Victoria requested mini-remixes of her work. This is less a remix than a response to her story, Forbidding Mourning. I stole my own title from the Adventures of Sinbad story of the same name. Hey, it fit.

In his hands, he holds paper angels. Slight and fragile and so easily broken, but he remembers paper cuts from before he could destroy farm equipment with a touch. Remembers how much they could hurt, a sharp, sudden pain nothing like the pain of holding Lex's comic books in the hall outside Ryan's empty room.

He thinks these paper angels did more good than he did. More good than he does, and he has never felt so outmatched.

So he goes to Lex, as he has done more and more when he feels like this. Lex is also slight and fragile and easily broken, but Lex has cut him wide open with a single look. Sometimes he needs to know someone can do that, can save him from what his otherness might make of him.

Sometimes, he needs an angel to hold him.

And sometimes he needs paper to cut him to ribbons, so he knows he is at least that human.

~END~