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## be your bible

|| Relationship: Negative Spirit/Larry Trainor, Characters: Negative Spirit // Additional Tags: Religious Imagery

The Spirit watches from the comfortable nest they’ve made within Larry’s lungmeat, watches from the sidelines, the arena bleachers, witnesses on as Larry’s all is taken right out of him by the talons of the Bureau agents. They wave their electric staffs, poke and prod him like some sort of Earth animal—they don’t have animals in the Negative Space and the Spirit pities each Earth creature in captivity, supposes that the comparison isn’t too outlandish on second thought. Both animals and Larry are kept, locked in, locked down. Both animals and the Negative Spirit are kept, locked in, locked down. Both animals and Larry lack a higher self awareness. Both animals and Larry deserve better than what life has given them.

The Spirit isn’t supposed to get this attached to the memories they see in Larry’s mind. No, they have never seen an animal in real life, but there’s a golden retriever in Larry’s mind—Sheryl’s childhood pet, Isabella—and in the dreamscape the Spirit feels the softness of its fur despite lacking the ability to perceive sensation and in the dreamscape the Spirit feels an ache that could hollow out the entire planet and in the dreamscape the Spirit:

touches everything besides Larry, the one forbidden thing. The Spirit pets the dog, tries to feel human as they touch it. Everything is too vivid here, too bright, so realistic for a memory. They can wade through his past like vast rippling oceans when they’re inside his body, and Agent Forsythe is generous enough to allow them both some rest today. They’re getting used to the man that is Captain Larry Trainor, their new home. What do the humans say? Amen.

They leave Isabella behind and turn a corner, floating through the walls a bit as they move. In the next corner they see Larry on the ground — he is freshly eighteen years old here, curled up on the floor, knees to his chest, the position he begins and remains in. They watch as the tears burst from his eyes, each one running down and hitting the wood like grenade explosions all in a pretty fiery line, destroying the path before him. They still don’t understand the reason for this pain; how could love ever be evil? How could love ever go against nature? Nature, they think, is love. In the Negative Space, the Nebula is treated as a friend and thanked for its contribution. Nature, they think, does not discriminate.

“Please,” the younger Larry says, begging at the skies. At first there’s a brief flash, the sense that he’s talking to them, but the Spirit knows better; he’s talking to God. “Make me better.”

How could love ever go against nature? The Spirit thinks of the Larry they know today. He is still so cowardly, still so scared, still just as scared as he was here. He left them there to get tortured when the Spirit tried to stop his torture, Larry always so stubborn. The Spirit thinks of the Larry they know today, and it begins to all make sense, the concept of a forbidden love. The hatred doesn’t factor in, but the tragedy is decipherable: the Spirit could love Larry, if they were staying. The Spirit, so alien to this world, so virulently angry at their circumstances, could love their own prison. Neither of them chose this and neither of them would ever have chosen this. They will make it home one day, so the Spirit will not love Larry; they cannot get attached to something devoted to its own destruction. While he prays to his depression, the fear that has consumed him and left maggots in its wake, the entirety of Larry Trainor gobbled up by his own self-hatred, the Spirit simply prays to Larry.