The Names

He didn't tell her her name for several months. They're of a sort that don't like to name a thing until they know it at least a little, and gettin' to know her is always a lifetime's prospect, no matter what she is.

She grew up with a name that, first and middle run together, sounded like a word for a lying, thieving cheat, and it grated on her from the time she was eight and looked that word up until she got her new real name almost twenty Earth-years later. She's human, far from god-like perfection (whatever that is), but she tries to be a good, honest, decent person... whatever that is. The name he'd been given by the parents who birthed and raised him meant 'the Lord's free one', and hers meant 'feminine lady of Christ', but the homophone that was used so often and so casually as a nickname left her feeling on a human level as if those one would think would know her best never really knew her at all. It was okay, made the time they were to be left behind easier. This lifetime's grand adventures would require traveling lightly in terms of relationships.

He couldn't even remember that original unsuitable name two months after they properly 'met' in this life, though they'd been inseparable whenever he was home from his glamorous high-flyin' job ever since that fated evening. She laughed when he told her haltingly over the phone in the midst of yet another four-hour conversation (that would end as they all did, with her in his bed) that he'd forgotten that horrible name that everyone loved so much, and a month later, when she was living with him, she wandered into the rec room and asked what he thought it should be.

"Peace," he responded without missing a beat. He'd been drawing a symbol for it in the steam on the mirror over the bar, and they thought it suited her this time 'round so they went with it.

She is also on occasion known as 'Peacemaker' or 'Peacekeeper'.

She likes the name - compensates for her lack of it within by keeping it around her - and revels in its inherent power. He didn't call her 'Peaceful' or 'Peaceable', but Peace, which only exists in duality with conflict. She's so good at conflict.

His naming process was more complex and took a circuitous route to what he really is, a Dude. She would say the dude, but she's biased. He came this time wanting nothing more than to be fully and completely, humanly, male. Whatever that means.

And HomoFreakian, well that's a result of a very literal mindset. "One who is human yet oddly different." Aren't we all?

It's been said before, they've had so many names. After a while it's easiest to just call things what they are. Maybe he should've named her 'Chick' in keeping with the theme, but he really wanted some peace in this life. And she wanted nothing less (or more) than a man. Not a pig, nor an asshole, nor a creep, nor a dick, nor any of the other pejorative terms by which people of the male gender are often known, sometimes rightly, but a simple, sainted, loving, kind, strong, enduring man. And while Peace remains a rather fluid and dynamic (read: 'unpredictable and volatile') concept often surprising in its terms, a dude is a dude is a Dude.

But again, never underestimate him. His happy-go-lucky exterior belies what lies beneath: He is and always has been the only one who can tame her beast.

Without the Dude there would be no Peace, and that's how they were named.