instant between breaths—
THUNK
Another bullseye.
“Nice.” I applaud with a wide grin, and Sour Sweet smirks back at me over her shoulder before turning and bowing with a flourish.
Except she keeps going, bowing until she almost upside down before sweeping her hand up, snatching an arrow from her quiver, setting it and firing a shot upside down while pulling a clean cartwheel and landing on her feet.
THUNK
“No fucking way.” I stare in disbelief between a smugly smirking Sour Sweet and the target.
A third bullseye.
“That was just to show off,” Sour says with a cocky wink. “You should see me do that on a moving target.”
“That was insane!” I hop up from my stump as Sour does a few stretches. “Where did you learn to do that?”
“My parents pushed me to be perfect despite my ‘disability’,” Sour replies with air quotes and a grimace acidic enough to eat steel. “That’s code for: Hey shithead! Try to look normal enough that you won’t be a total fucking embarrassment to our rich friends!”
I wince, but nod. After Exodus, Sour and I ended up spending a lot of time together. I was surprised to discover my childhood wasn’t nearly as unique as I thought, which made me feel a little less isolated on the one hand, but on the other I wouldn’t wish the way I’d grown up on anyone, much less Sour Sweet.
But we’re out now. We’re free of the Entity and of our old lives, and that means we can be whatever we want now.
“I wish I had some kind of skill like that,” I say dolefully. “I’m pretty sure outside of the Trial’s I’m just a liability.”
Sour shrugs. “You could learn something, wanna shoot a tree?”
She holds out her bow but I laugh, shake my head, and push it away.
“I… I don’t really trust myself not to shoot something that isn’t there,” I reply. “Even if my episodes aren’t that common, what if I can’t tell in the moment?”
It’s why I’ll never touch a gun. I just don’t trust myself.
Sour takes the bow back, hangs it over her shoulder and plops down on the grass looking thoughtful. I join her a moment later, and scoot a little closer to her until our knees are touching. She doesn’t say anything, she doesn’t even acknowledge it. Sour’s brow is furrowed, and her nose is doing this cute little scrunch that makes my heart flip a little.
I know she’s just thinking really hard, but it’s… it’s really cute.
“Hey, Star, do uh…” Sour trails off, the grimaces, and starts again. “Okay, this is gonna sound weird, but do you ever smell things for no reason?”
“W-What?” I ask with a surprised laugh “You mean like randomly sniff things?”
“No, I mean like-” she waves her hand searchingly for a moment, “-like have you ever just been sitting in your room then smelled like… fucking cow manure or something?”
“Uhm, n-not that I’m aware of,” I reply, feeling a little confused. “Why?”
Sour goes quiet again for a long moment, then looks back up at me.
“Wanna learn Kendo?” She asks, and I stare.
I try to backtrack through our conversation to figure out where this line of questioning came up. Did I hallucinate part of the conversation? Did I blink something out? That wasn’t very common but it had happened before, kind of like a reverse hallucination where I imagine silence instead of whatever is happening.
“You want to give the crazy girl a sword?” I ask with a weak, disbelieving laugh.
Sour sighs and flops backward onto the soft grass. I Watch her for a moment as she breathes slowly, staring up at the blue sky while she gathers her thoughts. She has a hard time with words sometimes, I know. A big part of it is her disorder. Sour Sweet tries really hard to say the right thing, and most of the time it comes out kind of rough, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t try. It’s not her fault her brain is fighting her.
So I lay down next to her while she collects herself and I turn my head so I can just watch her for a little while under the pretense of waiting for her to figure out her words. I mean, I am waiting for her to figure them out, but I’m also admiring her profile.
She’s just, like, stupid pretty.
For someone so strong, Sour has really soft features. She has a cute little button nose, pert lips, and the nicest dimples in her cheeks when she smiles.
“You’re not crazy.” Sour turns her head sharply and without warning, and locks eyes with me. “You’re not… okay?”
“I’m a paranoid schizophrenic who can barely function on my medication,” I say with a blunt little laugh. “I’m a little bit crazy.”
She doesn’t laugh back, instead she scowls, sits up, and rolls over until she’s pinning me to the ground with a dark, angry look on her face that puts a chill down my spine.
“Stop that!” Sour snarls. “You’re not crazy! Your brain just messes up sometimes! That’s not your fault!”
My heart is pounding in my chest as I scowl back at her. “Who cares whose fault it is? I still can’t drive without having a panic attack! If I skip my meds for more than a day I start thinking the garbage man is a private detective hired by my parents to hunt me down! And I can’t even defend myself without wondering if I’m losing it!”
Sour Sweet’s scowl slowly fades. She sits up and gets off of me, and as I’m sitting up and about to apologise she pokes me gently on the nose.
“Hey!” I wrinkle my nose, trying to stop the weird itching sensation from getting to me, and Sour laughs.
“You see things, right?” Sour asks, and I nod. “And hear stuff?” Another nod. “But you don’t smell stuff?”
“Uh, I guess not, why?” I ask, still trying to figure out why she’s so hung up on my nose.
“Well…” Sour looks pensive, then takes a breath, looks up, and straightens her back. “You have audio and visual hallucinations, but not olfactory ones, or tactile ones. I did some research, and if they haven’t manifested by now then your schizophrenia is probably localised away from those parts of the brain, so that should be safe.” My eyes widen a little as Sour rubs the back of her neck awkwardly. “My point is, that if you focus on scent, assuming you’re close enough, you should be able to tell what’s real and what isn’t.”
I’ve never heard her speak for so long without triggering her verbal tic, and the strain on her face makes it clear how much it’s costing to keep herself in line. That aside… research?
“You… did research?” I ask quietly.
Sour shrugs and nods.
“Yeah, what about it?” Sour says. “It’s not like it’s hard to read a book.”
Ah, there’s the tic.
“But you were reading about my disorder?” I ask. “About what’s wrong with me?”
She doesn’t reply, she just curls up, tucks her knees under her arms, and shrugs again.
Even on my meds my paranoia isn’t totally under control. It’s like there’s some rebel part of my brain that’s frantically weaving conspiracy theories, but the meds make it so that part is a lot smaller and has its own little room with a locked door and all the corkboard and red strings it needs to keep itself occupied until my next dose.
The thought of someone looking into me like that, though… it put a weird shiver up my spine that I’m not sure how to account for.
“Why?”
The word comes out before I can stop it, and Sour looks up at me with a confused expression on her face.
“Because you’re important to me?” She says that as if it's the simplest thing in the world. “Why the fuck else would I bother?”
Do normal people cry when they hear stuff like that? Because apparently I do. Maybe it’s because I can’t really remember a single specific instance when somebody actually said those words out loud to me.
Part of me knows I’m important to Tempest and Sour, and Aria, I get along well with Adagio and ‘Nata even though ‘Trial-wise’ I came in a little after Adagio was taken. Sunset… wherever she is… I know I was important enough to her for her to damn herself for me, despite how I treated her at first.
But to hear someone, especially someone like Sour Sweet, just tell me flat out and straight-faced that I’m important to her, important enough for her to take time to learn about me, and to try and understand me, even though I know focusing is really hard for her, is just… too much.
“Woah, woah, woah!” Sour puts up her hands and her eyes go wide as I start sobbing.
When I cry it is not a pretty sight. I get blotchy and snotty, and I always get the hiccups which just makes me sound worse.
Despite my ugly-crying Sour Sweet shuffles over to me and pulls me into an awkward hug, and I wrap my arms around her as she rocks me back and forth. She’s not very empathetic, and she knows it, but Sour does her best, and she does care. In her own klutzy way, she tries to comfort me, and even though I’m sure she doesn’t feel like she’s doing a good job, she is.
I wish I knew how to tell her exactly how much I care. I hope that she knows just how much I appreciate her.
…and that a little bit of me loves her.
“It’s, uh… it’s okay… I think?” Sour pats my back awkwardly. “A-Are you okay?”
I can’t get the words out right, so I just nod frantically while I continue to blubber.
“O-Okay, I guess that’s good.” Sour Sweet actually sounds a little scared, which is kind of funny if the situation weren’t so mortifying.
It takes me a good ten minutes to calm down enough to be coherent again, and by that point Sour Sweet has me practically in her lap. I hate how tired I get after something like this. I just want to curl up in a ball and sleep for a thousand years, but I can’t.
What I can do is nap in the passenger seat of Sour Sweet’s Corvette while she drives us home, and which she convinced Adagio to buy for her on the premise that it would be, and I quote, ‘really fucking cool to own a Corvette’.
That was the entirety of Sour Sweet’s argument, and somehow it worked.
In Sour’s defense, she’s not wrong.
The growl of the engine fills my ears with a gravelly and monotonous hum which, rather than interfering with my sleep, only lulls me deeper into it. My rest is black and dreamless, and to be honest it’s the best sleep I’ve had in a long time. I rarely get more than an hour or so before snapping awake unless I’m utterly exhausted, and even then I’m rarely sleeping well, I’m just too tired to wake up.
I drift in and out of sleep anyway, but not in a bad way. The outskirts of Canterlot are beautiful, made even moreso by the sunset, but that’s not what I’m looking at when I open my sleepy eyes in the brief gaps of consciousness I experience.
I’m looking at Sour Sweet. I’m looking at the way the sun warms her cheeks so I can pick out her freckles. I don’t know if I’ll ever have the courage to tell her how much I love her freckles. Instead, I watch the way her sharp eyes rove over the road with sleep-gummed eyes before drifting off again, only to wake up as the last light of the sun is dipping down.
In that moment, I think I see her look down at me and just… smile.
Did I dream that? That split-second moment where there isn’t a single inch of caustic humor or sardonic, waspish wit. Just a warm, happy smile.
And those pretty dimples.
Before I can figure it out. I fall asleep again, and everything fades away until-
“Hey.” A hand shakes me lightly out of slumber and I force my eyes open.
Sour Sweet is smiling down at me, normally this time. We’re idling at a red light in inner Canterlot, and a glance around tells me we’re less than five minutes from the apartment. I take a slow deep breath as I force myself to sit up from where I’d nodded off on Sour’s shoulder and wipe the little bit of drool from the edge of my mouth.
“I’m up, I’m awake,” I grumble. “For certain definitions of the word, and definitely under protest.”
“Heh, mood, you hungry?”
“I think so,” I stare sullenly down at my stomach. “Half the time I can’t tell, but I don’t think I’ve eaten in the last eight hours…”
“Damn it, Star,” Sour groans as the light turns green and she guns the throttle, and I flinch.
I start to apologise, but before I can get a word out Sour Sweet has her hand in mine and she’s squeezing it tight.
“Sorry,” she says quietly without looking over at me. “Let’s order in and… maybe watch a movie?”
Even sleepy, I can’t deny that sounded kind of nice.