In Other Lands

by Sarah Rees Brennan

Elliot sat on the fence bisecting two fields and brooded tragically over his wrongs.

Elliot objected because after an hour in a moving vehicle he would be violently sick. The other kids objected because after an hour in a moving vehicle they would be violently sick of Elliot.

The other had a bright vacant smile that someone, finding it empty, had filled with light.

Elliot was an expert in people being unhappy to see him.

“You are just like I thought you would be from Luke’s letters,” she said. “Come sit by me, Elliot, and tell me how you got Luke to actually learn facts about ancient history.” “Mum!” said Luke.

That was the last straw. He had no pencil, and must scream. “Something’s very wrong,” he announced as Serene and Luke sat down. “You’re not going to die of a chill,” said Luke. “I will give you my cloak if you promise to shut up.” “I may well die of a chill, I refuse to shut up, and I’ll take your cloak,” said Elliot. “But this isn’t about that. Look at these papers.”

Luke drew his sword. The sharp edge glittered in the light of the burning papers, pointed across the desk at the captain. “Don’t touch him.”

Conversations would stop and start, escaping from Elliot’s hands like a balloon in the wind. That was how conversations with his father made him feel: as if he were a little kid, surprised every time at the loss.

“You’re like me. Nobody will ever love you enough to stay.”

He supposed it didn’t matter if someone left because you weren’t good enough or left because you actually drove them away. The result was the same.

Even if you found yourself in a magical story, there were no guarantees that you were the hero, or that you would get the things you dreamed of.

Elliot did not know how to be around a proper family. He might have managed all right at the picnic, but he was meant to stay here for days. They would all realize that he had no idea what to do.

This fragile, beautiful hope was crushed when Luke barreled into the house, calling for his mother and attended by vicious animals.

“It’s okay that it’s—bright,” said Luke. “It means I can find you, when you’re in trouble.”

“Luke will come,” he assured her after a moment. “I know he will. He always comes, and he always protects people. He won’t stop until you’re safe.”

Does it get easier? Elliot thought, looking at her still pale face. Or is it just that you shut doors in your own heart and never open them again for fear of what is behind them?

“This had better be important,” said Luke. “Do you have any idea how embarrassing it is to let down the whole team, in front of everybody, because you whistled and beckoned? I’m not your dog.”

It was so embarrassing. Luke could never know. Elliot decided that he was just going to be Luke’s friend very sneakily.

Elliot put down some of his bags on the big tabletop and knelt down, then gave her a quick kiss on the cheek, near her pink-painted mouth. She smelled like grass and perfume. He hesitated as he did it—he’d never kissed a mother-type person before, and he wasn’t certain that she wasn’t making a joke, that she didn’t really mean him to—but she didn’t seem to be joking. She patted his hair with her heavily ringed hand, and he hoped she had not felt him tremble.

the one time Elliot had felt pleased enough with Luke to award him a pen, Luke kept it like a souvenir rather than ever actually trying to use it.

He did not know how to be grateful enough.

It was just something that Elliot had understood his mother would have wanted him to know about. He had learned all he could, hoping to please her, in the days when he still believed she would come back. But she had never come, and he had never done any of the things he’d read about. He had never believed in much, once he stopped believing in her.

“—cannot believe you would be such a reckless idiot,” he said as they walked through the green hush of the forest. “I mean, I can, because it’s you, but—” “Aw, someone’s cranky!” said Elliot. “Did someone not enjoy sharing a tent with the commander? I think she’s charming, personally.” “Someone is only cranky because someone else is so full of—” Luke broke off, made one of his incomprehensible military gestures that sent cadets and the commander alike scurrying for cover, and with his free hand grabbed Elliot by the back of his tunic and bore him down into the undergrowth.

“Don’t be sorry,” said Elliot. “I’m not sorry. And don’t talk to me about what should be easy. I’ve never had anything be easy in my whole life. I don’t want easy. I wouldn’t know what to do with easy if I had it.”

Every world I know of is messed up.”

in two worlds full of blundering and flaws he was always the one who made the worst mistakes, the one who ruined everything he touched.

There was so much pain in her face that she almost looked like a different person. She almost looked human.

He hated himself for being so pathetic. He wished he could be nobody at all, as long as he could stop being himself and feeling like this.

He’d asked for it, as he had asked to be hit once when he thought she and Luke might be dead.

She said she loved him, and nobody had ever loved him before.

“We’re shown all this stuff we were trained to want, shown the great adventure, and we jump at it like the dazzled fools we are. We’re too young to know any better, to know that we won’t triumph and be heroes, that we won’t be returned to the other world as if no time had passed, that the lies in the stories aren’t about mermaids or unicorns or harpies—the lies are about us. The lies are that we might be good enough, and we might get out. We could fail at everything we try to do here, and we will never be able to go back home. Even if we wanted to.”

All the other students leaned toward Luke, like plants yearning in the direction of the sun.

Later Elliot was to think this was typical of the way his plans usually went. He had not planned at all for what actually happened next: that instead, he got a boyfriend.

Everyone else noticed him. Nobody could help but notice him. He didn’t know how to get people to love him, but he knew how to bang on the door of people’s attention, lean on their bell until they answered in the vain hope he would go away. He knew how to be inescapably irritating. But the one person he had learned it for was the one person it didn’t work on.

He barely existed to his father, insubstantial as the dust in his room, only there because nobody cared he was.

but he was all alone and his own body had become a strange and treacherous thing.

Elliot wanted to shout at him, but he knew better than anybody that you could not fight people into caring about you or being fair to you.

“What did you do to him?” Luke asked, looming over them and eyeing the blood, which was now all over Elliot’s arm and the table, in horror.

Luke yanked him up off the bench by the back of his collar. “Come on, we’re going to the medic.”

“Uh, you, the murderous, man-hating elf girl, and the intense gay kid?” asked the medic. “You’re the weirdo table.”

“You’re not watching,” Luke said crabbily later.

It was not only for Serene. He hated the idea of Luke looking up into the stands and seeing nobody there for him at all.

He could see the dull glint of a crossbow in Serene’s hands. He wasn’t expendable to everybody.

“You can’t just do things like this!” Elliot raged. Luke’s face was not blazing anymore, but shut down as if someone had slammed an iron door on a furnace. “I can,” said Luke. “I did. He hit you. I killed him. That simple.”

“The only thing I don’t understand about my son is you.”

But Elliot didn’t want love to be like that. He loved Serene, and he did not want to catch her in his arms if she stumbled. He wanted to help her to her feet.

And he did not want to be loved as a second choice, as a surrender. He had spent his whole life not being loved at all, and he had thought being loved enough would satisfy him. It would not. He did not want to be loved enough. He wanted to be loved overwhelmingly. He did not wish it had been him who caught Myra, instead of Peter. He did not want to be Serene’s fallback, even though it was Serene. He had never been chosen, so he had never had a chance to know this about himself before now: he wanted to be chosen first.

It would be a long time before anyone chose him first. If anyone ever did.

“Is that your blood?” Elliot demanded, scrambling up. “No,” said Luke. “Don’t worr—”

He meant love: that love could not be given from hand to hand like a parcel, that what had been gold from his father in her hand had turned to ashes in his. He could not say the word love, though, not with her looking at him.