Feel Something

Chapter 21: A Hole in You Remains

Darcy didn't look not Jewish...except for her eerily ice-blue eyes. As a young child, she loved them. She thought they made her unique. Interesting. Her parents always complimented her eyes and told her that being different was a good thing. A beautiful thing.

But as an older child, she started to understand the whispers. Some would doubt her mother's faithfulness. Others would assume what Darcy now knew to be true—that she was adopted. When Darcy asked her parents about all the talk she overheard around school or Synagogue, they told her not to worry. They said her eyes were a gift; a sign that she was blessed and destined for something great.

Her parents always seemed uncomfortable when she brought it up, though, so she did her best to ignore the gossip. For a while, it worked, as no one ever tried to approach her directly about it. Then in fourth grade, when she was cornered by a group of boys after school. They pulled her braids, threw her books in the mud, classic bully stuff. She was used to it, being notably smaller than most of the kids in the community. But that day, one of the bullies struck a chord.

"You know what I heard?" he sneered to his pals as he towered over her menacingly, "I heard your mom and dad aren't even yours. You act like one of us, but there's not a drop of Jewish blood in you, is there?" He pressed a thumb painfully beneath her right eye, "I mean, just look at your eyes. What a freak."

Darcy punched him in the face. He looked shocked at first, but then he punched her right back. She fell to the ground, unconscious, and woke up in the nurse's office with her parents hovering worriedly over her.

She never told them what exactly had happened, but a few days later she asked if she could start wearing glasses, although she didn't actually need them. Eventually, they gave in, assuming it must be some sort of trend, and she had worn them ever since. Her glasses made her feel safe. They were a shield that allowed her to imagine her eyes were a deep brown like those of her parents, or even just a darker, more normal shade of blue. People noticed her eyes less, and eventually, the whispers faded into the shadows.

Darcy had all but forgotten about them until the day her biology-major roommate asked her to do an ancestry test as part of a Genetics project. An ancestry test that, while not successfully connecting her to anyone else in the database, irrefutably proved that her parents were not her parents—which resulted in a very tense Hanukkah that year.

So. She was adopted. It had been several months since that traumatic revelation and Darcy was gradually coming to terms with it. What she was completely unprepared to consider was the fact that she may not even be human to begin with. That piece of information definitely didn't show up on the ancestry test.

"Am I positive that I'm human?" Darcy parroted dumbly, in shock that Loki would even ask such an absurd question, "Yeah, last I checked I'm definitely human! I age, I bleed, I went through puberty—"

"Many other species do those very same things, Darcy," Loki interrupted calmly, "But only a select few possess the power that Asgardians call seidr. Only the few that the people of your planet consider...gods."

"Loki, I'm not a god! You're not a god either, for that matter! There's only one God and I'm pretty sure he doesn't run around flirting with mortal girls and blasting green magic at people."

Loki smiled gently at her retort, "I do not mean 'god' in the way you do, Minn Ijós. I simply mean beings of greater ability, longer life, higher intelligence—"

"Did you just call me stupid?"

"No, I called humans stupid. You, Darcy, are not—"

"BUT I AM HUMAN, DANG IT!" Darcy screamed, closing her eyes and backing away from Loki rapidly, hands pressed tightly against her skull, "Maybe I've just been around you too much and your power is rubbing off on me. Maybe it was the Tesseract. Maybe I'm just a new kind of human, but I'm human!"