Fics like you're always looking at a different beach

Grace had joked, occasionally, that they were a liquid and I was a solid, two completely different states of matter; it was a joke because it was an exaggeration, an overstatement. In reality, Grace had bones and teeth, and I had blood and steam, but we both enjoyed the pretense that we were more different than we were. It reminded us that our new friendship was something rare, something strange and special. Grace called themself a blob and called me a hunk of granite (a great insult that I was saving to use again on Erid), or they called themself a water balloon and called me a little mountain, or themself a puddle and me a pile of rocks: and they tilted at me, the human mouth tilt they called a smile, and that tilt always made me think again, lovingly, about the enormous odds against us ever having met. Stone and water, water and stone. That comparison, even as a joke, never failed to ring a bell deep inside of me. Because I would think about erosion, about the long slow beat of water against rock, and I would think about how the rock was always, in the end, consumed.

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