1
" I’m not for you,” I say desperately. “We are so different. Our lives are a thousand and one worlds apart. It wouldn’t work. And it’s dangerous.”
But his face only brightens. “Then you do feel the same.”
“We are not the same—and that is the whole point! I am not human, Aladdin. Everything that was once human in me was destroyed, and I was forged into something entirely different. I’m not here to help you—I was never here to help you, or any of my masters.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t believe that.”
“It doesn’t matter what you believe,” I say bitterly. “It is what it is, and it has nothing to do with what you want.”
He walks around me, forcing me to face him. “You helped me get away from Darian in the desert. You got me into the palace when you could have let them find out who I really was. You taught me to dance, for sky’s sake! You’ve had a hundred opportunities to trick me and betray me, but you don’t. You’ve helped me when I didn’t wish for it.”
“A chicken doesn’t fly like other birds, but it is still a bird.”
“Zahra!” He spreads his hands, the wind ruffling his hair. “You do care. I see it when you think I’m not looking. "
― Jessica Khoury , The Forbidden Wish
3
" His brothers accepted his fluid nature as something Darian simply was. He had been so all his life; suspended between male and female, one rising, the other ebbing without pattern or reason. The Queen, daughterless and doting, had gladly let her youngest son
wear gowns, bows, and curls far longer than appropriate, until his father had intervened with violent persuasion. At court, he now moved as a man. In private, he never stopped wearing gowns or ribbons when the softer she inside him waxed like the full moon. He allowed her complete rein. In truth, he no longer knew where he ended and she began. They were the same. "
― , Beneath the Layers
