Take Her Head Upon Your Knee (for ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
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Jan. 5th, 2008 12:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maculategiraffeTitle: Take Her Head Upon Your Knee
Fandom(s): Wonder Girl (Cassandra Sandsmark), Wonder Woman
Spoilers: Up to and including Infinite Crisis
Rated: R for language
Author's Notes: Diverges from canon after the events of Crisis. Title is from Edna St. Vincent Millay's Prayer to Persephone.
Prompt: Here
I can fly. Not just in airplanes, but the real deal: up, up, and away. And yeah, it’s as great as you think. It’s better. There’s nothing like it: the rush, the wind, eyes watering, hair streaming. You’re not weightless; it’s just that all your weight is forward, like falling with all your strength, falling exactly to anywhere you want to be. Or to nowhere.
So sitting sedately in Diana’s little glass plane, watching the clouds through the clear walls, is a really special kind of torture. I guess anybody with a window seat and an ounce of imagination probably thinks at some point, Gee, I wish I could be out there, but I’m actually thinking, Gee, I could be out there. It doesn’t seem fair that the wind’s only in the plane’s hair, and I’m trying not to kick the weird glass walls while Diana ignores me and reads Ms.
Instead of kicking, I start counting good reasons to take the glass plane. Diana wants it clear to all the Amazons that I'm there under her auspices, so we have to arrive at the same time, and I’m not good at not wandering off when I’m in midair. Plus, the way my powers were flickering in and out for awhile there, a girl could get used to good old-fashioned airfoil deflection as a means of staying miles up in the air. At least it’s not dependent on a whim from any of the gods of Olympus, who aren't really the people you want in charge of your parachute.
But here I have these shiny new powers from my brother Ares– greater than anything you’ve imagined, he said to me when he made his offer, dangling a hissing and sparkling golden lasso in front of me like I was a kitten. No more depending on daddy dearest, the sperm donor (or whatever gods have instead of normal-person sperm– ichor? Uch) responsible for making me in the first place and making me Wonder Girl in the second, though he was of course way too busy being the king of the gods to follow up with all the women he’d boned and check if they’d produced adorable golden-haired daughters named after doomed prophetesses. Just more fodder for the therapy I’ll probably never get now. I don’t think they have Freudians on Themyscira. They don’t even have penis envy. They use lassos.
Anyway, whatever, I’m over the whole dad thing, mostly. But Ares had to know when he asked me to own him as my brother that he was asking me to deal with a lot. And when I agreed, he gave me more to deal with: power like I'd never had. He pumped it in me till I was sick, and I loved it so much it felt like cheating, like I was juiced: so strong, so fast. I took it– to save the world.
It didn’t work. The world got saved, but I didn’t do it. That was Conner. I couldn’t even save him.
Diana’s flipping pages now, impatient. She only bought the damn magazine because it had her picture on the cover. Okay, so would I, but don’t know why she actually thought she could read it without getting antsy and starting to mutter about privileged little whippersnappers. Any minute now she’s going to go off on her rant about how back in her day fighting for women’s rights meant cutting off your own breast so it didn’t get in the way of your bow arm. Talk about your first-wave feminism.
I should have flown by myself, whatever she said about not showing up uninvited. I can take care of myself. The lasso’s still sizzling beside me on the seat, and I’m sizzling, too, sitting here, when I could be out there, for one last flight. Last, before I kneel down and publically pledge my fealty to Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty– who’s always been a little too close to Ares, god of bloodlust and battle, for their own or anyone else’s comfort. Last before I get the complete powerectomy I have to have if I want to stay on Paradise Island, which to me sounds like either one of the less screamworthy rides at Disney World or an assisted living community in Fort Lauderdale.
Maybe sixteen is a little young to retire. But sixteen’s a little young to watch your boyfriend die saving the world, too. Sixteen is pretty fucking exhausted right now.
Still staring out, I realize I can see land ahead, lush and verdant. Themyscira. Paradise Isle. I wonder if the Amazons golf.
“Diana?” I ask, sounding to my own ears like I’m working up to wheedle an extra bag of peanuts out of the flight attendant.
Her impossibly blue eyes fix on me. She can make you feel like the only person in the world, for a few minutes at least, before she flies away again. And I’m so tired, I just want to climb in her lap and bury my head in her neck. God, I’m so reverting to infancy.
“What is it, Cassie?” she asks in classical Greek, which I’m going to have to speak from now on. We’ve been practicing. Her lips look like she’s been sucking pomegranate seeds. I find myself thinking that while they may not have Freud in the Paradise Public Library, I’m sure they have Sappho.
“Can I fly down?” I ask finally, in clumsy, thick-tongued Greek. “Just–- from here?”
She looks at me again, closes her magazine. She’s thinking. She’s thinking about me. I wish I knew what.
“Don’t land before I do,” she says.
I nod again. “I won’t.”
She fiddles with something invisible– this plane is so fucking ridiculous, I can’t believe she flies in it with a straight face– and an invisible glass door opens. I hear the whoosh, feel it, the rush and suck of air, flattening my skin against my bones. I moan, just a little.
“Cassie, wait--”
But I’m already falling.
Fandom(s): Wonder Girl (Cassandra Sandsmark), Wonder Woman
Spoilers: Up to and including Infinite Crisis
Rated: R for language
Author's Notes: Diverges from canon after the events of Crisis. Title is from Edna St. Vincent Millay's Prayer to Persephone.
Prompt: Here
I can fly. Not just in airplanes, but the real deal: up, up, and away. And yeah, it’s as great as you think. It’s better. There’s nothing like it: the rush, the wind, eyes watering, hair streaming. You’re not weightless; it’s just that all your weight is forward, like falling with all your strength, falling exactly to anywhere you want to be. Or to nowhere.
So sitting sedately in Diana’s little glass plane, watching the clouds through the clear walls, is a really special kind of torture. I guess anybody with a window seat and an ounce of imagination probably thinks at some point, Gee, I wish I could be out there, but I’m actually thinking, Gee, I could be out there. It doesn’t seem fair that the wind’s only in the plane’s hair, and I’m trying not to kick the weird glass walls while Diana ignores me and reads Ms.
Instead of kicking, I start counting good reasons to take the glass plane. Diana wants it clear to all the Amazons that I'm there under her auspices, so we have to arrive at the same time, and I’m not good at not wandering off when I’m in midair. Plus, the way my powers were flickering in and out for awhile there, a girl could get used to good old-fashioned airfoil deflection as a means of staying miles up in the air. At least it’s not dependent on a whim from any of the gods of Olympus, who aren't really the people you want in charge of your parachute.
But here I have these shiny new powers from my brother Ares– greater than anything you’ve imagined, he said to me when he made his offer, dangling a hissing and sparkling golden lasso in front of me like I was a kitten. No more depending on daddy dearest, the sperm donor (or whatever gods have instead of normal-person sperm– ichor? Uch) responsible for making me in the first place and making me Wonder Girl in the second, though he was of course way too busy being the king of the gods to follow up with all the women he’d boned and check if they’d produced adorable golden-haired daughters named after doomed prophetesses. Just more fodder for the therapy I’ll probably never get now. I don’t think they have Freudians on Themyscira. They don’t even have penis envy. They use lassos.
Anyway, whatever, I’m over the whole dad thing, mostly. But Ares had to know when he asked me to own him as my brother that he was asking me to deal with a lot. And when I agreed, he gave me more to deal with: power like I'd never had. He pumped it in me till I was sick, and I loved it so much it felt like cheating, like I was juiced: so strong, so fast. I took it– to save the world.
It didn’t work. The world got saved, but I didn’t do it. That was Conner. I couldn’t even save him.
Diana’s flipping pages now, impatient. She only bought the damn magazine because it had her picture on the cover. Okay, so would I, but don’t know why she actually thought she could read it without getting antsy and starting to mutter about privileged little whippersnappers. Any minute now she’s going to go off on her rant about how back in her day fighting for women’s rights meant cutting off your own breast so it didn’t get in the way of your bow arm. Talk about your first-wave feminism.
I should have flown by myself, whatever she said about not showing up uninvited. I can take care of myself. The lasso’s still sizzling beside me on the seat, and I’m sizzling, too, sitting here, when I could be out there, for one last flight. Last, before I kneel down and publically pledge my fealty to Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty– who’s always been a little too close to Ares, god of bloodlust and battle, for their own or anyone else’s comfort. Last before I get the complete powerectomy I have to have if I want to stay on Paradise Island, which to me sounds like either one of the less screamworthy rides at Disney World or an assisted living community in Fort Lauderdale.
Maybe sixteen is a little young to retire. But sixteen’s a little young to watch your boyfriend die saving the world, too. Sixteen is pretty fucking exhausted right now.
Still staring out, I realize I can see land ahead, lush and verdant. Themyscira. Paradise Isle. I wonder if the Amazons golf.
“Diana?” I ask, sounding to my own ears like I’m working up to wheedle an extra bag of peanuts out of the flight attendant.
Her impossibly blue eyes fix on me. She can make you feel like the only person in the world, for a few minutes at least, before she flies away again. And I’m so tired, I just want to climb in her lap and bury my head in her neck. God, I’m so reverting to infancy.
“What is it, Cassie?” she asks in classical Greek, which I’m going to have to speak from now on. We’ve been practicing. Her lips look like she’s been sucking pomegranate seeds. I find myself thinking that while they may not have Freud in the Paradise Public Library, I’m sure they have Sappho.
“Can I fly down?” I ask finally, in clumsy, thick-tongued Greek. “Just–- from here?”
She looks at me again, closes her magazine. She’s thinking. She’s thinking about me. I wish I knew what.
“Don’t land before I do,” she says.
I nod again. “I won’t.”
She fiddles with something invisible– this plane is so fucking ridiculous, I can’t believe she flies in it with a straight face– and an invisible glass door opens. I hear the whoosh, feel it, the rush and suck of air, flattening my skin against my bones. I moan, just a little.
“Cassie, wait--”
But I’m already falling.
