throbbing light machine

Title: That Sears the Mouth
Pairing: Anne/Diana
Little girls and practice kisses. Not explicit.



It was Diana's idea to practice kissing.

Usually it was Anne who invented their play, and usually Diana was content to trail along in the wake of her flying imagination. "But Anne," she said, "What if, when someone kisses you for true, you do something wrong? I should be so ashamed if I ruined my first kiss. And you haven't kissed anyone before, have you?" Her tone was anxious, and Anne hastened to comfort her.

"No, Diana, I never have. Who'd want to kiss me, anyway?" She tugged ruefully at the end of one of her long red plaits. Diana secretly thought that Anne had the prettiest hair she'd ever seen, but knew that there was nothing she could say to reconcile her friend to it. "But you'll be fine at it, you know you will. Somehow, I doubt you'll need to practice. It does seem horridly unromantic, doesn't it? To think about your first kiss being spoilt because you didn't know what to do."

It was a splendid day in the Dryad's Bubble. The two little girls had been rambling the whole day long, picking berries in the woods along Lover's Lane and looking for wildflowers along the edges of the Haunted Wood. It was August, warm and soft as a father bed, and the days seemed very long and full. At that moment, it should have been coming on to dusk, but it was still as bright as noon, the sunlight streaming merrily around the boles of the beech trees and catching in their jagged leaves.

"Ruby Gillis says that one of her sisters told her about a girl who ruined her fist kiss so badly that her beau walked out on her and never spoke to her again. Oh, Anne, think how awful!" said Diana, pressing her advantage.

But there was no need for it. Anne's fancy had been ignited, and was burning as brightly as all thoughts did that grasped her nimble mind. She sat down decisively on a fallen branch and said, "Truly, Diana, that would be dreadful. First kisses should be...well, perfectly splendid, with the emphasis on the perfectly. But how would one go about practicing? You couldn't kiss a boy for practice!"

"Oh heavens no," said Diana, more than a bit horrified. Kissing boys would not have bothered her in the slightest, but for once Diana Barry was the one with the plan, and she meant to be sure that Anne Shirley went along with it. "No," she said again, trying ever so hard to find the right words, "but I read in a book once"-there, that would catch Anne's attention-" about two girls who were such good friends that they could practice kissing with each other, and not be afraid. And the scene where the heroine kissed her lover, right after the most beautiful proposal, was just thrilling. She did it wonderfully, and they were married the very next day. It was terribly romantic."

Caught out of herself for a moment, Diana wondered if this was what it felt like to be Anne. She could hear the way that her voice was imitating her friend's, picking up all of her italics and adjectives. She knew no other way to say such things, to be the leader of their plays or the creator of their imaginings. Anne had always done that, before. It felt very odd. She felt like she should have been able to hold the sunshine in her hand, or call the trees to dance.

She had thought about how best to kiss Anne for a very long time, lying tucked up in her white-and-pink bedroom full of the sounds of pines and the small frogs down by the pond. Kissing Anne was a very important matter, because she wanted it more than she'd ever wanted anything before. And she needed it to be just right, the way that it would be if the two of them were in a storybook or a fairytale. That night she had baited her hook with more care than ever did any fisherman, because she wanted it to catch painlessly and not tear at her quarry.

She had angled well, and Anne was entirely caught, although Diana couldn't have caught a fish if her life depended on it. "Oh, Diana," the redhead sighed blissfully, "how lovely!" And that was that—she was wholly absorbed by the idea. "Do you think we should practice that way, Diana? I know that I love you enough, though I could not hope that you would love me so."

At that moment, the thrill that passed through Diana could have rivaled any of Anne's, and she had to bury her face in the bunch of now slightly wilted black-eyed susans she had found blooming on the crest of the hill and tucked into her sash hours before. "Oh Anne," she cried, "oh Anne, of course I love you. I've never liked any girl so much as I like you. Why do you think I brought practicing up? But it's awfully nice of you to say that you will." She cut herself off, hoping that she had not let her mouth run away with her. She had seen Anne get into enough scrapes through inattention to know to watch her tongue. But everything seemed to be all right.

"I would do anything for you, Diana, you know that."

But Anne wasn't moving, wasn't taking the lead back, and Diana was terribly bewildered. Anne had agreed; she had not thought any further than that when she had planned things out in her bed the night before. Shyly, she enquired, "How do you think we should start?"

"Well," said Anne, sounding oddly uncertain, "I've never kissed anyone before, but I think that if I did I would do it like this." And she closed the distance between them, awkward and unsteady on her legs as a new foal, and took Diana's face in her hands-Diana noticed that they were very cold, and wondered why-and tilted it a bit, and closed her eyes, and leaned in.

It hurt a bit, Diana reflected. Anne's teeth bumped up against her lips, and she couldn't figure out what she was supposed to be doing with her hands, and their noses were all squished together. After a long and very strange moment, Anne moved back. Diana wasn't sure whether to be heartbroken or extremely relieved that the kiss was over. She noticed wordlessly that the goldenrod in the hollow was even yellower than her daisies, noticed that her shoes were scuffed and dirty and wouldn't her mother be mad, noticed that the sky was going red around the edges, rolling out the red carpet for the sunset.

She didn't know what to do. Anne looked at her, but she didn't say anything. Her face must have spoken for her, though, because Anne gave an affected little laugh and said," I don't seem to be very good at it. I'm glad you suggested we practice, or I would never have recognized this deficiency of mine. But now that I know, I suppose I can work on it."

Hope burst in Diana's mouth. "You want to try again?" The moment after she kicked herself, just a little, for sounding so desperate.

"Yes." Anne's voice was fierce and determined, and it was clear that the iron had entered her soul. "It was no good because I couldn't see where your mouth was, and so our teeth bumped in the wrong way. Were your eyes closed too?" When Diana nodded, Anne said, "Maybe we should try it with our eyes open. The we could at least keep out teeth out of the way."

It was a very good idea, but it seemed to be harder for Anne to lean in when both their eyes were open. Her grey-green eyes were locked with Diana's brown ones, but she wasn't moving at all, and Diana could see that she looked a bit afraid. So Diana leaned in and kissed her.

It was very different, being able to see Anne while they kissed. She never looked away, and neither did her friend. And this time she could feel the softness of Anne's lips, warm and just a bit damp, tasting slightly of the blackberries that they had gathered in Lover's Lane that afternoon. Anne's eyes were greener than she had ever seen them, so green that they were almost blue or violet, and her skin was paler than milk. The light picked up her ruddy hair, drawing a saint's aureole around her braided head. She made a little surprised noise, but it sounded like a good sort of surprisedness, and so Diana didn't pull away. Instead, she tilted her face a bit, getting out of the way of Anne's small freckled nose, and that was even better though the sun was in her eyes. Then, more than a bit afraid of her own daring, she pulled away.

When she dared to look at Anne again, she found herself out of breath all over again. Anne's lips were pinked where she had kissed her, and her starry eyes looked very bright. "I think...I think that was a bit better," Diana said.

Anne nodded, and that wordlessness did more to confirm her feelings than anything else. Diana's heart swelled She, Diana Barry, had made Anne Shirley speechless. She must be doing something right. Taking Anne's spot on the earthed branch, she sank down on to it in perfect, dreamy happiness.

Coming back into her usual self-possession, Anne said, "But that's not at all how they do it in the novels that Mrs. Allan says we're not supposed to read. Don't they open their mouths?"

"I guess so," Diana replied, carried along now by Anne's momentum.

"I wonder if they do it like this?" Anne said, and touched her mouth to Diana's one more time, lips open and parted. That was very odd indeed, until Diana opened her own mouth a bit and felt the sweet moisture of their combined breath. Time stopped. Everything went very sill, very silent. Anne's mouth, Anne's lips, were the only thing worth paying any attention to, somehow. And it was far better than novels or sunbursts or marble halls.

And then the sun went down, sliding under the hills like a small child going willingly to bed. And then Marilla, standing in the orchard, called them in for supper and how far had they wandered that she had to come all the way out there for them to hear her. Anne pulled back with a winsome, mussed-looking sort of smile, touched one pale little finger to Diana's mouth in a fey caress, and then took her hand and pulled her back to the house. They never talked about what had happened, or practiced kissing again. It wasn't that they were not talking of it, just that they never seemed to talk of it. And time slipped on.

Later, when Anne went away to Queen's and then to Redmond, and when Fred started coming round to Orchard Slope after church to pay court, Diana realized that Anne meant something very different by the word "love" than most other people. When she said that she loved Diana she meant it, from the very bottom of her iridescent heart. But she also meant it when she said that she loved Stella Maynard, and Phillipa Gordon, and Roy Gardner. And she meant it even more when she said, or rather didn't say, that she loved Gilbert Blythe. Diana knew which one of them was to have her. And it wasn't Stella or Phil or Roy or any of the others who wanted to have the love that Anne offered to keep. It would be Gilbert who would call her his, and not be merely hers.

She remembered getting Anne's first letter from Queen's, had kept it carefully as she did every other memento of her beloved bosom friend. She had cried such a great deal over it. After only one line of missing Diana, Anne had gone off into raptures about school and work and other girls, and Diana's eyes, made keen by long knowledge, could see a good deal of Gilbert Blythe in it, though his name was never writ there. At the end Anne must have remembered herself, and wrote a fearfully flowery paragraph of love and fidelity to her absent friend. But it hadn't been enough, back then, to make Diana's heart stop aching.

It should have been the other way around. It was always so in the books that Mrs. Allan said they shouldn't read, but Diana had started reading anyway without Anne to fill up her hours. She had read many stories about the sorrows of bosom friends when their girls started flirting with the opposite sex. But she had noticed boys long before Anne did, and she had always been the flirtier of the two. She hadn't lost Anne to a boy, but rather to a host of both girls and boys. Because Anne didn't love the way other people did, and couldn't be expected to love just her.

Diana wasn't really jealous of any of Anne's other friends, Anne's other lovers. She had been, at first, but now she knew that her claim on the imaginative redhead was stronger than theirs. However, she was wildly and passionately jealous of Gilbert Blythe. He never knew it; she worked long and hard to promote his suit with her friend, because if she couldn't have Anne then Gilbert of all the others most deserved her. But she resented him all the same. Anne Shirley had never loved like other people, even though Diana had once been deceived into thinking that she did. That was her own fault, and none of Gilbert's doing. She hadn't known as a small girl that Anne could not only love one girl or boy, any more than she could wish away the color of her hair or the few fair freckles that still clung to her nose and cheekbones.

But Anne had said she loved her first, had kissed her first. And so maybe she was at least second-best, next to Gilbert. She could certainly beat out most of the Kingsport men. Anne had kissed Roy Gardner, she knew, but she didn't think that she'd ever told him that she loved him. Even if she had, there would be no exclusivity to it. Anne simply loved everyone at once, her heart being seemingly big enough to hold on to many love affairs at once.

It wasn't proper, wasn't ordinary, but then again neither was Anne. She had broken her slate on a boy's head and given Diana currant wine instead of raspberry cordial and nearly been drowned while playing Elaine. She was beautiful, though with red hair and freckles and a very slender figure she should have been eclipsed by Diana's vivid, buxom good looks. She published stories and went to college and was all together unlike any other girl in Avonlea. And she had kissed Diana three times, and said that she loved her.

Either way, Diana never stopped loving Anne. And when Fred kissed her for the first time, and then laughingly said that she was awfully good at it and had she been out practicing kissing with other men behind his back, she smiled and said nothing. She really did love Fred an awfully lot, though she had never lain awake in her bed plotting after his kisses.

And when Anne married Gilbert Blythe on a beautiful spring day she smiled as brightly as anyone there and kissed her friend goodbye chastely on the cheek. And when her little baby, her little girl that she had waited so for was laid in her arms, she looked down at her wee white face and named her Anne, after the thing that she loved best in the world. And so, perhaps, they all lived happily ever after.

"Darling, you can't love but one," she sang, bouncing Small Anne Cordelia up and down in her arms. "Darling, you can't love but one." She carried the little baby over to the dressing-table, the one that she had insisted by placed by the open window that looked out on the cherry orchard for this baby, though it had not been set out that way for little Fred. It was mid-morning, and the sunlight was streaming through all aslant. Small Anne fussed a bit as Diana lay her down, and she kept singing, "You can't love but one and look for any fun, oh," while she dressed her daughter in the pretty ginghams and littlest wee puffed sleeves that were all that she allowed to clothe her dear. "Oh darling, you can't love but one."