Human AU about two kids, then two adults, then a nun and a priest. I don't know, I had originally planned on popping out some good old-fashioned blaspheming crack, and wound up writing this huge serious discussion about, like, sexuality and memory and love.

Rated M for lots of cursing (including some offensive slurs about sex work and vaginas), opportunistic sex (not really prostitution) and abstract descriptions thereof. Not explicit.

Also note that while Gil and Liz are the main focus of the story, there is some brief Austria/Hungary, a few Hungary/OCs, cameo Spain/France, and implied RusAme.

I.

They met on a Wednesday, over the dead body of a baby robin. Elizaveta was poking at it with a stick, trying to determine the cause of death. "Its neck is at a funny angle," the boy offered, squatting across from her. He swayed a little; he'd been walking home from school, and his bookbag sagged heavily down his back.

"Yeah, but maybe he died mid-air, and his neck broke on impact."

The boy found his own twig and started to poke at the bird's red breast.

"You're copying me," Elizaveta accused. "This is my dead bird. Get your own."

"No."

She reached over the corpse and shoved at his shoulder. With help from his bookbag, the boy overbalanced and toppled backwards. She stood up, casting him and the dead bird in shadow.

His face went red. "You stupid…idiot! You knocked me over! You're even taller than I am! You're not even a girl, I bet." He shouldn't have said that; stupid and idiot were words you're Not Supposed to Say. She could've gone to a teacher or his parents. But Elizaveta just kicked at him.

"Yeah, and you're stupid right back. Your hair is stupid and your eyes are stupid, and I don't want to be a girl anyway."

He scrambled up and pulled her hair, calling "Stricherin! Du dreckige Schlampe!" Liz was excited to be insulted in a language she knew besides English, and came back with "Sheisskerl! Scheide!" They went back and forth for a while, until neither could think of any more names. The boy ran out first because he only spoke English and German, while she could speak those and Hungarian too.

"Are your parents immigrants?"

"No, my grandma. She taught me all the words though. My name's Gilbert." He held out a hand, bloodied from his fall.

"Liz." She took his hand and wiped his blood off on her pants. "My parents are from Hungary. But they speak German sometimes."

"Do Germany and Hungary touch?"

"No, Hungary touches Austria, where they speak German."

"Nuh-uh, Austrians speak French."

"No they don't! You're stupid. They speak German in Austria."

Elizaveta took him home to her parents so they could set it straight: Austrians speak mostly German, but the Swiss speak German and French, which is probably what Gilbert was thinking of.

"No, it was Austria. I read it in a book," he sulked. Liz didn't think he really believed himself, but she admired his stubbornness. You can't never admit to being wrong and you can't never say you're sorry, was what she always said.

***...***

After that their parents set them up on playdates, even though Liz and Gil did the opposite of get along. The two couples chatted amiably in the kitchen as their respective children tried to kill each other in the backyard.

But the children had enough decency to fix what they broke, or at least clean and bandage it. Too tired to maintain their mutual antagonism and natural belligerence, Gilbert and Liz locked themselves in the bathroom and whispered in their different shades of German. They called each other "girl" and "baby" to distract each other from the stinging peroxide. Sometimes, afterwards, they would even fall asleep together in front of the television set.

Liz had always been the kind to show off scars and broken bones and bruises, so she relished the side-effects of their weird friendship. More than that, she liked seeing her own marks on him. Their whole relationship was like a bruise, she thought, a punch begging to be landed, a bone begging to be broken. As she got older, the phrase "cruisin' for a bruisin'" took on new and exciting connotations.

"Hey, Gil?" she taunted on the way home from school, jogging to catch up with him. "Guess who got a hundred on that social studies test?"

"Shut the hell up," he snarled back.

"No, I don't think I will. What did you get?" In class, she'd peeked over his shoulder to see his seventy-two. Hopefully he was about to snap and get her good in the shins; shins were off-limits, and she could break the rules as long as he did it first. Playing dirty was to her advantage because she could get him in the crotch.

"I said shut up. Stupid bitch."

"Oooh, sweet-talker. Does Mrs. Beilschmidt know her little Gilbird uses words like that?"

He stopped in his tracks, but didn't turn around. "Liz. Just stop."

"Jesus, what's your problem? Scared I'll kick your ass? C'mon, blow off a little steam with me. I dare you to punch me." She danced into his line of sight (wincing at the way her newly tender chest ached) and landed a glancing blow to his collarbone.

He shook his head, turned aside, and walked away.

Liz went home and punched her pillow and imagined it was his stupid face.

***...***

"It isn't right, the way you two carry on."

"Like how?" Liz picked at her sandwich sullenly.

"The way you swear at each other," Katyusha said. "And the way he hurts you. It makes me nervous."

Liz rolled her eyes. "He hasn't even touched me in, like, a year. Gilbert and I aren't really even friends anymore. I don't know why you're freaking out, Kat."

Katyusha smiled the placating smile of one who disagrees but is perpetually unable to say so.

"No, really. He just stopped hanging out with me last year. It's like talking to a fuckin' brick wall." Liz scratched uncomfortably at her new "big girl" bra, as her mother had patronizingly called it. It was stupid, and so was Kat (who was wincing at the f-word; what was she, ten?), and so was Gilbert, who wouldn't even give her the benefit of a good fistfight anymore. "But he can just go fuck himself, right? It used to be us against everybody else, you know, they could all just go fuck themselves while we did our own thing. Those were the good old days."

"I begin to understand why the other girls tell me you have an attitude problem."

***...***

This assessment would follow Liz around for a very long time. She had an attitude problem and an authority problem and an anger problem—"Because I don't do whatever I'm told without question," she would tell anybody who brought it up.

Soon her reputation as a short-fused firecracker morphed into something new. Men twice her age wolf-whistled in the street, and though she'd preach against objectification 'til she was blue in the face, she was intrigued by this new kind of war fought with whispers and flirty glances. It was almost as fun as grinding Gilbert's face in the dirt.

Though Liz understood that she looked old for her age, it was still surprising when Alfred Jones, a senior of (relative) renown, approached her in her freshman year of high school. "Hey, your name's Elizabeth, right?"

"Wrong, it's Elizaveta." She flashed her best confident grin. It mirrored his nicely.

"That's a neat name. Russian?"

"Nope, Hungarian. Oh-for-two, Jones."

"Damn. Well, I guess I'd better get the next one right. Will you come to my party this weekend? There'll be good food and shitty booze. And a bonfire."

She promised to think about it and did little else for several days. Freshmen enviously pestered her for details, while older girls whispered and giggled at her from behind bitchy hands. Whenever this happened, she would loudly say, "I don't even give a fuck about them. They're just jealous because they didn't get invited."

"You should maybe shut up," Natalia advised her once.

"I'm not kidding, Nat. I really don't give a fuck."

"Don't call me Nat. And yeah, they're being bitchy, but that doesn't give you leave to be bitchy right back."

"No, it does. It totally does," Liz pointed out reasonably. She remembered the lessons she learned in sparring with Gilbert: you had to sink as low as your opponent if you wanted to win. A sort of outlaw's honor, loyalty to a different kind of principle. Gilbert would understand, she found herself thinking wistfully, and then she wanted to punch something.

***...***

She got the opportunity to do so that night, when he stood outside the window of her first-floor bedroom. "Liz," he whispered.

She hadn't moved since childhood. Her parents didn't speak much English; they'd always straddled the line between paying for hot water and doing without, and air conditioning was out of the question. The window was wide open in the hopes of catching a breeze, so Gil didn't have the chance to pull some eighties-movie bullshit with the pebbles and the boombox. He just whispered her name.

"Hey, Liz."

She moved aside the beach towel that functioned as her screen, and punched as hard as she could into the darkness outside. Her fist glanced disappointingly off what she guessed might be his temple. Her bloodlust was not sated in the least.

"Jesus fuck!"

"Hello, strange guy whispering my name outside the window in the middle of the night. I hope you know you deserved that."

"Shut up, Liz, you know it's me."

"Oh, is that Gilbert Beilschmidt? Then you deserved that and more." The light flicked on and revealed that pale, pale face floating outside her window. "Now, what the hell do you want from me?" She bent her knees slightly to bring herself down to his eye-level.

"Heard you're going to Alfred Jones' party tomorrow."

"Oh wow, sounds like somebody's grown a cunt and 's listening to gossip. It ain't me."

"You don't need to grow one. You are one."

She scoffed, "Not your best."

"Shut up, filthy Schlampe." Now that hurt, and not because of its meaning either.

"Yeah, okay. Tell me what you have to say and leave. But just so you know in advance, I don't care."

"Well, you should. You are way too fucking young to be going to senior parties with alcohol. With creeps like Alfred Jones and Ivan Braginsky—"

Liz spluttered and pushed ineffectually at his shoulders. "Firstly, Ivan's a perfectly nice guy, and I know this because my best friends are his cousins. Secondly, what the hell gives you the right—so patronizing—this is the first time you talk to me in—Jesus, I can make my own decisions, and I don't need you or any other well-meaning condescending douchebag to tell me how to 'protect my virtue' from 'creeps'—"

Gilbert scowled. "You're not listening. I'm not trying to tell you how to live your life—"

"You are! You totally are! Explain to me how you're not."

His petulant look hadn't changed much in nine years—he still looked like that seven-year-old who knew that one spoke German in Austria but had too much constancy to admit it. "I'm just letting you know that if you become a party girl now, there's no turning back."

Liz stood up to slam the window, lack of air-conditioning be damned.

"Wait! Eliza, wait." His odd eyes, bright as a robin's breast, sought hers and held. "Do you remember the baby bird?"

She paused and lied, "No," and knew she would have to stick with that answer for the rest of her life.

***...***

It was a Friday, and her father had pissed her off again, and Gilbert had pissed her off last night, and Liz was ready to break some rules. Alfred's house was colder than she was used to: he had air conditioning. Even with the people packed in like sardines, she shivered and wondered if she was sick again. "Liz!" classmates called out to her, and "Hey, girl," called some strangers, but she had eyes only for the tallest man in the room.

"Ivan," she sighed in relief. He wordlessly handed her a beer. "This is shit," she informed him, full of a confidence that no fifteen-year-old should have in matters of alcohol.

"Drink more. You'll be able to forget." He smiled sweetly and moved away. Liz chugged and tried not to feel conspicuously alone.

By the time Alfred reached her, the room was spinning in lazy circles, and a strange calmness possessed her. She'd never felt so at peace in her life; her typical rage was quiet, so much so that she didn't even sneer at Alfred's corny, "Fancy meeting you here, darlin'." Instead she giggled and let him lead her in a silly spin, which would have been awkward if her whole soul weren't so relaxed, down to her soles, out through her ears. Alfred grinned lazily and moved on to the next girl. She felt good, but worried that she was losing class-points. She crossed her legs and tried to remember how sober people acted.

"Bonfire in ten," a stranger murmured in her ear.

"Want another?" asked a sweet-faced girl with braces.

"…so creepy, his eyes are like red or something…"

"They say he's screwing the TA…" a blonde said, pointing at a redhead.

"Hey, Liz, like your top!" Elizaveta smiled vaguely in the direction of the speaker and then heard, "Crazy barefoot whore."

Eventually her cold-natured body won out over the desire to act sober, and she pulled the couch-cover off the back of the sofa. It wasn't very warm, this crocheted, holey, ugly thing, but she wrapped it around her shoulders like a shawl and felt like a queen. There was either a puppy or a little yappy dog in one of the spare bedrooms, which she freed and then watched chase guests around happily. Everybody laughed and played with him until the shout came:

"BONFIRE TIME!"

Most of the party's guests decided they'd rather watch from the windows, but Liz was freezing and curious. She staggered out onto the grass, and the puppy followed at her heels. Being outside felt like thawing, like water was dripping from her nose and fingers. The sunset glared at her, and she glared back.

With some trepidation, she beheld the enormous pyre. The circumference was at least thirty-one point four feet (she estimated the diameter to be about ten) and probably wouldn't have fit in her kitchen at home. The wood had a piney, sappy smell, and Liz was extremely proud of herself when she managed to put that together with the pine-stump she'd tripped over on her way out here. "They must have chopped down a tree recently," she told a stranger beside her. "Didn't want to keep the firewood because they have an electric fireplace, you know."

"Lighter fluid!" commanded Alfred. Some sidekick produced it with great ceremony.

"Matches!"

The first lit match arced into the perfect center of the pyre and blazed up. Alfred tossed in a few more just in case, but it wasn't necessary; the flames quickly grew hungry and high. The partygoers sent up a ragged cheer.

"Having a good time?" Ivan was back, standing behind her.

"Not really," she admitted. "But the fire is neat."

"Go dance," Ivan winked at her. She glanced down at her feet, adorned in only a toe-ring and an old hemp anklet, and then back up; she saw that a few of the girls were trying to get enough people to hold hands in a circle around the bonfire. One of them started chanting something ridiculous, and she had to laugh. As she approached the bonfire the grass tickled and the dirt shifted between her toes, and it felt like those summer days with Gilbert, when they chased each other around the trees and ran barefoot down the streets until their soles were rubbed black and tough. She suddenly missed him something terrible, and wondered if she should start yelling or crying.

The woven sofa-cover was still wrapped around her shoulders. She threw it to the ground in front of the fire and joined hands with a couple of girls.

And she thought, fuck him anyway, but the red heart of the fire was the color of his eyes. It reminded her of something else, and she tried to block it out for the sake of fun and forgetfulness, dancing and laughing and spinning and falling into the arms of anybody trying to catch her.

The fire was too hot and she was drunk-dancing around it, trying to bring that bird back.

II.

"You haven't had this many discipline issues since the days you were running around with that Hungarian girl," Ludwig sighed, forging their father's signature for the third time in as many weeks. "You need to cool your head."

"They provoked me," Gilbert insisted, though it was not precisely true.

His brother put the pen down. "You'll be a senior next year. You can't punch out everyone who deserves it. There are reasonable, mature ways to handle the situation."

"What, like ratting them out?"

"No, like ignoring them."

"C'mon, bro, you know that ain't my style."

"Well, you'd better make it your style. Next time you get a Saturday detention you'll also get a suspension, and then they'll call Dad in for a conference." Gilbert swallowed his "you would know"with great difficulty."So do better."

"Do better," Gilbert mimicked viciously, and slammed out of the house. How the hell was it his fault that people were making up lies about certain people, and those certain people were too stupid to do anything to dissuade them?

He rang the doorbell. "Heard you got into another fight today," Antonio said by way of greeting.

"Yeah, it was stupid," Gilbert muttered, pushing past him into the hallway. "Got anything to drink?"

"It was about Elizaveta Hedervary again, wasn't it."

He rifled through the refrigerator, looking for anything that wasn't diet shit. "Nope, it was about your mom. Apparently she's been fucking everyone at school."

Antonio laughed softly. "You mean Elizaveta's been fucking everyone at school."

"Shut. Up. It wasn't about Liz, and it's really none of your business, so you can just go back to screwing that Frenchie in the janitor's closet. Okay?"

"Okay," Antonio said mildly. But he oozed pity; you poor little puppy was practically written across his forehead. They picked a video game and used it to beat each other bloody, and Gilbert stubbornly told himself that it didn't remind him of anything to do with her.

***...***

Elizaveta's tomboyish-ness had given way to a reckless sort of sensuality that captivated boys and intimidated most girls. She wasn't afraid to cuss, she wasn't afraid to go all out in sports, and, according to the rest of the school, she wasn't afraid to spread her legs for anybody who asked. Gilbert knew this was a lie, that they were just taking advantage of her because she was younger (still a sophomore) and too hot for her own good.

"What is your problem?" she demanded of him in the courtyard one lunch period, hands on hips.

"You're blocking my sun."

"Oh please, like the sun gives you anything but a burn," she snapped. "Listen. I don't know what you think you're doing, but you need to stop beating up my friends."

"Your friends? I think the problem here is that you need to get some new ones." He sucked on his soda 'til the straw rattled rudely. "Hey, don't you have someone to be screwing?"

She made a frustrated noise and took a step forward. "I would, if everyone wasn't so terrified that my dog would come bite their ass afterward."

Gilbert found that he could no longer meet her angry hazel gaze, so he looked down at her bare feet. She wore a hemp circlet around her right ankle. They'd made that together in the third grade, then decided that hemp-weaving was stupid and tried to fletch arrows instead.

"Nice shoes."

"Listen to me. Gil. It is none of your business who I decide to have sex with. It is none of your business who talks about it afterward. My life has nothing to do with you."

"'Fraid it does. Or were those six years just a figment of my imagination? You gonna pretend that never happened?"

"You were the one who—!" She cut herself off and looked around, as though checking to make sure nobody overheard about their shared history. Calming herself visibly, she said, "It doesn't matter anymore. Just leave me and mine alone." Gilbert watched her sway back into the cafeteria, to all those friends who called her "slut" behind her back. For a few seconds, he agreed with them.

Antonio offered him a swig of spiked fruit juice.

***...***

But it had been he who'd effectively ended their friendship all those years ago.

"Dude, she's still in elementary school," his middle school friends said when he told them how he got the scabs on his arm. "Aren't you too old to be fighting with the neighborhood girls?" his dad asked, staring down his nose. "Heard from the Hedervarys that she's been having anger issues at school," his mother would confide over dinner.

It wasn't until he noticed how pretty she was that he decided to grow up.

"Gil, I am really fricking tired of you ignoring me," she complained. "You're as bad as the boys in my grade. They snapped my bra yesterday"—Gilbert went red and tried harder to ignore her—"and when I started hitting them, they told me they couldn't hit back because I'm a girl! That's like, discrimination or some shit. Right? Can they get in trouble for refusing to beat me up?"

"Liz, go home."

She kicked at his mom's flowerpot. It fell off the stoop and shattered. "No! Not until you tell me why you won't talk to me anymore."

He'd tried to explain their relationship to all complaining parties: "Liz is really tough," he told his friends, and "I'm not beating her up, we're just play-fighting," he explained to his parents. But they could never see past the fact that she was a pretty younger girl. They didn't understand that it was okay because not only did she want it, she was better at it anyway. When he told Liz that "it just wasn't right" for "people of their age," she snorted and said "Fuck right. I thought we were better than their stupid rules." So he'd been ignoring her lately, and now she was on his doorstep demanding an audience.

"Liz, honey, it's nine o'clock," Mrs. Beilschmidt said, appearing from over Gilbert's shoulder. "Won't your parents worry?"

"No."

"I think it's time for you to go home." But she didn't. She went around the house and waited underneath Gilbert's window until she heard him getting ready for bed, then she threw pebbles at the glass.

"My mom told you to go home, Versager."

She grinned and gave him her middle finger.

He'd figured that she would go on grinning and cussing at him for the rest of his life, whether he talked to/punched her or not. When she didn't, he was relieved; his friends teased him less, and his parents were certainly glad that he wasn't beating up the neighborhood girls anymore.

***...***

The night before his graduation, he went to her window and knocked quietly on the siding. She pulled aside the towel-curtain, and he saw that she was clutching a matching towel to her chest.

"Oh Jesus, it's you." The towel fell (i.e. the towel-screen, unfortunately) and Elizaveta disappeared for a few minutes. He'd almost lost his nerve and was about to walk home when the towel was pushed aside again.

"Okay, what."

"Nothing in particular. Just came by to talk."

She regarded him with narrowed eyes, then stood up straight. His eyes were on a level with her chest, but he did his best to focus on her scabbed elbows instead. Her knees were probably skinned too. I wonder if she still sneaks into the woods behind the pool. She probably tried biking down that hill again and hurt herself. "Alright, climb in if you're gonna."

He did so, wobbly because he'd been drinking a little. She was sitting on her bed in a giant t-shirt, knees drawn up to her chest under the fabric. "You look like a fat penguin," he informed her.

"And you look like an albino stick-bug, but hey we can't all be pretty."

"Stick-bug?"

"You're skinny."

"Guess so."

He remained sprawled on the floor in front of her window. "You fucker," she said, apropos of nothing, completely failing to meet his eyes.

"Keep it down. Won't your parents hear?"

"Nah."

Should he say it? How should he say it? Did he have the right to say it? What would she do? What would it mean? His guts twisted. This was really stupid. "This is really stupid."

"What is? You coming to my window? Me letting you in?"

"I was thinking more along the lines of me graduating and leaving for college," he lied.

"Oh. Personally I think you've got the right idea. Leaving. I'd kill…"

"To what? Leave? You'll be able to in a year."

"Maybe sooner. I'm probably not going back. To school, I mean. Next year."

Gilbert stared at her. She pointedly avoided his gaze, chin-on-knees-under-shirt. Her slowly drying curls tumbled over the fold of her legs and left wet patches on her quilt and over the curve of her breasts. There were shadows under her eyes and she'd just told him frankly that she was dropping out of high school. There were no words for how lovely Elizaveta Hedervary was.

"That's the stupidest fucking idea I've ever heard."

"Why? What would be the point?" She straightened, frustration evident on her face. It was so painfully familiar. "I'm turning seventeen in June. I can't go to college. I don't have the money. If I tried to take on loans, then my parents wouldn't be able to keep this house."

"Are you looking for sympathy? Look somewhere else."

"You're the only one I've told, because you're the only one I expect to give me zero fucking sympathy. Pity." She picked up a pillow as though to smack him across the face. It was a little painful when she used it to hide hers instead.

"Okay, there are a lot of things you can't do without a college degree. But there are a lot more things you can't do without a high school degree. Seriously. Eliza. Just another year."

"I don't want to." There were tears in her voice if not her eyes. She looked furious with herself. "Why the hell should you care, anyway? You're leaving. You don't have to worry about me anymore."

"I never worried about you to begin with," he said, and was glad when she didn't point out that this was the exact opposite of the truth.

They huddled quietly in their opposite corners of the tiny room, both of them remembering how they used to be best friends and wondering why they ever stopped. Gilbert considered tackling her and beating some sense into her, but he was a) too horrified by the thought of hurting her and b) too afraid/hopeful of copping a feel when she was wearing a long t-shirt and no bra. "You were a good fighter," he said finally.

"Still am," she smiled, staring at her feet.

"I really miss you, Liz."

And there, he almost said it. He was one word off, but she seemed to hear the truth anyway. They looked down, like he'd thrown his heart at her feet, or more accurately like he'd lobbed a live grenade on the floor between them. They stood over it, waiting for it to go off.

But the explosion didn't move her. Gilbert smiled even as she shook her head.

"Thanks but no thanks. Let's not go there."

He nodded, still smiling, and drew himself to his feet. "Well then, goodbye. Eliza." He didn't bother cheapening it with any promises of visiting, any see-you-laters.

She nodded bravely and didn't get up to hug him. He hadn't expected her to, but would have liked at least a punch or a kick, at least a bruise to remember her by.

III.

It came as no surprise when her parents kicked her out.

"It's not that we don't love you, Elizaveta," her mother reassured her in Hungarian as she packed the smallest suitcase with which one could feasibly survive. "It's just that if you refuse to go to school and refuse to work, we really can't support you. Your father thinks"—Liz barely restrained a snort; when her father had spoken to her, it was all "It's just that your mother thinks"—"that you would really benefit from some forced independence. We're not abandoning you for good. Just pushing you out of the nest, see?"

"Sure. Did you see where I put my necklace?"

"Which one?"

"The blue one. Turquoise."

Her parents wept at the bus station. Catlike, she avoided their embraces and their eyes, saying, "Viszlat, Mama. Viszlat, Papa." They seemed awfully upset about a plan they'd conceived all on their own. She was to take the bus up to New York City, where some Hungarian friends (whom her parents had neither seen nor spoken to since the emigration) were looking to hire a live-in maid. It was an easy break, all things considered, but Liz was not about to take it.

When she disembarked at Port Authority, Roderich was waiting for her.

He went in for a hug, but she dodged like she had with her parents. "We need to get out of here, before they recognize me from the picture my parents sent."

They went back to Rod's apartment, where he held her by the shoulders and tried to look into her eyes. "Liz. It's been a long time."

"Only half a year," she smiled up at him. He had been one of Gilbert's least favorites, even though he was a perfect gentleman both in and out of bed. Maybe that's why; he never gave anybody a good excuse to beat the shit out of him. That sort of behavior pissed Gilbert off, like it used to with her.

She shook her head as if to clear these old thoughts away. "So, you'll give me a tour of your place?"

He laughed. "New York City, Liz. This is it. Half a kitchen, a bedroom and living room, and a bathroom. All for twenty-five hundred a month!"

***...***

She was slow to take to the city, spending most of her days curled up with a book in their shared futon or hiding out in Central Park. Rod was in the music program at NYU, so he spent insane hours practicing on the grand piano at the university. When he came home he spent most of his time on the keyboard. Their neighbors received a pleasant surprise when they came to complain of the infernal racket, and instead of Roderich's usual grudging apology, they were met with Liz's raised eyebrow and a, "Well I heard you fucking somebody against the wall last night, and I can tell you that's much harder to sleep by than a little Chopin."

It was almost three whole months before she began to feel claustrophobic and sick. It started with a young couple in the park, hands down each other's pants, mouths slipping and smacking together in a way that made Liz want to vomit. She knew what was going on, could practically see the metaphysical tug-of-war they were fighting when he started unbuttoning her blouse and her apologetic gaze crawled away and became empty.

She had been in that girl's place, and in that boy's place, baring her ribs and their cache, the hidden beating heart; baring others'; tired and sad and resigned, together, sad people getting together and trying to forget it.

"I think I ought to start looking for a job," she told Rod that night.

"I've told you a thousand times, Liz," he said, searching for a condom, "my parents pay for the apartment. And they give me an allowance for food. There is really no reason for you to get a job."

"I can't just stay here and mooch off you forever."

"Why not?" he asked playfully.

"Ew, stop trying to be cute."

She already knew that he wasn't, and his face only confirmed that. He was completely serious about wanting her to stay forever, and was too afraid to admit it. It hurt Liz to know that she was hurting him, but it also meant that she was right: it was time to leave.

She stared at the water-stained, peeling ceiling above his shoulders as he called her name and "baby" and "girl," mouth touching her naked arms and breasts. She pretended her shudders of revulsion were ones of pleasure. She liked Rod; he was one of the nicest friends she'd ever dared to make, but they were using each other, so obviously they were using each other, that she just couldn't hold in her disgust anymore.

Is this what sex is always like? she had to wonder. Is this what it always means? Two tired people engaging in that one tired act, distracting and desecrating each other, themselves, killing and dying slowly, or that's what it felt like anyway. People she saw on the sidewalk, in the street, the Laundromat, all of them, victims of this weird dispassionate passion, this compulsion to take off another's clothes and pretend to give them something while only taking for yourself, and it hurts because you want to give, but you can't, you just can't.

She lay awake for a long time that night, as she usually did, pretending that Rod hadn't said those terrible words and wondering what was the fastest way to get out of this mess. And it came to her: same way as before.

***...***

She cycled through her high school contacts, or at least the ones who had moved away from home. Alfred and Ivan were the best; they'd both somehow managed to get into MIT ("Shit, Alfred, I always took you for a lunatic," she'd admitted, to which he replied, "Yeah, but a brilliant one," and Ivan had smiled sweetly with, "Really? Your Analysis grade suggests to me otherwise"). They were living together on campus and were happy to buy a little futon for her to sleep on.

"I won't stay long," she swore to the two of them.

"Stay as long as you need," Alfred smiled, but she could tell he was one of the few who didn't actually mean it. Neither he nor Ivan ever propositioned her; if they had, she would have accepted. But they seemed content to study and bicker with each other late into the night. She started to wonder if maybe her presence was interrupting something.

One of their hallmates noticed that she was there a lot more often than the guest sign-in sheet would suggest. He offered to forget about it with a sweet, suggestive smile on his face. She made sure that he did, willingly if not enthusiastically. It was obvious that Alfred and Ivan disapproved, so she started calling other friends. And on she went.

***...***

"Hey!" Liz pasted on her brightest and most charming smile. "Not to be a weirdo or anything, but I noticed that you were just cursing in German. You a native speaker?"

The man laughed and took a pull from his beer. "Nope, but I took Elementary German in college. Why? Are you from Germany?"

"No, but my parents were from Hungary. Northwest, so they had to speak German, too. They taught me all the important words."

"Ah, yes. The curses." He grinned, and while it was a little friendlier, a little less toothy than she would have liked, he was a handsome guy. "I'm David."

"Elizaveta."

"That's a pretty name. Let me buy you a drink, Elizaveta."

He forgot it later that night, when they were in bed together, but she didn't take it personally. "I'm going to take a shower," he told her afterwards. "Church in the morning." The excuse was so ridiculous that it was obviously meant to chase her away, but Liz had nowhere to go and little shame left.

When he got out of the shower, his "Oh, you're still here" confirmed her suspicions.

"I thought I might go with you. We could go out to lunch after."

"This was…this was a one-night thing. I'm sorry. If you need money, I can—"

"No, that's okay. I should be going." Give even an inch, she reminded herself at the bar that night. Take their money just one time, and you're a whore forever. She very carefully convinced herself that accepting a roof and a meal was very different from accepting actual money for sex. It was a fine line she walked, and a fine line she made the men walk, that between the gentleman and the john. It only got finer as she grew more desperate.

Some days she thought about David and his excuse, I have to go visit God in the morning, and she wondered what it meant, that word, God, and god, when they touched her some nights it made her want to scream, and she'd never been ashamed of sex until she really needed it.

"It isn't wrong," she insisted to a fellow barfly. The girl's name was Madeline, and she was aloofly, shyly beautiful in a way that Liz never could have pulled off. Their hair was of a length, but Madeline's was paler and curlier. Her eyes were a piercing dark blue behind a pair of large, round glasses. "I just don't want to get stuck in it forever, you know? I don't want it to become my living."

Madeline nodded. "I understand what you mean." She signaled the bartender for another two drinks and murmured, "I really hate Sundays." Liz had noticed a similar pattern; bars were most sparsely populated this night, possibly from piety or possibly because people had work in the morning.

"You need a place to stay?"

"Yeah."

"I'm getting kicked out of my apartment next week, but you're welcome to crash 'til then."

***...***

Summer had arrived again when Elizaveta went back home. It was almost two years after she'd decided to drop out of high school, one-and-a-half since her parents had sent her to New York. She had lived in six different cities, with eight men and one woman for an extended period of time (not counting the numerous quickie affairs that each lasted between one night and two weeks). She owned three dresses, one pair of heels, one pair of flip-flops, two pairs of jeans, four ratty t-shirts, a makeup kit, a hemp anklet, and a dark blue duffel bag. Her boyfriend of the time paid for her bus ticket.

When she knocked on his door, Ludwig stared at her for a full minute before collecting himself and letting her in.

"Would you like any refreshments," he told her with cold iron politeness.

"No thank you." She shifted uncomfortably on the red sofa. "I don't mean to impose. I only wondered when Gilbert would be back."

"He is with Antonio at the moment. I texted him, but he has yet to respond."

"Ah…well, I should be going. I only…"

She was halfway out of her seat when they heard the front door open. Whoever it was (of course it was Gilbert, but Liz prayed otherwise anyway) did not immediately pass through the foyer, but remained apparently frozen by the door for a few seconds. Finally, footsteps to the living room. He stopped abruptly when he caught sight of her, and she froze beneath his gaze.

Ludwig quietly left the room. "Elizaveta." Gilbert said her name like an accident, like it had fallen out of his open mouth. Liz approached him on shaking legs and endured his shaking arm around her waist.

"Been a long time."

"What, no name-calling?" His laughter was harsh and flung outwards like a weapon, like old times. "Two whole years and you don't even give me the courtesy of your best shot."

Things have changed caught in her throat, so she just smiled up at him shyly. But she kept thinking it, over and over again, seeing the new linoleum in the kitchen, the new dishes in the cabinet, and the new soft glances he kept throwing at her when he thought she couldn't see. Things have changed, Gilbert, like her voice and her hands and the ends of her hair and the lines in her palms, things had been untied and slipped away from her, her roots were ripped away from her, they had drifted away from her, the petals of an unripe flower plucked too soon.

At dinner she ate from the new dishes and didn't mention it at all.

IV.

"It's only for a few weeks."

"Whatever you say."

"Really! I swear. I have friends who expect me to visit them this summer."

"Okay."

"And I don't want my parents to know I'm in town, either. Hey, don't give me that look."

"What look?"

"This look." Liz screwed her mouth to the side and looked down her nose. It was extremely unattractive. I don't want her, Gilbert thought to himself. "I just really don't want them to know I'm around right now, okay?"

"Okay."

Liz inhabited the edges of the house like a ghost. She spent a curious amount of time sleeping, and a curiously small amount of time eating. Gilbert half suspected that she was a figment of his imagination, a true ghost come back to haunt him very shyly. Sometimes he heard singing in the kitchen, and he hovered out of sight knowing that the song would stop as soon as he revealed himself. She the wild animal, she the charming ghost, she the apologetic guest whose very presence was a miracle.

He treated this development with his customary tact and delicacy. "Oi, you've barely come downstairs twice in as many weeks. What the hell is up with you?"

Liz leaned against the guest bedroom doorway. "The fuck should I tell you for?" And though the words were a little of the old Eliza, the tone was soft and unassuming. "Where did your parents get to, anyway?" she asked. "Did you and Ludwig finally murder them?"

"Yup, we buried 'em in the backyard."

She went to the window and peered out. "God, Liz, I was joking."

"I know! I'm not an idiot. I was just…remembering."

She'd cracked the windows open, even though the air conditioning was on, and so the gauzy curtains fluttered in a slight breeze. It stirred the baby curls at her temples, and the sunlight slanted across the bridge of her nose, and I don't want her. "They moved down south when they couldn't take the stairs anymore. But they wanted to finish paying off the loans on this one so they could sell it without the bank's interference, or some weird mortgage thing—I don't know. Both Ludwig and I still use this house anyway, so they're letting us keep it for now."

Liz didn't look up from her examination of the backyard. "That's nice of them."

"We won't tell them you're here. I mean, if that's what you're worried about. And about your parents—"

"No."

"Is that why you—"

"Got any chocolate?"

***...***

Ludwig worked in a plant just outside of town as a mechanical engineer, so he was gone for most of the day. Liz grew bolder in his absence, waking hours before Gilbert and making him coffee when he finally stumbled downstairs.

"Boy, your bedhead looks like a cockatoo," she'd mock, sounding unpleasantly like his mother.

"And your voice sounds like a fuckin' dog whistle. Hush now. Where's coffee?"

He let the coffee grow cold in his mug as he explained his studies. Ludwig had inherited all the math and science know-how; Gilbert had recently declared for political science with a history minor. Though most people loved to mock him for it, Liz only seemed honestly interested.

"Explain the Seven Weeks War again?"

"Liz, in school you were better at history than I was. You know what the Seven Weeks War was about."

"Yeah, so? I want to hear you explain it." He tried to reconcile her defensive tone with her sweet words and failed.

Those months were oddly sweet, he would reflect later. Some wall between them had fallen, and they stood facing each other dumbfounded, threats dying on their lips as soon as they had the power to hurt. It was strange; they'd spent several years taking turns putting themselves at each other's mercy, and each time they'd not been disappointed by the swift administration of justice. But now they tiptoed around each other, mindful of soft spots and weaknesses. Liz seemed constantly uncertain of her place, Can I live with you in this peace that wasn't meant for me? And Gilbert was mindful of her vulnerability, and never said a thing to challenge it, never made her move to shield it.

He heard her voice and saw her face in everything. He was always doing that, had been for thirteen years, but that summer she really was everywhere.

"Mind if I join you?"

Liz was sprawled out on the floor of the spare bedroom, dozing in a puddle of light. Her eyes opened and brimmed with white sunshine as she nodded lazily. He dropped his head next to her belly and listened to its mutters and growls.

Like heaven, he thought, and then I don't want her. If angels were real, one was lying next to him. If angels were real, they could not hope to be one speck more lovely than this. And like heaven, there was nothing to do but lie around being thankful for it.

"God, you're lazy," she slurred, eyes closed. He took the opportunity to memorize the simple washed-out beauty of her face in the sunlight.

"You started it."

They took turns dozing off and watching the other doze off. Once he wriggled up so that their faces were of a level. The next time he woke, her eyes were on his. She watched him for a few moments, then said, "Stop being sappy."

"'M not."

"Yes you are, you big girl. I can hear your sappy thoughts all the way from over here."

All the way from over here? They were inches apart. "You caught me. I was thinking about how you really ought to start waxing your upper lip."

She smiled as her eyes drifted shut. Dazed, staggered, hypnotized. Trickling sun, patterned coffee cups, lazy insults. These were the miracles of that last soft summer, like a childhood dream come true: no parents, no anger, just the two of them sleeping in the sunshine and challenging each other's respective gender identity. All that was missing were the fistfights.

***...***

In late July, Ludwig took Gilbert aside while Liz was in the shower and said, "Her parents know she's here."

Gilbert stared at him for a few seconds, uncomprehending. "How?"

"I told them."

"You what? Why would you—"

"I just saw her parents at the grocery store. The last time they heard from her was two months after they filed the missing persons report. A year ago. They've been worried sick."

"So? That's not your fucking business, I can't believe—"

"It is my business. I live in this house as much as you do. And anyway, I told them that she didn't want to talk to them, but I would try to convince her otherwise. They won't bother her."

"She isn't going to care! She'll leave as soon as she gets wind that they know."

"It's better off this way: you're leaving for school in a few weeks. Please be sensible."

Gilbert had never been sensible a single day in his life, and didn't see any reason to start now. "Don't tell her. She'll run away if you do."

"She's been missing for almost two years. Her parents…"

"Please."

Moments later, a wet-haired Elizaveta tripped lightly down the stairs and regarded the two of them with polite puzzlement. "What's wrong?"

The brothers shared a significant look. Finally Ludwig said, in a tone that completely undermined his words, "Nothing at all."

She looked back and forth between the two and smiled uncomfortably.

***...***

"What have you been doing these past couple years?"

"Nothing. I've told you so a thousand times."

"And I didn't believe you a thousand times. Seriously. You had to have done something. Hey, where are you going? Liz—"

***...***

She came to him in a dream twelve nights in a row, and each time she wrapped her hands around his hipbones and smirked with glittering sloe eyes. Her skin was soft and naked, all but for the hemp anklet, which she scratched up and down his leg. Her hard little bare feet. Her soft breasts and dimples.

She slept with her face pressed into his chest, never breathing or talking, only sleeping. He could see her from above, somehow, in that way that dreams have, and her dark curls fanned out against his pale skin and spilled over the side of the bed.

And then the feeling would come, and he knew he needed to tell her something very important. Half the time he swallowed it and knew—looking down at her sleeping on his chest—that his silence would bring something terrible. But the six times he tried to speak were worse; in each and every instance, she stood up and left before he could say the words. He began to dread the dream, its sense of the whole world going awry, and the way he could only lay there and watch as everything slipped out of his control.

***...***

Her parents showed up at their door on a weekday in August, while Ludwig was at work.

Gilbert and Elizaveta had been lazing in the guest bedroom; occasionally he read bits of his book aloud disparagingly while she picked at the carpet. She rarely gave sign of listening to him, or indeed that she noticed his presence at all, until the doorbell rang.

"I'll get it," Gilbert said, overlapping with her "I'll stay up here."

Luckily he decided to look through the peephole before opening up. He crept back up the stairs as quietly as he could, muttering "Shit shit shit shit shit."

"Gil?" she called loudly. Then, softening her voice as he met her at the bedroom door, "Who is it?" He tried to memorize the lighthearted curiosity on her face, knowing that his next words were about to smash it all to pieces.

The bell rang again, this time accompanied by frantic knocking. "What's wrong?" But her parents saved him the trouble of having to answer.

"Liz, please. We know you're in there."

It was the first time Gilbert had ever seen someone go as white as him, from peach to pale in just two seconds. She pressed her lips together, shoved him aside, and locked herself in the bathroom. She gave no instruction on how she wanted him to handle this, so he decided to do nothing.

"We just want to see you," they called, muffled by the door. "You don't have to come home." They kept pausing between shouts, as though waiting on an answer. "We only want to see you." Pause. "Please." Their thick accents made it sound like pleass. Gilbert remembered eating Goldfish in their kitchen.

Her mother started sobbing at the same time Liz did. He stood frozen on the stairs between the crying women, wanting desperately to escape out the back door but feeling that that would be even worse than hiding a girl away from her sobbing parents.

"What did they do to you?" he asked when she finally emerged from the bathroom. The Hedervarys had stayed for almost thirty minutes, knocking and calling and sobbing. Liz had stayed in the bathroom for five hours.

Instead of giving him the silent treatment and/or punching him, she said very quietly:

"It's not what they did to me. It's what I did to them."

***...***

On the thirteenth night it wasn't a dream. Her feet were cold when she slipped into his bed, and so was the finger she put to his lips. Her arms curled around his bare waist while he vainly tried to think through the fog in his brain. Dark eyes flashed with moonlight. I don't want her, he thought, but even to himself it sounded more like a reminder than a conviction. And then she kissed him on the mouth.

Her body slid over his, thin nightshirt leaving little to the imagination as she pressed into his bare torso. Gilbert could feel her ribs falling into place between the dips in his, and then the kiss deepened before he could think about it too much harder. It was the first time she'd been in his bedroom since they were kids. He distantly heard his comforter thump softly to the floor as her tongue nested in his mouth and her leg came up to bracket his hips. He pulled her face away so he could move his lips down her sweetly rumbling throat. She let slip a happy sigh when he tasted her collarbone and dragged his teeth to her bony shoulder, the tendon between it and the neck, her earlobe. Like a ragdoll, she went limp in surrender.

It was the surrender that shocked him out of his drowsy arousal. "What the hell are you doing?"

"Making out with you." She'd drawn back a little, hair swinging above him and tickling his cheeks. Hers were flushed dark, he could see by the soft light of the moon. He remembered his dreams and tried to think of what needed saying.

"No, I mean what're you doing here."

She sat up on his lower abdomen, and froze when his hands automatically came up to rest on her hips. He nearly apologized before remembering that she was the one who'd crawled into his bed and started sucking his face off. "What am I doing here? Beats the hell out of me." She crawled off him and swung her legs over the edge of the bed.

He sat up quickly. "Wait, Eliza—"

She shook his arm off her elbow. "No, I—just need to leave. That's what I meant to say. I came to say goodbye."

Hell of a goodbye. "Liz, don't be stupid. Just go back to sleep, and in the morning—"

"No. I can't…" Her gaze sought his, and he felt like she was trying to tell him something important. But it was too dark; her eyes were glittering holes in a map of shadows. For a moment he was so frightened of her that he had to lean forward and steal a kiss.

"Well? Is that it? Can I go now?"

No, he wanted to say, but Liz never took kindly to being ordered around. And anyway that seemed a little pathetic, begging her to stay. We never show our weaknesses, they had learned as children, and not even these peaceful summer months had managed to teach them otherwise.

"Let me see you out, at least."

"No, just..." She forced his shoulders down and kissed him gently, for what felt like hours and mere seconds, until he fell asleep. In the morning she was gone.

V.

Elizaveta took up hitchhiking that year, and then swore off it the next after an unfortunate incident with a drunk woman and a baby. That was about the time she started working as a waitress in a greasy spoon outside of Tampa. Florida was pretty hot and really fucking humid. When Roderich invited her in an email to come visit his new apartment, she was almost glad to get back to the city.

"Déjà vu all over again," she said, inspecting the two bedrooms and half-kitchen.

"Bigger than the last one. Don't you think?"

"Yeah," she said, smiling up at him. "It's pretty nice. How long are you keeping it for? I thought you were graduating this spring."

"Yeah, I'm just renting it 'til July."

"And then?"

"Had an audition last week." And then he broke into a grin and started talking about different orchestras who were taking on pianists, and this amazing maestro who had been impressed with his playing, and he had plans for his future beyond "Where will I live next week," and Liz realized that although she'd seen a lot, she hadn't really grown up much these past years.

People her age were already getting married, for fuck's sake, and Elizaveta didn't hold with that sort of nonsense. Roderich had kept up with their friends much better than she had, and they had a good laugh over which ones were married, which ones were expecting children soon. All these people who were still awkward and pimply in her mind's eye, settling down.

A year later when people started asking her about it, she'd grin and say, "I'm too young at heart for that. Too young, period! Twenty-four. My frontal lobes aren't even done developing."

"Didn't you drop out of high school?" the blunt ones asked.

"Yup. Never looked back." But that was a lie. And it was a lie when she told everyone that she never thought about settling down. It wasn't that she wanted to get married and pop out babies or anything gross like that; she just wanted to stop. To stop living from paycheck to paycheck, or, when she wasn't working, to stop preying on lonely men with enough money and enough kindness to lend her a roof to sleep under. She wanted rest.

"Time doesn't just stop,"a certain insufferable dipshit had once told her. "Time never stops." Supposedly there was no such thing as rest, but Liz knew that she would seek it 'til her dying day.

Said certain insufferable dipshit was on her mind a lot in those years, as he'd been for her whole life. Elizaveta was a worldly and cynical woman, and so tried to analyze and dismiss these thoughts. Childhood friendships are fascinating, because there are no taboos and secrets between them, she thought. It's a state of mind that all adults grow out of, and constantly dream of going back to. It was the lifestyle she associated with him that she wanted, not the boy himself.

Even so, she dreamed of him often.

***...***

"What are you thinking about?" Kat asked softly. They were having what they called a Big Girl Sleepover—Kat's very first job interview was in the morning, and she'd called Liz up in desperate need of advice and distraction.

"Remember Gilbert Beilscmidt?"

"Hm. Very vaguely."

How could anybody's memories of that boy be vague? Liz swung her legs a little; they were on Kat's porch swing. The birds living in her hanging spider plant chirped loudly. "I was thinking about him. He was my best friend, you know?"

Kat pulled a face of polite confusion. "Didn't you guys hate each other?"

"Yeah. It was great. Say, how'd you get those birds to move into that? Isn't their nest kinda small?"

In the morning, they rose early together. Liz made coffee and thought of that summer with Gilbert. Kat donned an outfit that she called "business casual," and Liz felt like a teenager. She'd never had an important interview, and she was already twenty-four.

"Well, good luck, Kat! We'll go out to lunch or something when you get back." She opened the door.

"Oh no!" Kat gasped.

A baby bird had fallen from the hanging plant. "Oh no, is it dead…?"

"I'll take care of it," Liz said distantly. "You just go get that job."

She stood on the porch for a long time after Kat left, staring at the probably-dead bird and indulging in some childish fancies of portents and signs. When she tried to sweep it into a dustbin, she had to drop it and go back inside for a few minutes, shivering, choking back a stupid fear.

It was a robin. His eyes weren't open yet, but his little chest rose and fell shallowly. She made a nest for him in a shoebox.

***...***

This time when she knocked on Ludwig's door, she felt more like the girl who used to trade punches with Gilbert than the timid twenty-year-old wash-up who'd wanted to know if she could maybe talk to him.

"Ludwig, where's your brother?"

Ludwig had never really liked her, she knew. It was pretty obvious; that whole summer, he'd begrudged her every meal, every day she spent lazing about on his floor instead of looking for a job. Gilbert had denied it, but Liz knew.

So she expected that he would lie, or just flat out refuse to say. He was a hard man, his gaze steely and disapproving as he took her in, she in her inexpensive clothes, her dirty feet. He had never liked her.

But he told her.

***...***

"The body of Christ."

"Amen." The line moved forward.

"The body of Christ."

"Amen." Again. Liz was next after.

"The body of Christ."

"Amen."

She stood before him, holding out her hands. The priest's face gave nothing away as he murmured, "Get out of here, whore."

"Fuck you."

Gilbert's lips twitched as he pressed the wafer into her palm.

***...***

She didn't speak to him until the following Saturday.

"Bless me father, for I have sinned. It's been my whole life since my last Confession." The small screen between her chamber and the priest's slammed aside, revealing Gilbert's pale complexion and odd eyes. He seemed vaguely amused to see her.

"Jesus Christ, Liz, you're not even Catholic."

"Yes I am! I mean, my parents were. And I've seen The Exorcist."

"Well then, I guess you must be a frickin' expert."

"Sure am. This is the part where I tell my sins, right? You wanna hear about how naughty I've been, Father?"

"Oh, Jesus H. Christ, spare me."

"Maybe you should be the one making confession here, Gil. Taking the Lord's name in vain? In a church? While you're listening to a Confession? The ironies are just piling up. That alone is probably worth, like, forty years in Purgatory." She watched his long fingers fidget with his collar and wondered if it had a technical Catholic name. "Anyway, I came to ask why you became a priest. A priest, Gilbert?"

"I'm only a deacon. And it seemed like a good idea at the time." She did her best are you kidding me look. "Just tell me your sins, whore."

"Okay, then." She straightened in her seat. There he goes, kicking straight for the shins. Now I get to knee him in the crotch. "I was a whore. Literally sold my virtue for money."

She wasn't sure what she was expecting; disbelief, maybe, or insults. Anger was something she hadn't really counted on, though maybe she should have. The glare he directed at her was honestly the most frightening thing she'd ever seen on his face, save sadness. "To who. Give me their names."

It sounded more like, Give me their addresses so I may hunt them down and kill them very slowly. Maybe they taught the art of torture at seminary school: Spanish Inquisition 101. "That's not part of a typical Confession, is it? Anyway, I misspoke. I sold my body for food and shelter, which is better."

"How the fuck is that better? You were—I mean, if you were that desperate, why didn't you—?"

"Why didn't I ask you for help? I did. That's how I showed up on your doorstep. That's how I showed up on Rod's and Alfred's and Ivan's and Kat's and…lord, I can't remember them all. Some of them wanted to have sex with me. So let them."

"Okay." She could practically hear his teeth grinding. "Your penance is to never do that again."

"What, have sex? In that case, maybe I'll become a priest."

"You can't. We're Catholics."

"Y'know, I never did understand that. I can't preach the word of God because I don't have a dick? Like, I've been to Mass before. And I've never seen any of you guys whip it out during the Consecration or whatever."

Gilbert laughed, a little hysterically, his red eyes crinkling. He sounded and looked more like a demon-man than a man of the Lord. "The idea is that Jesus was a man. So the priest has to…I don't know, basically what it boils down to is No Girls Allowed. Because Jesus was a dude."

"Jesus was also the Son of God. Are you the Son of God, Father Beilshcmidt?"

"Could be. But you don't have a dick, so you can't be. You're the Daughter of God, if anything, which is not the same thing."

"Fuck you."

He rubbed at his pale hair and scooted closer to the little window. "Shit, Liz, you know I don't believe in any of this."

"Then why are you arguing with me?"

"Just to fuck with you." That actually made a lot of sense. "And I like playing Devil's Advocate. Or, you know, Angel's Advocate, as the case may be."

"I want to talk to you," she said abruptly.

"We are talking."

"Take me out to dinner."

"I'm a clergyman now."

"So? You aren't allowed to meet up with old friends?"

He rubbed his hair again, looking at his feet. "I'll have to talk to my monsignor."

"Oh my god, you have to ask permission? Being a priest sounds like being in middle school again."

"I'm not a priest yet. I'm just a transitional deacon."

"Can deacons have sex?"

He coughed and blushed. Blushed. "Only if they're permanent deacons. And married."

She fished a receipt out of her purse and wrote down the name of a motel and a room number. "Here. If your daddy gives you permission, come here at seven. I'll only be in town for another night, so it's now or never."

"That's kind of an unfair ultimatum."

"Life isn't fair."

"Oh, fuck that saying. What did you used to call that in high school? Thought-terminating cliché?"

She smiled. "Just making sure you were paying attention."

***...***

To get ready for him, she donned her best dress (a gift from her most recent stay with Katyusha, whose breasts had outgrown it in high school), did her makeup carefully, and tried on her three pairs of shoes before deciding on none at all. The hemp anklet scratched at the top of her foot like spider legs or a ghost's fingers. She brushed her teeth and fretted in front of the mirror for a while, wishing for a book or that she gave two shits about television.

He came knocking at seven-thirty, when she'd begun to worry that he wouldn't. Naturally. She'd given him the upper hand along with her address, so that it was within his power to accept or decline as he fancied. She was to await his decision patiently and uncertainly. But I have other advantages.

Like this, she thought when she opened the door and he raked his eyes up and down her figure. She could almost feel them like a physical presence on her body, and she thought of that night so long ago in his bed…

"So glad you could join me, Father."

"Still a Brother."

"Don't care. Sit down, have some shitty wine."

"I thought I was taking you out to eat?" he called as Liz fetched the cheap plastic glasses. He toed of his shoes and sat cross-legged on the floor. My albino stick-bug, she thought, though he was perhaps less skinny than he had been. Lean, certainly, but with broader shoulders and a hint of muscle around those old bones.

He noticed her perusal and grinned. "Sorry, my body belongs to the Church now."

"Why the fuck." She managed to squeeze out the cork. "Did you do that?"

He held the two glasses as she poured. He was still sitting and she bending down, so he had an excellent view of her cleavage if he cared to exploit it. "Why not? It's actually got great job security. Not many young men are racing to become priests, you know."

"What happened to your political science and history?"

"What indeed. What can anybody do with that? Nothing I wanted to be a part of. So I quit school to go to seminary. Not long after you left, actually." There was a barb somewhere in that last statement, which she chose to ignore.

"You must be a better liar than I remember, to fool all those old priests."

"It ain't hard to fool a fool," he reasoned cheerfully.

"I'll drink to that." They struck their plastic glasses together with a plck sound.

There was a small silence in which Liz readjusted her dress to make sure her underwear wasn't showing. Gilbert examined his wineglass with admirable dedication before asking, "So, what have you been doing these past four years?"

Elizaveta managed to dodge the actual question for a long time, speaking instead of their childhood together and about how old it made her feel. Feeling old was the subject that people their age seemed to talk about the most, though honestly Liz wasn't sure if she agreed herself. Her life was devoid of "grown up" things: she'd never paid rent on an apartment, never paid bills, never owned a house, never had a proper job interview, never filed for a tax return, never even graduated high school. She was in a kind of surreal stasis that involved making friends and taking advantage of their generosity. Sort of a childish thing to do.

"I don't feel old at all," Gilbert argued. "I feel like everyone's expecting me to, but I'm still clueless…one nice thing about the holy life is that everyone just tells you what to do. I don't have to worry about making decisions for myself."

Here was the perfect opening. "Why would you want that? It doesn't sound like you at all. The Gilbert I knew would have told the Church to take Her orders and shove 'em up Her ass."

"Well, I basically am. I'm just being subtle about it."

"That's stupid. You should leave."

"Ha, ha." He glanced at her face. "You're being serious." She said nothing. "C'mon, Liz, what the hell are you talking about?"

"I just think…you're doing the wrong thing. It's the rest of your life, Gil."

"And you think it's your job to tell me what to do with it?"

"Just giving advice," she shrugged innocently.

"And what do you think I should do instead? Since you obviously know so much about what's best for me." This conversation was not going well, Liz realized. She waited for him to rant himself tired, but he was looking at her expectantly. "Well?"

"I think you should leave the Church. Just go get all your shit and go. They can't really stop you, can they? It's not legal for them to chase you down and force you to be some dickless preacher just because they had a ritual—"

"I've been ordained. As far as they're concerned, I'm married to the Church, and they don't recognize divorce. I could leave, if I really wanted to, but I don't. My future is pretty much decided, and I'm okay with that."

"Well I'm not!"

The words fell out of her mouth before she had the chance to think them over properly. For six heartbeats he stared at the flush creeping up her neck. This will not end well. Never should have invited him here, never should have tried to tell him what to do, should have remembered that neither of them took kindly to being told what to do.

He stood up, nearly six feet of long bones cloaked in pale skin, towering over her seated form. "Well, I'm just so sorry to hear that you're taking my choices this personally, Eliza."

She knew she shouldn't let him leave like this. She thought about how important it was that he didn't leave like this, how desperately important it was that she call him back, so she thought up all the things she should say in her head the whole time he was walking out the door.

VI

Gilbert was growing to enjoy his official assignment, which would last at least three years (unless some old father caused major problems by kicking the bucket). He played sidekick to a relatively chill monsignor, in an area that had converted to Catholicism from a more fiery denomination. The typical Franciscan "love thy neighbor and be nice to animals" fare bored the congregation to tears; Gilbert was chosen because he liked to talk about burning infidels, a sentiment much more to their tastes.

The life of a priest, he found, was even more peaceful than he'd feared. Daily Mass began at seven in the morning, and he was required to fast and pray an hour beforehand. Usually he spent that time sleeping in the sacristy. Saturdays and Sundays were a horror, as they had been as a deacon: on Saturdays were weddings and Baptisms and Confessions and evening Mass, on Sundays there were five different Masses to say (though he only need attend three).

"You're unusually popular with the female laypeople," Monsignor Robertson had commented once. He was an uncomfortably straightforward man, especially for a priest (for most of them preferred to pretend to be laypeople in each other's company, tired of putting on the holyman act for the rest of the world). He was also suspicious by nature, or was maybe just resentful of having been sent such an unseasoned yet overly-popular underling.

"I'm young. I'm not completely hideous." I'm not related to them, like the rest of the men in this backwater hellhole.

"Yes, well. I trust you to avoid temptation. Remember your vows."

Shove 'em up your ass, Grandpa. "Of course, Monsignor."

He still exchanged letters and phone calls with his perplexed older brother, who was pretty much determined to misunderstand Gilbert's subtle assurances of complete spiritual apathy. For all his booksmarts and successes, Ludwig could be as dense as lead. Especially in matters of the human heart.

This is something I want for myself, not "The Church," Gilbert wrote once. Being a priest is more like a really easy nine-to-five for me, only I get fed and housed for free. Ludwig didn't get it until it was explicitly spelled out for him, at top volume. "I don't give a flying fuck about the Church, I just want to eat!" This seemed to bring his brother some relief.

"Elizaveta Hedervary still comes around every so often. She told me—"

"Don't care."

He'd married six couples and said the Requiem over six bodies on the Sunday of his sixty-sixth Mass. He decided to give an especially fiery sermon commemorate it, for his own private amusement. When he stood at the doors to the church after Mass, many of the congregation stopped to shake his hand, saying, "What a great sermon, Father. Why, it made me want to get right on home and throw my TV out the window!" Yeah, I bet you'll even consider it for a few seconds before flipping to Real Housewives. "Have no other gods," said an old, ponderous man. "I known that one since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. That's a good one."

"With that kind of attitude, Father Beilschmidt, you could be mistaken for a Church of Christer," the monsignor said, back in the sacristy. His expression was distinctly disapproving.

"That's why I'm so popular here."

"It won't be like this everywhere," he warned. "Most Catholics are more sensible than these converts. There was a nun in the congregation today, did you see her?"

"No. What order?"

"Saint Clare. She asked to meet with you after you'd disrobed. She's waiting in the rectory."

And Gilbert knew, halfway to the priests' house, who this nun was.

"Liked your sermon, Father Beilschmidt."

Her loveliness was barely marred by the black-and-white habit she wore over her hair. A few of her baby curls poked charmingly out from beneath it, at the temple, and Gilbert had to restrain himself from crossing the room just to brush them aside.

"Whatever you say, Sister Hedervary."

"I usually go by Sister Liz." She stepped forward, dimpled smile and dark sparkling eyes, and gave him a spine-crunching hug. He was glad for the pain; it snapped him out of his desire to do something really, really stupid. "So what, are you some kind of Crusader or something? That homily was…I thought you didn't even believe in God."

"These days piety is less important than fighting spirit."

She pulled away, waggling her finger. "He who lives by the sword."

"Ooh, listen to that! The whore preaches to the preacher."

"I'm not a whore anymore," Liz snapped, sounding defensive about it for the first time he'd witnessed. And suddenly their false politeness was gone; Gilbert was pretty relieved, because he'd always hated treating old friends like new acquaintances.

"Why did you become a nun, anyway? For somebody who said it was really fucking stupid to join the clergy, you sure managed to do it pretty fast yourself."

"Well…I thought that if that's the way it's gonna be, then fuck you I'll be a nun."

"You used to be a whore!"

"Everybody loves a redemption story, Gil."

He chewed that one over, before deciding it was more funny than serious. "Okay then. Let's go back to my room. Monsignor's the only other priest here, and he's gotta say the noon Mass now." He led her to the back of the little house. "No chairs, but you can have the bed."

She took it, bouncing a little and then patting the spot beside her. He sat against his better judgment, thinking, Forgive me God, God, and god when she touches me—"Why did you come to visit, anyway?"

"I want you."

Gilbert stared, trying to meet her eyes. She was looking at her feet, still clad in black shoes. Her eyelashes were so long they brushed the tops of her cheekbones. Neither of them said anything for a while, and soon Gilbert began to feel uncomfortable. He was afraid to move his foot, which had fallen asleep.

Finally he joked, "I thought you wanted this to be a redemption story."

"No, I've decided that actually I want to fuck you."

He had to laugh, because if he didn't he was likely to kill one or the other or the both of them. "So you want me now that I'm unavailable? What a pretty little table-turn. When it's blasphemy, you want me."

"The fuck do you care about blasphemy?"

"The fuck do you care about sex? What does sex even mean to someone like you? You've never done it for…"

"What?" She finally looked up from her shoes and glared at him, partly from anger and partly from fear. "Never done it for love?"

And then the word was there, it was actually there and floating around, a collection of molecules from her lungs and shaped to make that word, a physical presence. It was so big it took up the whole room—there wasn't any space for Gilbert and Elizaveta anymore, they'd just become agents of the horrible, singular, collective thing between them, and the tiny part of Gilbert capable of terror was howling bloody murder in the back of his head.

There was nothing to say, really. Anything after that would be a whisper on a scream. Completely ridiculous. So Gilbert kissed her, tenderly enough to scream louder than words ever could.

"I can't stop thinking about you," she admitted, lips halfway on his cheek. "It's stupid and it sounds really dumb, but there it is."

"There it is."

"No, you don't understand," she said, desperation edging her voice. "When you were gone…I couldn't…I felt you, everywhere, I wanted your breath on my neck, and, and stupid-poetic-shit like that, Gilbert, do you know what it's like to want—"

"Yes."

"Oh." She met his eyes. "Oh."

He put one arm around her shoulder, the other around her waist to twist her around into his lap. She sat on his knees, facing him, cheeks flushed, and she said, "I hate it, you touch me and it's like a dam inside of me breaks, and I want everything inside of me to be out, or I want you in, and nothing stops it, I—"

"God, and when you touch me I could squeeze you into me, I could swallow you, I want to, I fall, believing—" He growled it into her ear, and she shivered as she adjusted her black skirt.

"We could do this, you know," she said lowly, urgently. "Old friends, visit every so often on Sundays, when your monsignor has Mass to say, we could do this."

"No," Gilbert sighed, even as he unwrapped her habit. "I know how these things go. Once is too much, and a thousand times is never enough. I don't want you to end up my fucked-up fix."

"Maybe it's an addiction that could work."

"No, it can't."

"Gilbert." She pulled away to look him in the eyes very seriously. He felt years sliding into place, from those innocent days of beating the shit out of each other, to the years he pined for her while they pretended to be enemies, the years spent apart alone—all of them condensed to bring Gilbert and Elizaveta here, in this moment, a priest and a nun undressing each other in the back of a rectory. He'd laugh if he thought Liz would understand. "Gilbert. Please. I can't stop thinking about it."

"Good," Gilbert smiled. "I'm an itch who wants to hang around. Don't scratch."

"It's not like that," she insisted, tugging at his collar. "How the fuck does this thing come off. Oh, there, buttons. It's not like that, it's not like I'm just using you for sex. To get rid of you. That doesn't make sense."

"Maybe you don't realize it," he said, carefully unclasping her cross necklace. "But that's probably what will happen. It'll take over everything. Soon that's all we'll think about when we think of each other. And then it's easier to dismiss as a thing of the body. And we'll get over it. I don't want to get over you."

"Okay, first of all that sounds really dumb, 'I don't want to get over you.' Second, it's not like that. Sex doesn't have to be a weapon."

Gilbert laughed hollowly and nuzzled her neck. "Of course it does. Everything's a weapon in our hands."

"Then let's use it," his Eliza insisted, little spitfire to the last, even though it had been decided minutes ago, longer, the second she walked in, the night she slipped into his bed, before that, the day with the bird.

He thought about the time he climbed into her window and threw his heart at her feet like a grenade. This time it would go off, he knew. This time they'd be standing over it, holding hands and counting for it, braced and ready for the end.