Smoking - Chapter 1
Title:: Smoking
Genre:: Drama
Fandom:: RPS Vam, Villinde, Dugera, Lindunn, others.
Rating:: R
Summary:: A story, reaching back to the beginning like a twisted, curling whisp of smoke from a slow burning fire.
Disclaimer::Most characters are property only of themselves; I own the storyline and the writing. This is a work of ficiton; treat it as such.
Chapter 1
Moving across Helsinki was traumatic for me. At the age of 9, I could think of nothing more outrageous than being forced to leave my school, my house, and my childhood friends to move from the outskirts of the city to the center. I decidedly did not like city kids. They were obnoxious and loud and completely full of themselves. Or so I had been lead to believe.
Upon my arrival at my new school, my prejudice was definitely not disproved.
When I was a kid, I was short, skrawny, and almost painfully shy. My friends were few and very far between; I trusted no one. My parents began to despair of me ever finding my own place in the world when I was at the tender age of 5 and refused point blank to go to pre-school because of all the kids I’d never seen before. Transferring school in the middle of third grade was not much different.
The first day was a diabolical disaster - and the adjective is most definitely not an exaggeration. For me, for my small life, it truly was just that: a desperately diabolical disaster.
I knew the whole thing would end in fiasco when the principal of the school made me wait 10 minutes until after lessons had started before he let me go into the classroom. My parents were watching from next to the door - the escape route my mind was quite hopelessly fixed on - as the principal lead me down the silent, empty hall towards my new hell. When I turned back, begging for some kind of moral support, they had disappeared, and the door was swinging in their wake. I swallowed my cry of fear, apprehension, terror, and bit my lip. I rarely spoke and if I did, it was never to express my own opinion.
I spent the thirty five painful seconds of the principal’s introduction of me to my class staring at my shoes. I could hear the whispers of the rest of the kids, the giggles hidden by hands which failed so tragically as sound-barriers. I could feel 28 pairs of eyes burning into me, and my face went bright red.
“What is it, some kind of tomato on legs?” A voice hissed from the back of the classroom, and sniggers erupted from around it. I didn’t look up. At this point, the principal had only just stopped staring at the very pretty, very young, very bosomy young teacher for long enough to say, “Good morning, Grade Three.” My third grade soul was slowly dying, I was sure. It was slipping away from between my fingers. I was withering under the heat of all those stares, I wouldn’t live through them to tell the tale. These were surely my last moments on earth. I prayed to any God I’d ever heard of in my short 9 years to please, please let the ground open and swallow me whole…
“This is Mikko Lindström. He’ll be joining your class from now on. I trust you will all make him feel very welcome here. Mikko?” He was trying to motion me to sit down but I was paralyzed. I could hear the hisses: “But I thought it was a girl!” “No, he definitely said his name was Mikko.” “But it looks like a girl!”
“Mikko? Would you like to take a seat?” My new third grade teacher’s voice was sweet as honey, it literally oozed into my terrified thoughts and for the first time, I looked up from my shoelaces, and I’m sure the look of terror on my face made her insides veritably melt with third-grade-teacherly compassion. However, despite my deepest wish that she might take pity on me and tell the principal that I should go home and never come back to school again, she directed me to the only vacant seat and told me to sit down and get to know the other boys at my table.
The tables were set up so that four of us poor children were at one table. They’d done it so that the boys were with all boys and the girls were with all girls. And right away, I knew that would be a problem.
“Miss, shouldn’t she sit with the girls over there?” It was the boy sitting across from me who said this, and even though our teacher, Ms. Laukkanen, scolded him severely, it turned my face bright red again, and I bent my head forwards over my desk, casting my eyes downward onto the well-dented wood.
My neighbor was a boy who was so chubby that it was a wonder to me he could lift himself in and out of his own chair. He munched at the end of his pencil all day as if the nutrients in the wood were essential in order to get him through to lunch time. Diagonally across the table from me was a boy with thick glasses and a nose that was so odd it was all I could do to keep myself from staring at it. These two were relatively harmless; in fact, I spent most of the remainder of that year in serious doubt about whether either of them had any kind of clue at all as to what was going on around them.
It was the boy sitting across the table from me who had received the scolding from Ms. Laukkanen after suggesting I sit with the girls. It was he who made my face burn so much it felt like it would spontaneously combust on the spot, he who made me stare at the table for the rest of the day because I was too scared of him to look up. It was the boy sitting across the table from me that would probably be the source of every single problem I had in life from that very day forwards.
He was a year older than us, he boasted proudly - even though I looked like a girl, I was still good enough to brag to. He was a year older than us and he’d been held back the year before because he thought all the work was stupid so he never did it. His hair was brownish-blonde and his eyes were green, and somehow he’d lost a lot more of his puppy fat than any of the rest of the class had. I put it down to his whole year’s head start. He oozed ‘cool.’ He sat there, slouching in his chair, his legs splayed out so that everywhere I put my feet under my desk, I would step on his foot and receive a kick to the shins for it. His short, buzzed hair stuck up slightly, and when he stood up it ensured him a good 5 inches lead over us in height. He wore a battered t-shirt with four masks on it, proclaiming KISS across the top of it. Or perhaps they were actual people’s faces. At the time, I didn’t know. All I knew was that for some odd reason, they were sticking their tongues out… sort of like they were trying to catch raindrops or something. His jeans were too big and they frayed at the bottom. He twirled a pencil around in between his pudgy fingers throughout every minute of every class, and when it wasn’t twirling, it was sticking out from between his teeth, or stuck behind his ear in a way he was convinced looked grown-up.
His name was Ville Valo, and he terrified me.
Just hearing his voice saying my name would make me jump miles high. In fact, just hearing him say anything caught me so off guard that I was even more disorientated and unsure than ever, and began to fumble with everything.
“Hey Mikko! Let me borrow that crayon!” That was all it took for him to get what he wanted. Every. Single. Time.
♠
Mikko had his head on the desk again. He had it buried in his arms and his long, white-blonde hair splayed over the top of them, creating a shimmering kind of fortress. He nuzzled into his arms and wished that he had cameo-colored hair instead. Then maybe people wouldn’t stare at him.
His mom loved his hair. It was like silk, she said as she ran her fingers through it. Golden silk. You know, Mikko, she’d say as she tweaked his cheek, people would pay you lots of money to have your hair. They’d want to touch it and keep it and spin scarves and pillowcases out of it; it’s like golden silk.
Mikko, however, hated his hair. His mom let it grow out long because she said it made him look beautiful.
Mikko didn’t want to look beautiful.
He just wanted to look like a boy. He didn’t want his ruler straight, gold, silky hair. He hated his hair; he wanted hair like the little boys in all the movies had. Brown, kind of short, maybe a bit curly… like Ville’s hair. He wanted hair like Ville.
He hated how he looked. He was skinny, too skinny to be a boy. Boys were supposed to have muscles, baby-fat, something. Sometimes he thought his mom was starving him, but then… he couldn’t remember ever being hungry. So then he thought, well, maybe she just always wanted a girl, maybe that’s why she’s making me look like one.
But then he remembered that his mom always talked about how much she had always wanted a little boy, how he was the love of her life, how if the two of them stuck together they’d make it through because they loved each other and that was all that mattered. It didn’t matter that sometimes, he’d come home from school and she’d be crying over the snack that she was making him. It didn’t matter when he got off of the bus and she was waiting for him in the living room, a black circle around her eye. It didn’t matter when his step-dad came home shouting things and smelling like stale smoke and alcohol. No, none of that stuff mattered, because they had each other and one day - one day, she kept telling him, whispering into his ear after she’d tucked him into bed each night - they would escape, and they’d be together and it’d all be okay.
“Lindström! Wake up!” His teacher was yelling at him. But he wasn’t asleep. He was just hiding. He didn’t like being around other people. They made him nervous. Especially new people. It was a half a year since he moved to the new school; he was in fourth grade now. His teacher was an old man, strict, scary - a harsh change after his sweet, soft teacher from the year before. The whole class was different from the one before, except for one or two people - but even they were no comfort to him. Ville Valo was never a comfort to him.
“Look how long his hair is. He looks even more like a girl. You know what he looks like? He looks like a Barbie-doll. Without boobs.” The whisper was just loud enough so that the whole class could hear it, but their slightly deaf teacher couldn’t. Perfectly planned in order to make Mikko look as much of a fool as possible to as many people as possible.
Ville Valo liked to make fun of him. He liked to take his stuff. He liked to ignore him. And he liked to make his face burn bright red against the gold of his hair.
It had always been like that. Mikko figured it always would be. He figured that he wouldn’t be able to go to the bathroom once without Ville saying, “Hey, Lindström, you might want to pull your pants down now so that no-one thinks a girl’s walking into the boy’s room.” He wouldn’t be able to get a new shirt without Ville telling him how stupid it looked on him. Mikko figured he’d never be able to get a good grade without Ville telling him how much of a geek he was, how much of a mama’s boy he was, how stupid and dumb and pathetic he was.
“Mikko, you weakling, you couldn’t win a fight with a wet noodle.”
Mikko didn’t hate Ville. Mikko didn’t hate anyone - his mom always told him that there may be people worthy of hatred, but that hating was what bad people did and that he was above it. He was too good to hate people. But Ville hated him - he didn’t know why. He ignored it as best he could, but it was thanks to Ville that he had no friends, and sometimes that was hard to forget.
Genre:: Drama
Fandom:: RPS Vam, Villinde, Dugera, Lindunn, others.
Rating:: R
Summary:: A story, reaching back to the beginning like a twisted, curling whisp of smoke from a slow burning fire.
Disclaimer::Most characters are property only of themselves; I own the storyline and the writing. This is a work of ficiton; treat it as such.
Chapter 1
Moving across Helsinki was traumatic for me. At the age of 9, I could think of nothing more outrageous than being forced to leave my school, my house, and my childhood friends to move from the outskirts of the city to the center. I decidedly did not like city kids. They were obnoxious and loud and completely full of themselves. Or so I had been lead to believe.
Upon my arrival at my new school, my prejudice was definitely not disproved.
When I was a kid, I was short, skrawny, and almost painfully shy. My friends were few and very far between; I trusted no one. My parents began to despair of me ever finding my own place in the world when I was at the tender age of 5 and refused point blank to go to pre-school because of all the kids I’d never seen before. Transferring school in the middle of third grade was not much different.
The first day was a diabolical disaster - and the adjective is most definitely not an exaggeration. For me, for my small life, it truly was just that: a desperately diabolical disaster.
I knew the whole thing would end in fiasco when the principal of the school made me wait 10 minutes until after lessons had started before he let me go into the classroom. My parents were watching from next to the door - the escape route my mind was quite hopelessly fixed on - as the principal lead me down the silent, empty hall towards my new hell. When I turned back, begging for some kind of moral support, they had disappeared, and the door was swinging in their wake. I swallowed my cry of fear, apprehension, terror, and bit my lip. I rarely spoke and if I did, it was never to express my own opinion.
I spent the thirty five painful seconds of the principal’s introduction of me to my class staring at my shoes. I could hear the whispers of the rest of the kids, the giggles hidden by hands which failed so tragically as sound-barriers. I could feel 28 pairs of eyes burning into me, and my face went bright red.
“What is it, some kind of tomato on legs?” A voice hissed from the back of the classroom, and sniggers erupted from around it. I didn’t look up. At this point, the principal had only just stopped staring at the very pretty, very young, very bosomy young teacher for long enough to say, “Good morning, Grade Three.” My third grade soul was slowly dying, I was sure. It was slipping away from between my fingers. I was withering under the heat of all those stares, I wouldn’t live through them to tell the tale. These were surely my last moments on earth. I prayed to any God I’d ever heard of in my short 9 years to please, please let the ground open and swallow me whole…
“This is Mikko Lindström. He’ll be joining your class from now on. I trust you will all make him feel very welcome here. Mikko?” He was trying to motion me to sit down but I was paralyzed. I could hear the hisses: “But I thought it was a girl!” “No, he definitely said his name was Mikko.” “But it looks like a girl!”
“Mikko? Would you like to take a seat?” My new third grade teacher’s voice was sweet as honey, it literally oozed into my terrified thoughts and for the first time, I looked up from my shoelaces, and I’m sure the look of terror on my face made her insides veritably melt with third-grade-teacherly compassion. However, despite my deepest wish that she might take pity on me and tell the principal that I should go home and never come back to school again, she directed me to the only vacant seat and told me to sit down and get to know the other boys at my table.
The tables were set up so that four of us poor children were at one table. They’d done it so that the boys were with all boys and the girls were with all girls. And right away, I knew that would be a problem.
“Miss, shouldn’t she sit with the girls over there?” It was the boy sitting across from me who said this, and even though our teacher, Ms. Laukkanen, scolded him severely, it turned my face bright red again, and I bent my head forwards over my desk, casting my eyes downward onto the well-dented wood.
My neighbor was a boy who was so chubby that it was a wonder to me he could lift himself in and out of his own chair. He munched at the end of his pencil all day as if the nutrients in the wood were essential in order to get him through to lunch time. Diagonally across the table from me was a boy with thick glasses and a nose that was so odd it was all I could do to keep myself from staring at it. These two were relatively harmless; in fact, I spent most of the remainder of that year in serious doubt about whether either of them had any kind of clue at all as to what was going on around them.
It was the boy sitting across the table from me who had received the scolding from Ms. Laukkanen after suggesting I sit with the girls. It was he who made my face burn so much it felt like it would spontaneously combust on the spot, he who made me stare at the table for the rest of the day because I was too scared of him to look up. It was the boy sitting across the table from me that would probably be the source of every single problem I had in life from that very day forwards.
He was a year older than us, he boasted proudly - even though I looked like a girl, I was still good enough to brag to. He was a year older than us and he’d been held back the year before because he thought all the work was stupid so he never did it. His hair was brownish-blonde and his eyes were green, and somehow he’d lost a lot more of his puppy fat than any of the rest of the class had. I put it down to his whole year’s head start. He oozed ‘cool.’ He sat there, slouching in his chair, his legs splayed out so that everywhere I put my feet under my desk, I would step on his foot and receive a kick to the shins for it. His short, buzzed hair stuck up slightly, and when he stood up it ensured him a good 5 inches lead over us in height. He wore a battered t-shirt with four masks on it, proclaiming KISS across the top of it. Or perhaps they were actual people’s faces. At the time, I didn’t know. All I knew was that for some odd reason, they were sticking their tongues out… sort of like they were trying to catch raindrops or something. His jeans were too big and they frayed at the bottom. He twirled a pencil around in between his pudgy fingers throughout every minute of every class, and when it wasn’t twirling, it was sticking out from between his teeth, or stuck behind his ear in a way he was convinced looked grown-up.
His name was Ville Valo, and he terrified me.
Just hearing his voice saying my name would make me jump miles high. In fact, just hearing him say anything caught me so off guard that I was even more disorientated and unsure than ever, and began to fumble with everything.
“Hey Mikko! Let me borrow that crayon!” That was all it took for him to get what he wanted. Every. Single. Time.
♠
Mikko had his head on the desk again. He had it buried in his arms and his long, white-blonde hair splayed over the top of them, creating a shimmering kind of fortress. He nuzzled into his arms and wished that he had cameo-colored hair instead. Then maybe people wouldn’t stare at him.
His mom loved his hair. It was like silk, she said as she ran her fingers through it. Golden silk. You know, Mikko, she’d say as she tweaked his cheek, people would pay you lots of money to have your hair. They’d want to touch it and keep it and spin scarves and pillowcases out of it; it’s like golden silk.
Mikko, however, hated his hair. His mom let it grow out long because she said it made him look beautiful.
Mikko didn’t want to look beautiful.
He just wanted to look like a boy. He didn’t want his ruler straight, gold, silky hair. He hated his hair; he wanted hair like the little boys in all the movies had. Brown, kind of short, maybe a bit curly… like Ville’s hair. He wanted hair like Ville.
He hated how he looked. He was skinny, too skinny to be a boy. Boys were supposed to have muscles, baby-fat, something. Sometimes he thought his mom was starving him, but then… he couldn’t remember ever being hungry. So then he thought, well, maybe she just always wanted a girl, maybe that’s why she’s making me look like one.
But then he remembered that his mom always talked about how much she had always wanted a little boy, how he was the love of her life, how if the two of them stuck together they’d make it through because they loved each other and that was all that mattered. It didn’t matter that sometimes, he’d come home from school and she’d be crying over the snack that she was making him. It didn’t matter when he got off of the bus and she was waiting for him in the living room, a black circle around her eye. It didn’t matter when his step-dad came home shouting things and smelling like stale smoke and alcohol. No, none of that stuff mattered, because they had each other and one day - one day, she kept telling him, whispering into his ear after she’d tucked him into bed each night - they would escape, and they’d be together and it’d all be okay.
“Lindström! Wake up!” His teacher was yelling at him. But he wasn’t asleep. He was just hiding. He didn’t like being around other people. They made him nervous. Especially new people. It was a half a year since he moved to the new school; he was in fourth grade now. His teacher was an old man, strict, scary - a harsh change after his sweet, soft teacher from the year before. The whole class was different from the one before, except for one or two people - but even they were no comfort to him. Ville Valo was never a comfort to him.
“Look how long his hair is. He looks even more like a girl. You know what he looks like? He looks like a Barbie-doll. Without boobs.” The whisper was just loud enough so that the whole class could hear it, but their slightly deaf teacher couldn’t. Perfectly planned in order to make Mikko look as much of a fool as possible to as many people as possible.
Ville Valo liked to make fun of him. He liked to take his stuff. He liked to ignore him. And he liked to make his face burn bright red against the gold of his hair.
It had always been like that. Mikko figured it always would be. He figured that he wouldn’t be able to go to the bathroom once without Ville saying, “Hey, Lindström, you might want to pull your pants down now so that no-one thinks a girl’s walking into the boy’s room.” He wouldn’t be able to get a new shirt without Ville telling him how stupid it looked on him. Mikko figured he’d never be able to get a good grade without Ville telling him how much of a geek he was, how much of a mama’s boy he was, how stupid and dumb and pathetic he was.
“Mikko, you weakling, you couldn’t win a fight with a wet noodle.”
Mikko didn’t hate Ville. Mikko didn’t hate anyone - his mom always told him that there may be people worthy of hatred, but that hating was what bad people did and that he was above it. He was too good to hate people. But Ville hated him - he didn’t know why. He ignored it as best he could, but it was thanks to Ville that he had no friends, and sometimes that was hard to forget.