When the Lightning Came

Content warning: Contains depictions of gender dysphoria.

Does NOT contain transphobia/intentional misgendering. 

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I waited in darkness, paused amongst gravestones and decorated plots blanketed by stormclouds. A flash cleft the sky, a blinding display, lightning illuminating the plants and wild bouquets and trinket decorations arranged over the ground. Darkness returned. 

"Yes!" Crow yelled, incorporeal, from the far-off shadows before me. I applauded them. The beat of my hands coupled with the pound of rain streaking my vision, stinging my eyes. 

The sky lightened from pitch to upturned rolling hills of ash. Crow came before me—figure monochrome in the downpour, not quite silhouette—with a splitting smile. They threw their arms around my neck, gripped my shoulders, almost forceful enough to tip me backward, and even as I stumbled they didn't let go. 

"Yes," I whispered in return, into the rain-soaked auburn hair draping their collarbones and drenching my shirtfront. For the first time, their magick succeeded highly enough—their focused energy powerful enough—to alter a full-blown storm. 

They released a sigh along with my torso, rhythm returning to their almost-panted breaths as they stood contented. Their power itself, their accomplishment, wasn't the cause of their smile. I knew their joy was for my accompanying them. 

I didn't need them to say a word. Psychic since birth, as well as gifted with hearing the voices of the Saints—the seven embodiments of all energies of the world—I've always held an innate understanding of the universe, a blessing as old as this reality. The thoughts, emotions, deepest covetings and fears of those I've held close—I've sensed them, effortless, and safekept every one. 

"Raven, let's go." Crow clasped their fingers onto mine and pulled, ecstatic. The bone-aching downpour became a soft mist nostalgic of spring over just the path we walked, no wider, no less, simply by their joyfulness. 

We ran past the gravestones through mud-rivered streets, down alleys and cobblestones and the dirt roads that succeeded them, and finally through the long-worn path of stone slick with water and shining with marble in the last flicker of a clouded sunset. 

Crow stopped beside the small brick- and wood-side shelter tucked away in the hills, some way north of the Middle Kingdom. We had painted it blue last summer, the day they'd finger-painted drawings on the inside walls and I'd confessed I wasn't who they thought—I was meant to be a girl. 

I'd confessed my body didn't fit, straight and slim and no one would give a second glance before considering me in a way that would never align. I joined the world as male, and effortlessly I was seen as nothing but, nothing greater, nothing more. I had asked Crow to see me, as I was meant, as I'd always been and never shown. I asked to be known. 

And they'd held me, and promised always to hold me, and confessed themself in turn. They had never been the girl the universe thought they were—they were something else, something separate, a soul that didn't fit on either side. I had told them I saw them. I'd promised always to see them, to know and understand what words could not convey. That day, we had become each other's only truth. 

Crow lifted the green-rusted bronze latch to the front door and faded inside. Without a word I followed, and knew to turn as they stripped off their rain-wet shirt, no voice needed, no voices given save for the hiss of the fire they lit in the corner ring of stones and the dapple of rain on the bark-tiled roof. 

They turned to face me, clothed in an oversized white shirt that swayed at their mid-thigh and painted them a night-ghost, a replica of the kingdom workers tasked with lighting main-road lamps just before dusk met the horizon. Crow smiled, gilded by flame. 

They sank to the down-stuffed mattress set against the far wall to my left as I bared to nothing, my wet canvas vest set out on the floor. I slipped on a black skirt, dark as my parted hair and as opposite to Crow's shirt as it could be. 

They opened an invitation of lifted linen sheets and a body warm with companionship. I accepted. 

"When did you know it was enough?" I asked, my head on their shoulder and my fingers intertwined with theirs, playful. 

They laughed, a reminiscence of pride in themself. "When the lightning came." 

"I thought you'd still be months away," I answered. "To go from night and day, bending time and light, into something physical, something more—" 

"I know!" They slid their weight from under me, propped on their side by one arm. I mirrored them. They couldn't find the words. "It felt..." 

Incredible. "I know." 

"Incredible." 

"I know." A connection to the universe, like nothing ever before so great, so unmistakable.

"As if I was connected to something. Something real, something greater, the way it must be for you. It was like understanding the universe." 

"I know." 

"Oh. You know," Crow laughed again, forgetting every so often that I could understand them, as effortlessly and wordlessly as they returned affection. They pushed upright, sitting beside me, and leaned into my shoulder, the tip of their nose cold against the back of my neck. Their still-damp hair brushed my shoulder and their fingers followed. 

They rested against me and I sank once more into the bed, their form a comfort, a security, against mine. As we lay conjoined in one contentment their hand strayed absently from my shoulder down to the flat sculpt of my chest. I shirked away, a flush of something sick and wrong settling in my throat—something I could never put to words. 

"I'm sorry," Crow said, and pulled back. "I forget you still mind sometimes." Just as the days when their body was wrong, off, adjacent to accurate truth but remained uncomfortably real, they'd always understood the same in me. 

"I forget, too," I admitted. 

A moment of silence settled. "I don't see you that way, you know that," they reassured. "You will always be a girl, no matter what it feels like, no matter what doesn't fit. You're a woman, and you are tall—" 

"All six feet." 

"—and gorgeous, and so smart, and Saints, when you fly—" They shook their head, voiceless, and lay back, flat to the sheets. "Beautiful, beautiful bird." Our other forms, our namesakes, the lives where we belonged. Crow reached a hand beneath the toss of sheets and blankets, fingers creeping hesitantly until they found mine. "I love you," they said. 

"I know," I said, barely more than a whisper. "I love you." 

"I know." They always knew. 

I fell asleep as much myself and the most content with them I'd ever been. 

By morning the rain hadn't left and neither had we. I woke to Crow, always the dawn-greeter, stoking the embers of last night's burn back into a crack of orange rays. They knelt on the sanded ash floorboards, still draped in their white shirt, auburn hair tied up loosely and left half-stray. 

I watched silently as they poured two mugs of tea—lemongrass with pear—from the carved-seashell kettle they set to the floor, laid a metal pan on the stand above the stone-bound patch of flame, and dropped in butter and thick-cut bread with a hiss. They paused, patient, before catching the edge of a slice in their narrow fingers and flipping it with expert confidence, no hint of a burn. 

"Good morning," I interrupted, and pulled up the bedsheet to my chest and brought my knees to follow. 

"Oh! Hello." They turned and smiled, stood, and wiped their fingers absentmindedly on the hem of their top as they contemplated one of the shelves nailed into the pine-knot paneling and stacked with linens. They chose a shirt for me, a short-sleeve button-up of light blue satin that hit my face before I could catch it. 

"Thank you?" 

"Any time," Crow stifled a laugh. They returned to the floor, cross-legged, and exchanged the bread for a blend of fresh-picked blueberries and sage to go on top. 

"How did you have time for this?" I asked as I slipped on the shirt and kicked down the bedcovers. "Are we late, or were you awake this long?" 

"Flight needs fancy," they remarked, referring to our planned journey all the way to the coast, a celebration of our only way to feel truly free. They could keep things from me when they wanted, my knowledge of their inner thoughts still limited to those given passively, freely, or unknowing, and their method of success in preparing the surprise remained for only them to know. 

We ate in a quiet of delicate peace, and dressed in the lightest things we owned. I finished first and waited beside the opened door, misted clouds of summer drizzle painting the ground outside. Crow joined me and paused, leaned their head against my shoulder, fit their hand in mine, watching the rain. 

I waited until I knew they were ready, a tenseness in their chest and a focus in their eyes. I closed mine in turn, let my attention fall away, my body, myself. 

I was flying, a raven under clouded sky, letting the earth disappear. Crow rose beside me. I was twice their size, twice their wingspan splitting the air, yet they were always protective of me in flight. Flecks of rain turned into stinging along my feathered wings. 

We drifted side by side, over homes and fields in brilliant colours our human eyes couldn't see, until even those faded into emptiness—until there was nowhere left to be. I was first to overcome the lingered storm, the break as we reached the horizon where the clouds fell away to the glistening blind of light above the open sea. Crow had grown tired, their movements loose and energy spent. 

I took a dive downward, the sand a flutter beneath my wings, and I lay on the shore—human, wholly mortal. I'd always been, every part of me, but to be aloft beside the one I loved held a closeness to the universe nearly as great as our devotion. 

Crow circled once more and joined me. Two souls adrift, laid hand in hand. 

We watched the sea, the edge of the world. We watched the sunset, the bleed of darkness and the break of the moons out over the waves. We watched the stars catch light, the constellation of our Saint—the ring of far-off gold from which we received our names, a raven and a crow, fated always together—circling forever in flight. 

Dawn broke me from sleep much earlier than anticipated, or so it felt by the heaviness left in my limbs, my shoulders and human form a heavy weight. I looked to the side, my vision watercoloured by the sleep-blur of sea grass and salt foam, and Crow—their hands aloft—clutching the sun. 

Rays of light broke from the indigo horizon out beyond the sea, prismed through the still-dark sky and nestled, as if magnet-drawn, over their opened palms. 

Their smile broke to see me wake. Their laugh blossomed, gilding the glow they suspended in a blush of tender summer afternoon, the way the universe shows love to its creation. All tired emptiness was washed away, leaving nothing save for the tight serenity in my chest of being cherished, revered as the very energy of the world they pedestaled. 

They dropped their hands and lay back to the sand, light fading to the skyline in a hush of pink and grey. 

"Raven?" Crow began, a question poised and waiting. They were about to ask if I wanted to match them, to finally join our energies, our respective powers in a bond that nothing could break. To truly become one, for always. 

"Absolutely," I answered too quickly, before they could propose. 

"I didn't even—" 

"I'm sorry!" 

"You know?" 

"I do. I want to. Yes," I said. "But do you think you're ready?" 

"I do." They repeated, "I do. It's never been so strong, something I could use so freely." Controlling a storm, shifting the light, bending the very power that coursed though the world. "Between us we hold the universe, what could be lost?" 

I was ready whenever they chose, my own energy never changing since the day I was born. I'd never known anything more, nor did I need to—I'd found my full purpose in them. "So, when?" 

They tipped their head against my shoulder, gazing to the sky. "Tonight?" 

"Tonight." 

We walked home with tired bodies and wind at our backs, hand in hand the whole way, leaving the ocean washed out behind. We chased toward the storm that had yet to recede, its turbulent grey cloaking over all things. We walked for hours, unbreaking, driven by desire for a closeness never held, to become the same soul, a bonded unity built of nothing but ourselves—to pledge, with the energy that made us, to love forever. 

We followed through fields of soil and tired flares of grass reaching skyward in late-summer browns. We cut through the hillsides, down roads that built to cobblestones and between the buildings overshadowing them. 

We returned to where Crow's power was greatest before, to the little cemetery just north of the Middle Kingdom. We stood, side by side, without need of a word. 

Rain rushed over the sunset, a hard and gentle all-encompassing. In my mind I readied my own essence, my power, my connection to all things—a fullness I collected at the forefront of myself. 

Crow gripped my hand, our fingers intertwined, a single soul in separate beings, bound by fate as much as adoration. I felt the flare of their energy meet my own, a completion to the sanctity of the Saints I already knew. 

I became whole, felt the fulfillment of the gift to be alive. But it wasn't right. Something went wrong, a misbalance of the universe, of the energies we shared and those we hoped to gain. My conscience filled with voices unintelligible, as if too much room was taken by a shout through empty space. 

Crow's hand slipped from mine and all my memory of flight faded like a sun-washed room, a blankness irreplaceable where a love had once resided and shed the shell of loneliness behind, gone for better futures somewhere else. 

Flight went into them—permanent flight. My other form, my fitting truth, overtaking their humanity, and gone from me. Our last flight together was my final, no heart of the sky in me to be found. 

I still felt Crow beside me. I could sense where they once stood, their feeling of smallness, their need to be coveted by a companion. Traits now passed to them, a mirror of my former self. I could no longer hold their every thought, know their every memory, hear their words before they spoke them. We were no longer the same. 

Rain heaved from the clouds so thickly that, in my closed vision, for a moment I feared I would drown. I lived—fully mortal, fully human. 

As I am now. 

I look to Crow, held animal on the ground before me, mud on their wings and rain soaking their feathers. I lift them, cradle them, they perch on my shoulder and rest their head at the side of my neck, wet and cold in the downpour. 

Lightning splits the sky. 

"I love you," I say, barely above a whisper. "I will always love you." 

Do they know?