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 Posted: Tue Mar 25, 2025 1:33 pm
It was storming again.
Jaidev warily eyed the sky as he walked up to the door of the townhouse Simon shared with his sister and sister-in-law. Given what he intended, he really hoped Simon was home and Tabitha and her wife weren't. He wasn't exactly looking for an audience for the incredibly personal revelation he was about to share with his....
Whatever he and Simon were. Who even ******** knew. Sticking a label on it felt even more complicated than what he was planning, and that was complex enough. It was risky, he knew, and he'd have to be incredibly careful to keep anyone else from finding out what he'd done.
But it would be worth it, if he could make someone he...cared about...more prepared for what was coming.
Maybe it wouldn't matter. But maybe it would mean everything, and some part of Jaidev that hadn't been strangled by the hopeless bullshit his life had become wanted to try.
There was a flash of lightning. A crack of thunder.
Jaidev brought his hand up and knocked on the door.
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Posted: Tue Mar 25, 2025 2:56 pm
Luckily for Jaidev, Tabitha and Rhonda were not home tonight. Double luckily, Simon was home.
As quickly became audible on the other side of the door, though, a certain four-legged furball was also home. The knock on the door set the aforementioned Borzoi yapping in excitement. Not that Jaidev could see at the moment, but he could easily hear the sounds of the dog spinny-running around right by the door. Benny was not a small Borzoi, easily a hundred pounds of spindly, oddly proportioned fur-curtains and long face. In his excitement, he kept knocking his side into the door, calming down exactly not at all with his barking. At least, not until—
“Benny, please,” Simon groused with an affectionate sigh. He projected his voice enough to be heard on the other side. Without knowing who was there, he wanted them to know that they’d been heard and a human was coming to help them. “Just a second—!”
A pretty quick second, at least. The door opened, revealing one Simon Farkas, currently wearing an old t-shirt from Johns Hopkins and a pair of sweatpants, with his fingers gently curled into the back of Benny’s collar to keep him from trying to fly out the door. For a moment, Simon blinked at his………whatever he and Jaidev were, trying to process the fact that the visitor was here for him when he’d prepared to just sign for some delivery, or explain to someone that Tabitha and Rhonda had gone out for a date night.
At least his face melted into a smile pretty quickly. “Hey,” he said warmly, fondly. “Come on in. I just put some tea on to steep if you’d like some? Or I can get you something else?”
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Posted: Tue Mar 25, 2025 4:56 pm
Ah, yes, the sound of a very excited dog. Jaidev couldn't help but smile, just a little--for all that Benny was a truly ridiculous animal, he couldn't help but like him.
And there was Simon's voice, so at minimum the universe had politely conspired to ensure he was home. Jaidev would take that, and he greeted him with a smile that was definitely distinctly nervous. ********, this was...this was going to be a lot.
"Hey," he said. There was some relief just in seeing him, face to face. "Tea sounds great, I--" He moved to step in, around Simon and Benny. "And hello to you too," he said as he reached out to ruffle Benny's head-fur, which was sort of a distraction from what he'd started to say.
"There's something really important I need to talk to you about, Simon. Are Tabitha or Rhonda around? Or is it just us?"
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Posted: Sun Mar 30, 2025 2:22 am
“It’s just us and Benny tonight,” Simon said without thinking, or feeling any need to pause and think (no thoughts, head as empty as Benny’s while he enjoyed the fur-ruffles). “The weird storms lately have made going out for date night feel sort of……ehhh?” Letting go of Benny’s collar, Simon raised a hand so he could tilt it back and forth in the universal sign of someone refusing to commit one way or another. “So, Tabitha and Rhonda have a backlog of date nights to catch up on. They got dressed up real nice and went to some new place that’s apparently been all over the Tiktok.”
What Rhonda got out of that app, Simon didn’t personally understand. Whenever he’d tried to use it, he had mostly wound up fighting the urge to throw his phone at the wall, or drown it in the washing machine so he’d have to get a whole new one before he could end up hearing so many people confidently spewing anti-vax talking points or other medical misinformation that could and did get people ******** killed. The inconvenience that would’ve created in every other area of Simon’s life was the only reason why he held back from doing that. He might’ve had to go back to keeping a paper planner until he could replace the stupid thing and that sounded impossibly tedious.
Jaidev seemed nervous, though. A certain tightness in the smile. And he wanted to talk about something important, with Tabitha and Rhonda around. Hoping to maybe put Jaidev’s mind at ease, Simon trained that smile on him again. Gently, Simon nudged his shoulder at Jaidev’s as he led the way toward the kitchen, where the tea was steeping. “Whatever important thing is on your mind,” he said as he padded onto the kitchen’s linoleum floor and headed to get down two mugs, “we can talk uninterrupted.”
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Posted: Sun Mar 30, 2025 1:28 pm
"Oh, good. That they're getting their date night, I mean," Jaidev said. He knew he had to sound nervous, but then again, this was...something to be nervous about. Layers to it, really. But one thing at a time. He could deal with realizing he was far more serious about Simon than he'd ever meant to get if they got past the "actually, I'm a snake monster out of some shitty pulp novel" part.
He followed Simon into the kitchen, feeling as much abuzz with nerves as the city had felt recently with the lightning strikes. This felt so...normal, watching Simon pull down a pair of mugs. And he was about to make it so very not.
"Okay, well." He waited until Simon had put the mugs down on the counter, because this was probably a "drop something in shock" kind of revelation, and it was considerate or whatever to try to avoid that. "Let's start with: I'm not human. Not entirely."
And, to punctuate his point, he shed the glamor of Jaidev Vaswani, and right there, in Simon's kitchen, became Captain Nagyagite. Obvious scales, cobra hood, and all.
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Posted: Sun May 04, 2025 1:01 pm
All of this with Jaidev tonight felt……both incredibly normal, and incredibly not, as Simon went about getting the mugs and trying to get the tea ready. On the one hand, this sort of thing was something that most people regularly did with their partners or significant others or situationship persons. Having each other over. Making tea and talking. All of which Simon mostly understood in theory, but at the same time, he’d never really experienced it within his own relationships.
Hard to think you know anything about the course of normal romance when you had somebody like Tod as your most significant ex.
Of all the important things that Simon might have expected to be on Jaidev’s mind, though, watching him turn from his normal self into some kind of human-snake hybrid……definitely fell somewhere toward the bottom of the list. For a long moment, Simon could only blink in silence as he took in all the details, from the scales on Jaidev’s face and elbows, to the underbelly markings that looked like someone had combined a snake’s underbelly with at least an idea of human abdominal and pectoral muscles, to the cobra hood around his neck and the sides of his face. Idly, some part of Simon thought about Genesis 3, but……
Dragging a hand back through his hair, Simon pushed that thought aside. Jaidev’s confession felt too earnest to be some kind of You are not going to die, but God knows that as soon as you eat of the fruit your eyes will be opened and you will be like divine beings who know good and bad manipulation.
“Well, I’m not going to pretend I saw this coming when I absolutely didn’t,” Simon said, considering his words as carefully as he could while also trying to say something, lest Jaidev interpret too much silence as a rejection or condemnation or some other awful thing that Simon didn’t intend. “But……does this explain why we can always only spend so long together? I can’t imagine it’s easy, hiding all of that. Pretending not to think too poorly of pharmaceutical reps is bad enough, but pretending to be fully human seems like an energy-intensive nightmare.”
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Posted: Sun May 04, 2025 1:21 pm
The silence was...better than Jaidev expected. At least it wasn't screaming and throwing things, which was something he had very much prepared for. Also, Simon's surprise sort of confirmed that he wasn't magical and Jai hadn't just made some kind of very dangerous mistake.
And. Well. Getting asked such a specific question...was actually kind of reassuring.
"I....yeah, it is," he said. "I can only hold up the illusion for about three hours a day. The other twenty-one, I look...like this."
He smiled, bitterly. "It's also why I've never invited you to my place. I don't have one. I live in..." He huffed. "It's a long story, but the shortest possible version is that there's several different magical groups having a space turf war all over Destiny City. The one I'm part of has people all over the world, and back in Hyderabad I made the mistake of getting...involved. With one of them. Through a series of acts of incredible assholery, I ended up like this, and they shipped me off to Destiny City because there's at least a few other people here in the same situation as me. They've got...barracks, in a sort of other-dimensional space? So that's where I sleep. Wifi's great for being a weird magical dimension, at least. And we pull a salary and health insurance these days. So it could be a worse gig."
If he was blithe about it, maybe it would sound less ******** awful.
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Posted: Mon May 05, 2025 11:05 pm
If Jaidev expected anything he was saying to sound less awful just because his tone downplayed things, then Simon’s facial expression didn’t want to let him think that was working. While he didn’t look unsympathetic—because everything about this sounded horribly sympathetic, getting sucked into something so young and turned against your will into something that you hadn’t been before—Simon’s furrowed brows and pursed lips did not suggest that he found all of this distinctly horrifying, so much as they openly broadcast that fact. For a moment, there might as well have been a little please hold, buffering!! symbol floating beside his head as he considered everything (and tried to focus on the parts specific to Jaidev, even though several other things felt like they were starting to click in his head—)
“Honestly, giving you a salary and healthcare sounds like the least of what they should do for you after putting you in the situation in the first place,” Simon pointed out, after some consideration and deciding that no, really, he did need to make this point. “Also, I fully accept that I might be wrong but I can’t imagine that the health insurance is entirely useful to you or others in similar situations? To any humans working in your organization, sure, but do they have anyone in-house who can actually help you when you need it?”
Leaving the mugs behind for the moment, Simon moved closer to Jaidev. He didn’t touch Jaidev immediately, but he did hold a hand out toward Jaidev’s face. Hesitating, maybe, but only to let Jaidev decide if he wanted that or not. “Do they really look out for you now? Or is it more of what you had in Hyderabad but a few centimeters to the left?”
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Posted: Mon May 05, 2025 11:46 pm
In the face of Simon's expression, Nagyagite wilted. He wasn't sure what to make of all of it, of the way Simon was looking at him like--
He didn't know. Like all of this was actually bad, the way that Nagyagite knew it was, deep down, and had spent years trying to pretend he didn't, like he'd been gloriously unleashed instead of turned into a monster and sent down a path he couldn't escape.
"There's a medical division," he said, in the way of someone talking around something he knew was a problem, "and I'm sure they're competent." Because they probably were. But it was hard to trust. And it was easier to answer that question than the ones implied in all of the rest of it. Yeah, maybe all of that was true. Maybe he was owed this, considering he'd lost the chance at a normal life. But it wasn't as if he had any other choice. And at least the pay was good.
He gave the tiniest little nod of acknowledgement--he'd let Simon touch him, get a feel for the scales on his face, serpentine and cool in the way snakes often were. "It's better than Hyderabad. Not great, but better. And it's not like anyone here can fix me." He exhaled. "I shouldn't...stay like this for too long. Magical people give off...auras, sort of. And no one's gonna be able to pinpoint exactly where I am, it's not magic GPS, but it might draw attention. Bad attention."
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Posted: Tue May 06, 2025 1:39 am
Underneath his hand, the scales on Jaidev’s face did feel odd? Snake scales, yes, but the way they laid on the contours of a humanoid face made them feel different from how Simon had experienced the feel of snake scales. And the thought of this being something that someone else had done to him—done by exploiting youth and naivete in order to put him in situations where he didn’t have any ability to refuse—that made Simon’s blood boil. For the moment, he kept it tamped down. Kept his caress of Jaidev’s face gentle and any of the outrage that he felt about this contained.
It wasn’t Jaidev’s fault, after all. And maybe he wasn’t a bastion of moral purity (then again, who in this world was?), but that didn’t mean he deserved something like this.… Being stuck in a form that he hadn’t chosen for himself, something that he seemed not to want very much, due to the manipulations of others? Being resigned to life as a version of himself other than whoever he truly wanted to be?
“I don’t believe that,” Simon insisted, brushing his thumb down some of the scales near the apple of Jaidev’s cheek. “Or I guess it would be more accurate to say that I don’t accept that idea. Whatever happened to do this to you……” Sighing softly, he shook his head. “I know that I don’t know anything about whatever magical stuff this all is or isn’t? It’s making a lot of sense out of some more ostensibly inexplicable cases I’ve seen in the ER before, sure—or at least giving me some ideas about them. Like the handful of people lately who’ve come in with reports of getting struck by lightning, but they don’t have lichtenberg figures and the scars fade before they’re ready to leave. But that’s not the same as knowing.
“Still, if you don’t want to be the way you are now, I can’t accept the idea that you can’t escape this somehow. I don’t know how, but……there has got to be a way to help you. Somehow.”
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Posted: Tue May 06, 2025 2:06 am
It had been a long time since Nagyagite had felt a gentle touch. To his face, not the glamor he wore to still look like Jaidev. He let his eyes flutter closed, and let himself relax a little--and tried not to think about how this probably meant he was absolutely atrociously touch-starved, at least when it came to hos more "real" form.
Honestly, he wanted to focus on the part where Simon wasn't freaked out or horrified by him. The part where Simon seemed far more--horrified and angry for him. The part where that made him feel more human than he'd felt in a very, very long time.
"Maybe there's a solution. I haven't heard of it. There aren't many of us, and...I know you can change sides, but I don't know what that means for someone like me. I don't know if it's possible, or if trying would just make things worse." He exhaled. "But I do know about the lightning. Kinda...why I finally decided I wanted to tell you the truth."
That, and realizing how much Simon meant to him, but those were the little details.
"There's something coming, for Earth. Some kind of world-eating monster from beyond the stars. But we--and this is a very inclusive we, all of us magical weirdos of varying stripes--are trying to stop it." He paused. Then, he said, firmly, "we're going to stop it. But you need to be extra careful. These storms aren't natural, and I don't want to guess what might happen if you got hit."
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Posted: Thu May 08, 2025 11:13 pm
Simon nodded, trying to drink in everything that Jaidev was saying about……all of this. If whatever was happening with the weird lightning storms of late had some kind of magical cause. That……okay. Simon needed to square away a lot of things in his brain very fast tonight. Unfortunately, the magical origin of the storms was more theoretical in Simon’s mind than the very practical matter of Jaidev, right here and right now. Jaidev’s cheek in his hand was something real that Simon could mentally latch onto, keep himself grounded as he tried to process the fact that magic was real.
But the storms coming from something other than the normal scientific processes involving electrostatic discharge?
That was something future Simon could unpack.
“I will be,” Simon affirmed, nodding again, this time with the intent of reassuring Jaidev rather than helping himself process the information. “As for Tabitha…… I’ll do as best as I can without telling her and Rhonda everything. Last thing I need is for Tabitha to decide she’s going to take on your entire group single-handed in a bid to rescue you for me with no regard for……anything or how it works.” Something that sounded extremely likely to end badly. But for now, Tabitha was a problem for later. For now, Simon leaned in to kiss the cheek he didn’t currently have in one hand. “It’s like triage, though, right? World-eating monster first, and finding something for you can happen after.”
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