[ - E l e m e n t a l x C h r o n i c l e s - ]

[One-Shot] - Premier Amour

2008-01-16T15:42:59Z

Title: Premier Amour
Characters: Amilith and Opal
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Romance, Drama
Warnings: malexmale relationship
Words: 1035

It was of Dreams we were made, for our Dreams we live,
It’s only the stars that see us when no one else is there.
We all are looking for something, but we don’t know what,
Blinded by the search, it’s easy to forget what we already have…

“Opal, Opal, for the sake of the Dreamweave, Opal, answer me!”
It was no idea, he had went too far this time. The insight came as a cold rain in January. Amilith sank down to the ground, where it was cold and wet, and dark. It was almost midnight, already three hours since Opal had left the restaurant they had been at in fury. Two hours and fifty minutes since Amilith had went out so search for his sensitive friend. The city was quite now in the late falls, the only sounds came up from the harbor, from beating sails and compact tree that hit the soar in pace with the waves.

Damn, why did he always have to make him angry?

The elf sighed and leaned back against the wall behind him. In all his life, in all their life, it had been the same story over and over again. They always managed to annoy each other, with or without intending to do so. Yet they never learned…

- - - - - -

Seven years old, in school, he played with fire flames. Laughing flares danced over his lean hands. Opal, one year younger, all big, green eyes,
reached for the flames.

“Teach me,” he begged.

Amilith laughed at his blue haired little friend.
“You can’t! You can’t do magic at all, don’t you get that?”

Opal, just as delicate to his features then as now, looked coldly back at him.
“I can too, if you just wanted to teach me!”

Amilith smirked meanly.
“You’re not smart enough, your head is full of star wind.”

The younger boy clenched his teeth.
“I hate you,” he spat, before running away.

- - - - - -

Eight years old, they played in the forest; him, Opal and the purple haired elf girl Dragonfly. Dragonfly was wild and brave and now she tried to make the boys fight her with sticks. Amilith was as bad at swords play as it was probably possible to be. Opal laughed at him and danced around him as a nymph child.

“Coward, bookwork, you’re too slow!”

Amilith was like ever too proud to accept being teased. He launched after his friend with the wooden sword, as hard as he could, and hit Opal’s shoulder. Opal answered this with a cold smile as he gave Amilith a direct blow with his fist, right at the red haired boy’s nose. The magician apprentice looked surprised as the blood started to drip down at his new tunic. Opal let go of the stick, looking anxiously at his older friend.

“I’m… I’m sorry…”

Amilith just looked at him, quietly, before proudly turning and going back to the Dreamer’s Academy.

- - - - -

Thirteen years old at the Academy roof, Opal lay besides him and the silence was more then awkward. Amilith sighed.

“Why do you always have to embarrass us like that?”

Opal smiled croaked and looked up at him.
”Embarrass?”

Amilith sighed again and glared at him.
“You kissed me, right in front of our class!”

Opal laughed dryly.
“In other words it was the public you minded, not the kiss…?”

Amilith almost growled.
“You don’t take ANYTHING serious. Different to you, you freak, I have a
future here!”

Opal stood and looked at him in a way that could have frozen a smaller lake.
“You forget,” he said calmly, “that I’m in the same class as you, chosen because my gifts are equal to yours, only different.”

He leaned in so close that his blue strings of hair touched Amilith own, fire red ones.
“Vain and proud you are, my dear, but you know better. Stop caring about what is suitable if you want to continue being my best friend because I am never going to become… suitable.”

And with that he jumped down at the ground and disappeared.

- - - - - - - -

Sixteen years old, it was midsummer party. Opal had been singing. His voice, smooth as honey, was still in the summer night air and the entire party are was crowded with girls that swooned over him. Amilith did also have some gazes upon him; long, lean and charismatic as he was. Right then he stood in front of a dark haired beauty in the same age as him; her eyes looked like burned coal and her hair like waves from the sea at night.

“Well,” she said, “do you want to dance?”

Amilith was going to answer as he suddenly felt an arm resolutely sneaking up around his waist.
“I’m sorry, beautiful,” a soft voice purred from behind his shoulder, “but he’s mine…”

The young woman blushed as she looked from Opal to Amilith before excusing herself and disappearing out in the crowd.

“Opal,” Amilith felt very tempted to cast a lesser curse over his friend.

Opal laughed still holding his arm possessively around the other.
“I thought we had settled this already, love. The three last dances were mine and now I have sung all night.”

Encouraged by the party spirit he dared to nibble Amilith’s earlobe before letting go and dancing away from his friend’s anger. Amilith sighed, he often did that in Opal’s company, the snowelf did always win in the end anyway…

- - - - -

“Are you going to sit here all night, love?”
Amilith awoke and looked up in surprise. Even after all these long years the childhood friend had barely changed at all; it was the same short, messy, blue hair and the same androgynous punkrocker clothes. And when he smiled it was the same croaked smile; warm and mocking at the same time. Opal smiled even more, as if he could read Amilith thoughts. Maybe he could…?

He reached his friend a hand.
“Come,” he said, “I’m done with being angry for tonight and it looks like you’re too…”

Amilith didn’t answer. It wasn’t needed.

[One-Shot] - Imitation Of Life

2008-01-16T15:19:18Z

Title: Imitation Of Life
Characters: Morne-Miriel Yamagiri, Halieke Yamagiri and Dasherill Tishonake
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Drama, Angst
Warnings: Implied malexmale relationship, mentions of child abuse
Words: 1781

There are a lot of persons who thinks they know Morne, which is quite natural since he’s rather well know; the dark siren of the Gods. But among those I bet only a handful knows anything actual about his life and his past. I did neither, not until I met his sister. We had been travelling together for almost a year by then. Morne hadn’t told me much about his childhood, and I hadn’t asked, figuring he’d tell me if he wanted to.

The first time I met Morne’s sister was a late spring evening at a rundown bar in a smaller town. We had been there for about half an hour as a tall woman with short, black hair, tanned skin, tight leather clothes and a huge two handed sword on her back suddenly came in trough the door. Her arrival had quite an effect on the other guests, which of course Morne’s also had have, but not because of the same reason. It’s not that she isn’t beautiful, Yamagiri Halièké is pretty gorgeous, but still she’s one of the few good looking women I’ve ever met that manages to make men think of them as “fearsome” on the first hand.

She smiled broadly and lifted a hand in greeting before she sat down besides us and called out for beer in a quite un-ladylike manner.

“Hello, lil’brother,” she said, “’s been a while, eh?”

Morne smiled in the corner of his lips.

“Yeah… Three years? Four?”

“Four ‘n a half,” she emptied the mug in one swallow, “but you were damn easy to track down, towns are full of people remembering you’re pretty face, if not more. So, who’s the samurai boy?”

Halièké and I became friends that night, and the Gods know why…

She never told us why she had been looking for her younger brother; it could even have been as simple as sisterly love, only that she wouldn’t even admit this during torture. Hal is a tough girl with very little over for sentimentality. However, she decided to travel with us for some weeks before she left to join the war in the south. She is never staying at the same place for long, maybe she, just like her brother, fears that ghosts of the past will catch up with her if she gave herself time enough to feel.

It was some days after we had joined forces, a new town, a new inn and I and Morne had have another one of our regular quarrels. I don’t even remember what the subject of the fight was, probably something trivial and simple, but it made us go separate ways from the restaurant and I already knew I wouldn’t see Morne more that night.

I think I was swearing; I used to do that a lot more often when I was young, as I walked down yet another filthy street of the old harbour district just to clear my thoughts. However, somewhere in my irritation I felt that I was being observed. Halièké sat with her back leaned against a wall at my left, her gigantic sword carelessly thrown besides her. She looked straight at me with an odd kind of cold calmness in her coal black eyes, probably coming from the iron discipline she has on herself.

“He’s gone again, eh?” It wasn’t a question and she didn’t care waiting for any rhetorical answer, “I think you got ‘im over the edge, boy. He’s not used having people around ‘im for long…”

She lifted an eyebrow and continued.

“I’m surprised your samurai pride agrees to this…”

She looks, talks and acts like a common street thug but her brain is as sharp as the edge of her sword when it comes to the understanding of other people. I asked her about this once and she told me it was all about survival; at a battlefield it helps to be aware of feelings, both your opponents’ and your friends’. Back then I was too young to know that, I still thought it was all about sword skill and discipline, I never forgot her advice, though…

“It doesn’t,” I sat down besides her, “but what does that matter? I’m an outcast anyway...”

“Yeah,” her smirk told me she didn’t for one moment believe this was the only reason, “you know boyo; I think he likes you… a lot.”

I just shrugged at this.

Halièké sighed.

“Listen up now, samurai boy. I don’t know what he’s told you but I do know what he’s not, and trust me; you know nothin’ ‘bout ‘im,” her face turned uncharacteristically serious. “I was eight when Morne was created from the same source as me, which makes ‘im my brother. He was a cute child, actually, friendly and sweet and unaware of just ‘bout everything. The gods and their ‘lil helpers soon took this out of ‘im, though. They told us we were nothin’ but their tools, made only to serve. Than we didn’t have any own life at all.”

She glanced over at me with a strange twinge of pain in her dark eyes.

“They sent us people to be our friends, people we came to trust, so that the bastards could then betray us and hurt us, make us distrust everyone. Others they ordered us to kill. They wanted to break our will down at once, I guess, ‘cause I myself killed for the first time when I was six. Still I had it better than ‘im. See, I was to be the warrior, kind of a freakin’ Galion figure of the Gods’; I still needed some bloody pride to show up. But he, he was to work in the shadows, he wasn’t allowed to own anything; not his honour, not his will, especially not his body,” her lips tightened in anger. “They used to give ‘im to them they were pleased with, fuckin’ generals and priests and such, as a token of gratitude. It started when he was just ‘bout twelve and then it could be three-four times a week. They’d done it to other elemental children before, from other sources, and lots of them took their life, showing themselves bad tools. Morne didn’t, though, he ‘as some damn strong will to live my ‘lil bro. He did as they told ‘im and most of the other kids’ despised ‘im for that. He never cared, kept to himself and maybe to me, and survived. Lots of those bloody bastards they gave ‘im to adored ‘im, it was one of them who gave ‘im those swords of his.”

She took a deep breath as if to calm herself.

“And then he ran away, he was fifteen then I think, after that I know little of what he’s done,” she looked resolutely at me. “But you know, he’s never let anyone else come as close as he’s let you. That’s why I think he’s pretty damn fond of you. And maybe you can save ‘im, boy, maybe not. I failed so I won’t blame you if you do too. Still I’d be glad if you tried.”

Then she stood, took up her sword and left, it would be about half a year before I saw her again.

I started to walk back to the inn, not intending to look for Morne, but I found him anyway. He sat on an empty pack box in an alley not far from where we were staying, smoking and waiting for me.

“You know I talked to Hal?” I asked him, because I saw a strange, almost dangerous gleam in his eyes, as black as his sister’s, “about your past, I mean…”

The corner of his mouth twitched sardonically.

“Yeah,” he said, “eavesdropping always was one of my best subjects,” he took a deep drag from the cigarette, looking directly into the grey stone wall in front of him as if he didn’t saw it. “Then you know most of it, love, because nothing ever changed. I ran away and thought that I was free but I ended up in a brothel in Iamara, and was soon caught up in a game of politics, intrigues, murder and sex that was actually exactly what my masters had created me for.”

He lifted his head and looked at me with eyes full of feelings so mixed that I couldn’t sort them out. There was despair in them, and true sadness, but also a massive anger, blazing like a fire of frozen flames. Even if I was young, I understood some of the war that was burning inside of my raven-haired friend. It was only natural for him to distrust everyone, but stronger than this was his desire to brake free from the Gods and to do that, he might have to act straight against his character. I wasn’t sure of what I was to him, though. I was a chance to flee; that I was aware of, but I didn’t know whether this had something to do with me personally or if I had just been on the right, or more likely wrong, place at the right time. Only a few hours ago I wouldn’t hesitate to say that the last alternative was more probable, but Halièké had given me some first, cautious doubts.

Nevertheless, in that moment I felt a strong wish to step forward, to walk up to him, comfort him, touch him, make anything to take away the loneliness in his eyes. But you just don’t do that to Morne; he has his integrity and he wants to keep it intact. It has changed some by now, I guess, but still not completely. The main problem with him is that he is in fact two different individuals at the same time. At one hand he’s a warrior, an arrogant, cold hearted bastard who would climb over mountains of bodies to reach his goal. At the other hand, he’s a twelve year old boy, scared and lonely, who never managed to go on after having his childhood taken away from him. Of course, there is also a point between these two where the real Morne-Miriel is hiding himself from the world, but by then I had yet to find this point.

“You can still become free,” I heard myself say, “if you stop considering yourself a tool.”

He dropped the cigarette in the street mud and stepped on it to turn out the embers.

“It’s not that easy, Dash, it’s not that easy…” The short moment of displayed weakness was gone and confidence replaced it once more as he smirked at me. “As a substitute for being philosophical, why don’t you treat me a drink, sweet?”

[Drabble] - Break

2008-01-15T12:04:40Z

Title: Break
Characters: Morne-Miriel Yamagiri and Dasherill Tishonake
Rating: PG
Genre: Drama, Angst
Warnings: Implied malexmale relationship, language
Words: 356

Kshirr

A rain of small, ruby red pieces fell to the floor as the wine glass shattered against the wall, small, irregular shards that looked like bloody ice as they reached the carpet. Thousands of them there were, the glass had been the finest, thinnest sort and the stone wall had shown no mercy at all. So it rained wine and glass, blood and ice, and the spots would be impossible to erase from the weaved floor covering. Probably the maids would have to change them as they realized no soap in the world could remove expensive red wine from thick textile. It was so easy after all, if the spots on the carpet were too many you got yourself a new one, one that looked exactly the same. As long as the weaver was alive you could order how many you liked, you could change it every day if you had money enough to pay for it.

It didn’t take long until the door opened, letting in a slightly bewildered Dasherill. The samurai looked at the mess, wordlessly at first, as his slanted eyes narrowed.

“What the hell?”

Morne stood in the middle of the small room, his arm still heightened after the throw. If he even observed the other’s presence, he didn’t let it show.

Annoyed and worried, Dasherill walked up to his black haired lover, turned the smaller man towards him and looked at him with clenched teeth.

“Why did you do it?”

Morne shrugged, meeting the other’s eyes with perfect confidence.

“I felt like watching something break.”

Dasherill’s eyes narrowed even more.

“That’s no reason.”

The elemental raised an eyebrow.

“I don’t remember giving any promise to explain my actions to you, love.”

The last word was stressed, rolling on the black haired man’s tongue like a mockery. It made Dasherill let go of his hold, turn and walk away.

It wasn’t until the sound caused by Dasherill slamming the door had left the walls that Morne finally looked down, biting his lips as he examined the shards with a self ironic smile.

Funny how easy it was to make things break…

[One-Shot] - From The Start

2008-01-15T11:52:06Z

Title: From The Start
Characters: Morne-Miriel Yamagiri and Dasherill Tishonake
Rating: PG
Genre: Drama
Warnings: Implied malexmale relationship, implied prostitution
Words: 890

It was in the beginning of our story, if we have one, that is. Maybe I should say in the beginning of my story, because I was only eighteen. He was older, twenty-four or twenty-five; it’s hard to say since you can’t actually tell when it comes to him.

We had come to a new city this morning, it was not very big, not very small, and it would be forgotten as soon as we left. Morne was leading the way again, walking with the confidence of someone who has complete control. He was dressed like a street-whore; tight, low-cut pants, knee-high boots with ridiculously high heels, a shirt that left everything below the ribs bare and some carefully chosen silver gems in his earlobes, around his neck, pierced into his lower lip and even in his bellybutton. His wavy, black hair was brushed to perfection and his eyes were painted black with coal. Only the swords he carried at his back hinted that he was in fact a warrior and still no one feared him before they saw what he could do with those slim katanas. Men and women alike stopped to watch him with shameless desire as he walked past, and he winked and smiled cockily at them as if he wanted to say “Like what you see? Come and take it!”

I don’t know if I was already in love with him back then, maybe I was even too young to know what the word truly meant. We were just fooling around, neither of us had any claim on the other, no unneeded promises or empty words. But I did know that he was quickly becoming special to me. It was the way he acted, as if he really didn’t care about anything at all. He moved around in the world with grace and swiftness and made everyone fall in love with him. And he rejected them all…

I had seen him flirt shamelessly and frivolous at every bar we ever stopped at, with the bar maids, the costumers, even with the owners if they looked good enough. It was his favorite game and he didn’t intend to lose. He seldom slept with anyone else when I was around, though; I guess that’s his idea of being polite.

We sat down to eat dinner at a rundown restaurant. It was simple, the food was less that mediocre and the air was filled with smoke and dust. Morne lit a cigarette with one of the candles in the nearest candelabra and sucked greedily at it while I ate my serving of pork and watery vegetables; unlike him, I am not able to live on nicotine alone.

We made a strange pair, I guess: the raven haired beauty and the silver haired samurai, clothed in traditional hakama. And even if I was lean and of middle length, Morne probably looks very small in comparison since he’s at least a head shorter than me, and you can easily count his ribs just by looking at his naked back. Cigarettes don’t have much fat in them, or any other nutriments either.

After a moment a young girl walked up to us.

“Uhm,” she said, unsure, “I’m sorry to bother you, sir, but my master wanted me to ask you if you’re offering some kind of services…”

Morne raised an eyebrow, intrigued.

“Please tell your master that it’s cowardly to send a child to ask for such… Here!” he gave the girl a coin, “take care, candy.”

The girl smiled brightly at him.

“Thank you so much, sir, I’ll remember that always!”

Morne chuckled.

“I’m honoured by that, sweet, go back to your master now…”

I looked at the girl as she ran out at the street again; her master must have seen us through the dirty window.

“You never fail to get attention,” I remarked.

“Jealous, dear?” he never dropped the amused smile, looked up at me behind the cigarette he held casually in his left hand.

I snorted.

“Not particularly,” I said, “it would be quite meaningless, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah…” he blew out a cloud of smoke, “quite meaningless…”

“But don’t you get tired of it? About people seeing you like nothing but a whore?”

“But, sweet,” he rested his chin in his hands, still holding the cigarette between two fingers, and smiled softly at me, “I am a whore.”

“Only because you accept to be one.”

He shrugged.

“Why not, I’ve never wanted to be anything else, it’s only others that have wanted me to be something more, something I don’t want to be,” he put out the cigarette against the table. ”Besides, my body had never been my own anyway. The gods created me for a purpose and that purpose means that I, in fact, belong to everyone. If I continue like this, breaking bonds before they are even there, at least I’ll be somewhat free.”

“And you’ll be very lonely.”

“That isn’t so bad…” he stood and looked at me with determination in his black eyes. “Don’t try to change me, Dasherill; you’ll only waste your time.”

He walked off, leaving me there, and I didn’t see him again until next morning. I never asked where he had been and neither did he tell me.

Somehow Morne managed to break my heart before I even loved him.

Intro Post

2008-01-15T11:24:49Z

I decided quite a while ago that if I was going to start making my original writings public I'd do so in a separate journal. I know a lot of people said they didn't mind if I used my own journal for other things than fandom and personal life but I still wanted to have it all collected somewhere. Things tend to get messy and when it comes to my writings I'm kind of a neat freak.

All entries in this journal - so far - are public and open for all and I'd also like to keep it that way. Please pay attention to ratings and warnings. I don't want this journal deleted and neither do I want to make it friends only. My goal is to get this story published one day after all...

As for now I only have one-shots finished but I'm working on the first actual chapter. I'm well aware that the story might be confusing - feel free to ask anything - all questions will be loved.