Chapter Text
The first time Sudarat had fallen in love was on the first day of the first semester of her freshman year at the Scholomance. More correctly, Sudarat’s only year at the Scholomance. She fell in love with a huge, terrifying senior with eyes like the night sky and legs that went on forever. A senior who saved her life almost every day for the next six months.
Sudarat had begun to suspect she was gay shortly before she began her freshman year at the Scholomance. It had just been a suspicion: a tug in her gut when she saw a pretty girl in a way she had never felt with a boy. But Galadriel Higgins settled any questions Sudarat might have had about her budding sexuality. When Sudarat first laid eyes on the huge senior, a thousand desires Sudarat couldn’t even begin to put into words twisted into existence in her tiny freshman head.
Sudarat had fallen in love since. In the middle of her second semester she met a girl from America called Leigh and Leigh was the first best friend Sudarat had ever had. Of course, she had in Bangkok but those were friends in a distant sort of way. But Leigh was the first person Sudarat had ever loved in a way that she thought about her every morning when she woke up and every night when she went to sleep. Even after they got out of that terrible year, she would call Leigh every day, adjusting for the fourteen hour time difference like it was a small thing. Leigh would ask her so fondly “How is tomorrow?” And Sudarat would reply without hesitation, “No fun until you get here.”
Of course, she never had kissed Leigh. Sometimes, in school, she had thought there was a hint of something but after they left, with the world situated in between them, they both found such love in their friendship that neither of them could bear to ask the question.
Leigh was the first of the two of them to kiss a girl. A redhead at her mundane school who told Leigh she loved her in the locker room and then ignored her in the hallways. But Sudarat already knew love was cruel. She had known in ever since she had first looked at Galadriel Higgins’ serious face and dark eyes and known she would never do any of the thousand unnamable and unspeakable things Sudarat wanted.
Sudarat had loved a short handful of people since then. Even kissed them. A slight girl named Nay who smoked cigarettes behind the bathrooms at school, a girl with an assymetrical haircut named Chengcheng who lived next door when Sudarat and her aunt Khaing moved back to Shanghai, a glamorous girl named Divya who was a TA at the American college where Sudarat ended up, an intimidating femme named Raya who worked at the tattoo parlor down the road.
And yet, when Sudarat dreamed of eyes, she dreamed of El’s night dark ones. When she thought of beautiful hands, they were El’s elegant ones, tracing a incantation circle around the floor. When she thought of being safe, she imagined El, holding a door open and slinging a killing spell over her head, easy as breathing.
“Maybe” Leigh mused on the phone, “It’s a trauma response. You can’t let go of her because you can’t let go of the horrors of that place.” El had become her in their conversations. A ubiquitous her unequaled to any other hers in their lives. Well. In Sudarat’s life.
But Sudarat never truly expected to see her ever again. Sure, she followed El in the news. It was impossible not to. The exceptional girl had turned into an exceptional young woman. Traveling the world with a rotating cast of friends and family, building enclaves for the wizards of the word. She was a one woman force of justice: a pariah to the enclaves, a hero to the indie wizards. She was estimated to be the strongest wizard in the world, perhaps tied with the dominus of Shanghai and perhaps with her boyfriend Orion Lake.
El was more wizard royalty than the domina of New York. She was the woman who closed the scholomance, the woman who wiped all malificaria off the map, the woman who changed the odds for three generations of wizard children. Maybe more.
And Sudarat was a fair-to-middling wizard with an affinity for water magics and a love of mundane meteorology. Not a once-in-a-generation chosen one with the ability to rend the earth in two.
So when Sudarat saw Galadriel Higgins again in the flesh, six years after the first time she had ever fallen in love, she almost fell off a roof. Sudarat was spending the summer after her sophomore year of college in Wichita, Kansas. The official reason was a meteorology internship at NOAA research station in the center of tornado alley. The unofficial reason was to spend the summer with Leigh Ingleby who was working on her family’s cattle ranch and helping them set up the foundations for their own modest Golden Stone Enclave dreams.
Leigh’s family was big, two sisters who ruled as side-by-side matriarchs, their children, their grandchildren and even a smattering of baby great-grandchildren. But it would have been no where near enclave size had it not been for El’s dreams. Still, by the time Sudarat was going into her junior year of college, the golden stone sutras were spreading across the world like wildfire. Accordingly Sudarat had expected Leigh’s family to learn from the Portland, Oregon commune--incredibly generous with their knowledge and mana. Or maybe from the new enclave in Dallas, Texas where some of Leigh’s cousins had gone to make a little money in the winter season. Or even from Winnipeg, Manitoba which were claiming bigfoot visited their newly minted stone enclave.
So when Sudarat had been up on the roof at Leigh’s house, trying to catch a breeze in the oppressive summer heat, working on sifting through data at her internship, the last thing she had been expecting to hear was a low and smoky voice calling, “Sudarat? Is that you?”
Sudarat had twisted so fast that her laptop fell out of her lap and she reached out to catch it, twisting to the edge of the roof and barely stopping herself, the laptop, and an offending glass of sweet iced tea from toppling over the edge and onto the woman of Sudarat’s dreams.
The glass containing the tea was saved but the tea itself went flying over the edge of the roof, splashing all over the most powerful wizard in the world.
Somehow El managed to look coolly refreshed by the tea, elegant and dangerous. Sudarat wanted to die. And all of her fourteen-year-old desires came back to her in full force. Only now she knew why she wanted Galadriel to lift her bodily, slam her onto a desk and tell her to stay still. It didn’t help to know.
Galadriel waited for a moment, staring up at Sudarat, waiting for her to say something like, hello and probably not like, please slam me up against a wall and use me like a doll, sempai. Sudarat flushed to the roots of her dyed green hair.
“Umm, Galadriel?” The words were so squeaky and anxious Sudarat looked around to make sure the words had come from her and not someone else extremely embarrassed and in love with six foot tall women with the ability to summon monsters.
“Sudarat! Wow! I wasn't sure I'd ever see you again! What are you doing in America?”
Sudarat wasn’t sure she could make it down the stairs without dying and it was a near thing but by the time she got out to the courtyard Granny Marry Ann and Gigi Nel were already talking to El. With great respect, calling her “Miss Higgins” and thanking her with great gravity and telling her how excited they were to start this project with her and learn from her and Sudarat had never seen Granny or Gigi quite as excited or deferential and even that would have been quite enough magic for one morning.
But when El saw her, she wrapped Sudarat in a tight hug. Sudarat almost died again right there. Who was this effusive giantess and where was the surly seventeen year old who doled out kind words like each one cost a year of her life? But also--El Higgins was hugging her--Sudarat Setabutr. And she was trying furiously hard not to notice her head was unfortunately directly at boob level.
She didn’t think she could get any redder but somehow she did, stammering something about how good it was to see El.
“Sudarat was one of my freshman,” She explained to Granny and Gigi, “She was part of a freshman class that inspired me to lure in the mals. A class of baby freshman who couldn't eve cast a light spell.”
Which was untrue and unfair. Sudarat could cast a light spell perfectly well at fourteen.
And then Leigh came out of the house and El recognized her too and there was just shouting and celebrating and everyone was so happy to see El and Granny and Gigi insisted the family all sit down to a feast for lunch and even though it was too hot to eat there was cucumber salad and finger sandwiches and delicate cakes and sizzling fried chicken and buttery collard greens and fountains of sweet iced tea.
Over lunch, El asked about their plans to set up an enclave, how they planned on helping other enclaves, what they were going to do about the cattle and goats and horses on the acres of land around the house. And El asked about Leigh and Sudarat. Leigh did the talking for both of them, even if she was usually the quiet one. Leigh may have been quiet but she was also Sudarat’s truest friend and knew in her heart and soul that she would probably be incapable of human speech for at least 24 hours after being in such close proximity to El’s tits.
After lunch, Leigh had to go do some work in the fields, El and the grown-ups (Sudarat wondered how long it would take for her to start feeling like one of the grown-ups) started in on walking the grounds and looking at the physical space and Sudarat tagged along behind Leigh, not because she needed any help at all but rather because Sudarat expected she would be entirely useless anywhere else.