A Deadly Education

I love having existential crises at bedtime, it's so restful.

READER, I RAN the fuck away.

I decided that Orion needed to die after the second time he saved my life.

Was I starting to feel evil? Yes, now I was worrying I'd be turned to the dark side by too much crochet.

She says it's too easy to call people evil instead of their choices and that lets people justify making evil choices. Because they convince themselves that it's okay because they're still good people overall inside their own heads. And yes, fine. But I think that after a certain number of evil choices, it's reasonable shorthand to decide that someone's an evil person who oughtn't have the chance to make any more choices. And the more power someone has, the less slack they ought to be given.

Some sorcerers get an affinity for weather magic, or transformation spells, or fantastic combat magics like dear Orion. I got an affinity for mass destruction.

You feel like it’s going to rain.

You know, it’s almost impressive,” he said after a moment, sounding less wobbly. “You’re nearly dead and you’re still the rudest person I’ve ever met. You’re welcome again, by the way.” “Given that you’re at least half responsible for this situation, I refuse to thank you,” I said.

My anger’s a bad guest, my mother likes to say: comes without warning and stays a long time.

There was only me to save me, because no one else cared.

You have to ration sympathy and grief in here the way you ration school supplies.

Oh, how I’d enjoyed all that sweet crisp righteous anger, my favorite drug: I’d nearly ridden the high straight into murder.

Why would you ask for a spell like that!” “What I asked for was a spell to light my room, you twat, that’s what I got.” To be fair, the incarnate flame was in fact doing a magnificent job of lighting the room.

I was reasonably sure that my one tried-and-true method of being aggressively rude wasn’t actually how normal people made their friends.

I’ve been taught any number of ways to manage anger, and they really work. What she’s never been able to teach me is how to want to manage it. So I go on seething and raging and knowing the whole time that it’s my own fault, because I do know how to stop.

I'd want to. If you want, I want.

All shall love me and despair,’ ” I said. She was eyeing me very dubiously. “Galadriel? In Lord of the Rings?

But hope is good strong drink, especially when you can get someone else to buy it for you.

He obviously wanted to leave on a snappy comeback, but couldn’t think of one. I suppose he wasn’t ever called on to produce them in the ordinary course of things. After a moment of struggle, he just scowled and stalked out. I’m delighted to report my repaired door slammed shut on his heels beautifully.

I straightened up and shut my eyes, getting ready to start casting, and then had to push him off; he was trying to grab hold of my hand, which I needed rather urgently right then. "What are you doing?" I said, trying to get loose: he was being stupidly persistent about it. Yes, I really sincerely hadn't any idea: whatever was Orion doing, trying to hold hands with me in the moment of what he thought was his imminent demise, and then as soon as I spared it that much of a thought, the answer became so obvious that I felt like a complete idiot. "You are dating me?" I yelled at him, in a fury, and he turned around with his face screwed up in pinched determination and grabbed my face and kissed me. I kneed him with as much energy as the situation called for, since I also needed my voice, and then pushed him down to the floor so I could turn back to the onrushing fires and conjure up my own wall of mortal flame, just in time to put it around us as a firebreak.

They wanted to be safe. It’s not that much to ask, it feels like. But we don’t have it to begin with, and to get it and keep it, they’d push another kid into the dark. One enclave would push another into the dark for that, too. And they didn’t stop at safety, either. They wanted comfort, and then they wanted luxury, and then they wanted excess, and every step of the way they still wanted to be safe, even as they made themselves more and more of a tempting target, and the only way they could stay safe was to have enough power to keep everyone off that wanted what they had.

But I couldn't just be angry at her. Obviously I wanted to scream at her and set her whole enclave on fire, but that was just habit.

And I know nobody gets to live or not live because they deserve it, deserving doesn't count for a thing, but the point was, I now felt deep in my heart that I was in fact a better human being than Magnus or Todd, and hooray, all the prizes for me, but that wasn't helpful when what I actually needed was reasons why I shouldn't just wipe them out of existence.

It's always mattered a lot to me to keep a wall up round my dignity, even though dignity matters fuck-all when the monsters under your bed are real.

His shoulders were starting to stop hunching. "It's called sitting down together," he said, dragging the words out exaggeratedly. "At a table. In chairs. Most people can get through lunch without turning it into an act of war." "I'm not most people," I said. "Also, the seating arrangements are an act of war, and if you haven't noticed, that's just embarrassing. Do you think that everyone is always trying to sit with you for your amazing personality or something?" "I guess you're just immune," he said. "Bloody well right I am," I said, but he was grinning at me a little from under his overgrown hair, tentatively, and apparently I was lying.

If I ever did go maleficer, if I ever did start pulling malia out of people like toffee and tossing off those killing spells of mine left and right, I’d be unstoppable. Maybe literally. Raining death and destruction on all the enclaves of the world like a maw-mouth myself, like the biggest maw-mouth ever, tearing the others apart because they were my competition.

She says it’s too easy to call people evil instead of their choices, and that lets people justify making evil choices, because they convince themselves that it’s okay because they’re still good people overall, inside their own heads. And yes, fine, but I think after a certain number of evil choices, it’s reasonable shorthand to decide that someone’s an evil person who oughtn’t have the chance to make any more choices. And the more power someone has, the less slack they ought to be given. So

I sat down and got out my current project, an extremely bad villanelle in which I was carefully avoiding the word pestilence, which was trying so hard to shove its way into every stanza that I was sure that if I actually wrote it down, the whole thing would turn into a tidy evocation of a new plague. I’m probably the only student who tries to prevent my writing assignments from turning into new spells.

I don't have a very good idea of how people behave with their friends normally because I've never had one before. But, on the bright side, Orion hadn't either, so he didn't know any more than I did. So for lack of a better idea, we just went on being rude to each other, which was easy enough for me and a refreshing and new experience for him, in both directions.