FIC: In Athena's Shadow & Indifference & Words Spoken in Haste (SP)
Now a bit of Tevan's back story.
Title: In Athena's shadow
Prompt: 10. Athena
Word Count: 1264
Rating: PG
Original/Fandom: Original - Streetlight People 'verse
Pairings (if any): none
Warnings (Non-Con/Dub-Con/RPF etc): none
Summary: Tevan and Rika meet for the first time.
There was a statue near the beach, thrown there as if a giant had once used it as a plaything and long since abandoned it for something better. As a child, Tevan had liked to visit it. He'd long lost most of his other friends when his angry bursts had become uncomfortable for anyone to deal with. It was easier to play by himself and so Tevan did, most days. Some days he stayed in the cottage with his grandmother, ready to help take care of Grandfather if she needed help with the bedridden man.
He often took his Reader down to sit at the base of the statue, enjoying the little bit of sunlight that streamed in through the clouds that always covered the sun. His grandmother often told stories of a time when the sun had shown all the time, without any clouds to obscure it. She would shake her fist at the sky, her lips thinned with anger. "They did this," she would spit out. "They hurt us all with their rhetoric and lies."
But his grandmother never told stories about the statue. He wondered if she even knew about it. While it wasn't sheltered by anything but the scattering of low rocks, no one ever came to this portion of the beach, even in the warmth of full summer when the waterbirds swirled and dived in the water for the fish that floated just below the surface.
Tevan made up his own stories about the statue. He called her Athena, after his mother. There were stories on his Reader about other Athenas but he didn't think of her as a goddess. He just thought of her as a mother. And so he let her take care of him. She provided a place to lean back against and some shelter from the wind that came off the water. She listened to his stories and provided comfort when he wept. When he tried to hit her, she offered enough resistance that the pain in his fists brought him out of the cloud of rage.
On this day, it also brought him a playmate. The little girl had climbed up so that she was perched on the statue's shoulder, her hand tented over her eyes so that she could see all the way out to the horizon.
"This is my statue," he stated as soon as he realized the threat. It had been a bad couple of days so that both he and his grandmother were haggard and gray from the constant rage that flowed through him. This was not the time to make new friends who would cry and fling accusations at him.
She only smiled down at him. "Would you like to come up? She has two shoulders. One for me and one for you."
The idea sounded appealing. Tevan pushed his Reader into the waistband of his trousers and began to climb before he even realized what he was doing. He paused, one hand securely around stone and the other hanging in space. "I don't think I should," he mumbled.
"What?"
"I don't think I should." This time, he raised his face to her and enunciated every word. It was something he did right before he became swamped with anger. After that, he could barely form words in his brain and they rarely reached his mouth. All he did was screech and growl, becoming nothing but an animal.
"I think there's a mermaid out there." The girl ignored him as she stared intently out over the water. "She's waving to us. Do you see her?"
He couldn't help but turn to see what she was talking about. There was nothing out there that he could see but maybe he was missing something. Instead of climbing up to a better spot, he twisted around further. "I don't-"
A shudder tilted the statue. It was happening more and more as nature grumbled and complained. Grandmother couldn't tell him why it did it but he figured the earth was just as angry as he was and this was the only way it could express itself. The problem, this time, was that he wasn't in a safe spot. Instead of standing on the ground where he could sway with it, he found himself at odds with the motion. Since only one hand was keeping him in place, he had no real chance of staying in place. As the statue stilled, it was Tevan that was the one falling.
His breath came out in a whoosh as he landed heavily on the sand. It was a softer landing than if he'd fallen on the broken pavement of the path but it was still much harder than he'd been expecting.
"Are you okay?" Soft hair fell over his cheek as all light was blotted out of the sky. He had to blink several times before the girl's face came into view. It was a struggle just to breath so he didn't have time to tell her to get off him. Instead, she smoothed her hand over his cheeks, wiping away sand and dirt. Another hand searched over his legs and arms, looking for an injury. When she didn't find anything, she took to shaking him. "Talk to me. Are you broken?"
No one ever used that word around him. Not his grandmother. Not the children that used to be his friends. It held more meaning than this girl intended it to have. "Yes," he wheezed out. "I'm broken."
Her eyes went wide. "Where? Have I hurt you? I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to... and then I couldn't catch you when all the shaking started... and your eyes got sort of blank when I got down and I was scared that you were dead. Please don't die. Please. I'm tired of finding dead bodies."
"I won't die," he explained as he finally got enough breath to string together complete sentences. "I was broken long before I climbed up Athena."
"Athena?"
He could feel himself blushing but the girl moved away to give him room to sit up and he was able to busy himself with straightening his clothing and trying to get rid of the sand that was clinging to his backside. When he was ready, he took a deep breath and met her gaze once again. She looked curious and still a little scared that he was going to break into a thousand little pieces.
"I named the statue Athena. It's where I come to sit and think most days. I named her after," he paused, wondering why he was bringing this up to this particular girl at this particular moment, but it seemed okay to continue so he carried on. "I named her after my mother."
Her mouth made a round O shape. "You have a mother?"
He shook his head slowly, intrigued about the question. "Do you not have a mother?" Everyone he knew had a mother.
"No. At least, I don't think I have a mother. Well, I'm sure I must have one somewhere. I was born, after all. It's something we have common, though. Neither of us have mothers." She held out her hand and, when he didn't immediately reach out his hand to her, she went further still and picked up his hand from where it rested on his leg. A soft glow of peace stole over him, softening out his ragged breathing. "We shall be wonderful friends, you and I."
"Yes," he answered before even considering what she'd said. Yet, in that moment, he meant the word in a way he never had before.
Title: Indifference
Prompt: 14. "The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of beauty is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, but indifference between life and death." -Elie Wiesel
Word Count: 1354
Rating: PG
Original/Fandom: Original - Streetlight People 'verse
Pairings (if any): none
Warnings (Non-Con/Dub-Con/RPF etc): none
Summary: Tevan's grandmother explains some truths to Rika.
The very first time Tevan's grandmother set her eyes on Rika, she seemed to hate the girl. Almost more than she hated her grandson. The way that her lips curled into a grimace of anger and pain made Tevan move the girl slightly behind him, as if he could protect her. It was Rika, in her quiet way, that protected him, though.
She smiled serenely at the woman, just as she had smiled at Tevan when she had first met him. Just as she always smiled, Tevan realized. It wasn't happiness, though. They'd talked during the day enough that he knew she hadn't had much happiness in her life. Less even than he had because at least he had a roof over his head and food to eat. Even the presence of his grandparents was a plus when compared to Rika's life.
"She's my friend," he asserted when his grandmother opened her mouth, probably to demand that she leave. "Her name is Rika and she doesn't have anyone and I think," but he faltered there because he never really got to think when his grandmother was around. She was the only authority in this household. But he pulled himself together and decided that today, he would demand something, for once. Not in anger for the rage was as far away from his thoughts as it ever had been. "I think that she should stay here. With us."
"And what does Rika think of that?" was the quiet question posed to him.
Tevan turned to her, never once having thought what she might think of the suggestion. When she was talking of her life, he just assumed that he would be allowed to make everything better for her. Perhaps she liked living out in the open, able to move from town to town when she was given the chance.
She wasn't looking at him when she answered, though. Instead, her wide eyes were staring at his grandmother as if she recognized something in her that wasn't exactly what she had expected. "I have been many places and met many people. Some prefer that I move on. I'm different, you see."
"She doesn't mind that I'm broken," Tevan announced, as if this was an important piece of information that needed to be shared before anyone came to any conclusions.
"Not broken," she reminded him of their previous conversation with a small smile. "You're just... you don't connect in all the right places."
He turned his triumphant smile back at to his grandmother, astonished to find that there were tears in her eyes. He had never once seen her cry, not even when Grandfather had first started to get sick and it had been scary to have a grown man raging like like Tevan often did. He'd always hoped that he would grow out of the moods but if Grandfather was broken like he was, was there really any hope of that?
"You can tell?" the old woman asked as she swiped at one of her eyes with the back of her hand.
Rika smoothed a hand over the side of Tevan's face and, like a puppy, he leaned into the touch. Before today, he'd hated to be touched but there was something different about the feel of Rika's skin against his. And then there was the whisper inside his head when she did it. Be calm, boy. Listen to my voice and find the calm you need. He remembered hearing his grandmother's voice like that when he was in the deepest pit of the rage but it was so easy to block it out these days. So much easier to just ignore it and carry on with whatever was driving him at the moment.
This voice, though, was much stronger and more insistant. He wanted to bury himself in the sensation of safety, lean into the whispered words so that he'd never fall into the pit of rage.
"He called to me at my first questing. There have been others but I can see him much stronger than I see others."
"How?"
When Rika shook her head, Tevan realized that he had leaned into her so that she was nearly supporting him, even though he was taller than she was and nearly double her weight. "I don't know. It's what I've always known."
"Then you aren't from New City?"
"Nor from Old. I've been to both but I don't like the press of all those people. I like the forest much better."
"You will stay here," Grandmother announced. "But I want to talk to you privately. Tevan, go make sure your grandfather has a full water glass."
He wanted to protest, not only because he wanted to stay with Rika but because he truly hated walking into Grandfather's room without Grandmother around. He never knew what the old man might do, what words he might throw like knives. No matter how hard he tried, Tevan always felt worse when he was around the old man. There was something dark about him that sucked at his soul and called to the rage. But he went because he always obeyed Grandmother, even when he really didn't want to.
But this time was different. There was the faintest of whispers at the back of his conscious mind but so soft that he could barely hear it. The buzz of the words was a comfort, giving him the courage to smile when his grandfather raised his head to watch him walk into the room.
"There's only room for me in her heart," the old man growled, his silvered eyebrows lowering so that his glare looked even more menacing. "She never wanted you here. Never-" But he stopped, just like that. One breath in and he was talking and the next breath out, he was leaning back against his chair with a smile on his face.
Thankful for the reprieve, Tevan filled the water glass and hurried back toward the kitchen. It was where his grandmother took anyone that visited because it was the warmest of the rooms on the main floor. Most of the other rooms were bare of furniture or too dusty to use until they were more adequately cleaned.
Sure enough, through the small opening of the poorly shut door, he saw the two of them seated at the table. Rika was leaning toward Grandmother, her hand smoothing over the clasp of the older woman's hands. "It's all I can do to keep them both sane. Both... in the same house. It's not healthy. Boyce dropped him off one day, claimed that his mother was dead and he could no longer care for his son. I guess I should be thankful that he didn't ask to stay as well. That would have sent one of them to their sure death. Boyce was always easier to handle than his father and I hoped, by marrying Athena, he might find someone to calm his own raging beast. But she was just pretty. He married her because she was pretty. Not because she could help him in any way. I hoped and prayed that Tevan would be sparred but it was useless. Even at that young age, he was already different. The other children shunned him almost as soon as they met him. His father's arrival was the talk of the village, after all."
Rika's question was too quiet for him to hear even though he stopped breathing so as not to make any extra noise.
"No, it's not my natural gift. I've done what I can but it's costing me in almost the reverse manner. To help him, I give up the very thing that makes me love him. I only feel indifference toward him now. How horrible for a grandmother to not be able to love her own grandchild? I look at him now and feel... nothing. Not like I should. Not like I did at one time. To call it love now would be a travesty."
As if she sense him there, Rika's bright eyes turned toward his. Be calm, boy. You can have mine. Don't worry. You won't be without love any longer.
Title: Words Spoken in Haste
Prompt: Childhood (Weekly Drabble #7)
Word Count: 444
Rating: PG
Original/Fandom: Original - Streetlight People 'verse
Pairings (if any): none
Warnings (Non-Con/Dub-Con/RPF etc): none
Summary: Rika finally tells Tevan the truth and he can't accept it.
And so she stayed with them. Long after all the other girls from the village that were close to Tevan's age were sent off to their special school. Long after Grandfather died and Grandmother's mouth no longer dipped into a continual frown as if her concentration was elsewhere. On the day that Tevan received his acceptance letter to Grantson Academy, he ripped it up because Rika hadn't gotten one. Grandmother sent off her own letter and went into town for a meeting, resulting in a letter that finally came with Rika's name on it.
No one questioned why a girl was sleeping on a boy's floor. Nor did anyone notice that their room was set up differently than anyone else's, complete with a washroom for each of them and a fireplace that warmed the rooms during the night.
There were many of those early days when Rika slept for days at a time. She often woke drenched in sweat, as if she'd wrestled dragons in her dreams. When he asked her what it was that she saw when she slept, she only shook her head. "I can't explain them," she would answer, her smile so sad that Tevan immediately felt bad for asking such a stupid question.
Then there was the day that Tevan realized that Rika's voice in his head had gotten more insistant. He told her about it, laughing the whole time. How absurd that he think she was talking to him in his head when he nearly lost control while on the pitch during games. She wasn't laughing with him, though.
"It is my voice," she told him, her chin lifted up to show that she wasn't ashamed even though he was staring at her as if she had told him the most horrible lie. "I talk to you. I calm you down. I make the connections for you that you're not able to make."
That was the day when he stopped leaning into her when they stood together outside the Dinner Hall. In fact, he stopped touching her altogether and refused to let her touch him. The lies of childhood had been ripped away. Here he thought he was doing better because he was growing out of the rage. No, she was just protecting him. A little girl, now nearly two heads shorter than him and without any muscle definition at all, protected him as if he was a babe in need of another to keep him alive.
"I'm sorry," she whispered but her voice was strong in his head. I regret nothing. No matter where you go, I will follow. We are family, you and I. I'm not leaving you without love.
This entry was cross posted at dreamwidth - where the cool kids hang out.
Title: In Athena's shadow
Prompt: 10. Athena
Word Count: 1264
Rating: PG
Original/Fandom: Original - Streetlight People 'verse
Pairings (if any): none
Warnings (Non-Con/Dub-Con/RPF etc): none
Summary: Tevan and Rika meet for the first time.
There was a statue near the beach, thrown there as if a giant had once used it as a plaything and long since abandoned it for something better. As a child, Tevan had liked to visit it. He'd long lost most of his other friends when his angry bursts had become uncomfortable for anyone to deal with. It was easier to play by himself and so Tevan did, most days. Some days he stayed in the cottage with his grandmother, ready to help take care of Grandfather if she needed help with the bedridden man.
He often took his Reader down to sit at the base of the statue, enjoying the little bit of sunlight that streamed in through the clouds that always covered the sun. His grandmother often told stories of a time when the sun had shown all the time, without any clouds to obscure it. She would shake her fist at the sky, her lips thinned with anger. "They did this," she would spit out. "They hurt us all with their rhetoric and lies."
But his grandmother never told stories about the statue. He wondered if she even knew about it. While it wasn't sheltered by anything but the scattering of low rocks, no one ever came to this portion of the beach, even in the warmth of full summer when the waterbirds swirled and dived in the water for the fish that floated just below the surface.
Tevan made up his own stories about the statue. He called her Athena, after his mother. There were stories on his Reader about other Athenas but he didn't think of her as a goddess. He just thought of her as a mother. And so he let her take care of him. She provided a place to lean back against and some shelter from the wind that came off the water. She listened to his stories and provided comfort when he wept. When he tried to hit her, she offered enough resistance that the pain in his fists brought him out of the cloud of rage.
On this day, it also brought him a playmate. The little girl had climbed up so that she was perched on the statue's shoulder, her hand tented over her eyes so that she could see all the way out to the horizon.
"This is my statue," he stated as soon as he realized the threat. It had been a bad couple of days so that both he and his grandmother were haggard and gray from the constant rage that flowed through him. This was not the time to make new friends who would cry and fling accusations at him.
She only smiled down at him. "Would you like to come up? She has two shoulders. One for me and one for you."
The idea sounded appealing. Tevan pushed his Reader into the waistband of his trousers and began to climb before he even realized what he was doing. He paused, one hand securely around stone and the other hanging in space. "I don't think I should," he mumbled.
"What?"
"I don't think I should." This time, he raised his face to her and enunciated every word. It was something he did right before he became swamped with anger. After that, he could barely form words in his brain and they rarely reached his mouth. All he did was screech and growl, becoming nothing but an animal.
"I think there's a mermaid out there." The girl ignored him as she stared intently out over the water. "She's waving to us. Do you see her?"
He couldn't help but turn to see what she was talking about. There was nothing out there that he could see but maybe he was missing something. Instead of climbing up to a better spot, he twisted around further. "I don't-"
A shudder tilted the statue. It was happening more and more as nature grumbled and complained. Grandmother couldn't tell him why it did it but he figured the earth was just as angry as he was and this was the only way it could express itself. The problem, this time, was that he wasn't in a safe spot. Instead of standing on the ground where he could sway with it, he found himself at odds with the motion. Since only one hand was keeping him in place, he had no real chance of staying in place. As the statue stilled, it was Tevan that was the one falling.
His breath came out in a whoosh as he landed heavily on the sand. It was a softer landing than if he'd fallen on the broken pavement of the path but it was still much harder than he'd been expecting.
"Are you okay?" Soft hair fell over his cheek as all light was blotted out of the sky. He had to blink several times before the girl's face came into view. It was a struggle just to breath so he didn't have time to tell her to get off him. Instead, she smoothed her hand over his cheeks, wiping away sand and dirt. Another hand searched over his legs and arms, looking for an injury. When she didn't find anything, she took to shaking him. "Talk to me. Are you broken?"
No one ever used that word around him. Not his grandmother. Not the children that used to be his friends. It held more meaning than this girl intended it to have. "Yes," he wheezed out. "I'm broken."
Her eyes went wide. "Where? Have I hurt you? I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to... and then I couldn't catch you when all the shaking started... and your eyes got sort of blank when I got down and I was scared that you were dead. Please don't die. Please. I'm tired of finding dead bodies."
"I won't die," he explained as he finally got enough breath to string together complete sentences. "I was broken long before I climbed up Athena."
"Athena?"
He could feel himself blushing but the girl moved away to give him room to sit up and he was able to busy himself with straightening his clothing and trying to get rid of the sand that was clinging to his backside. When he was ready, he took a deep breath and met her gaze once again. She looked curious and still a little scared that he was going to break into a thousand little pieces.
"I named the statue Athena. It's where I come to sit and think most days. I named her after," he paused, wondering why he was bringing this up to this particular girl at this particular moment, but it seemed okay to continue so he carried on. "I named her after my mother."
Her mouth made a round O shape. "You have a mother?"
He shook his head slowly, intrigued about the question. "Do you not have a mother?" Everyone he knew had a mother.
"No. At least, I don't think I have a mother. Well, I'm sure I must have one somewhere. I was born, after all. It's something we have common, though. Neither of us have mothers." She held out her hand and, when he didn't immediately reach out his hand to her, she went further still and picked up his hand from where it rested on his leg. A soft glow of peace stole over him, softening out his ragged breathing. "We shall be wonderful friends, you and I."
"Yes," he answered before even considering what she'd said. Yet, in that moment, he meant the word in a way he never had before.
Title: Indifference
Prompt: 14. "The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of beauty is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, but indifference between life and death." -Elie Wiesel
Word Count: 1354
Rating: PG
Original/Fandom: Original - Streetlight People 'verse
Pairings (if any): none
Warnings (Non-Con/Dub-Con/RPF etc): none
Summary: Tevan's grandmother explains some truths to Rika.
The very first time Tevan's grandmother set her eyes on Rika, she seemed to hate the girl. Almost more than she hated her grandson. The way that her lips curled into a grimace of anger and pain made Tevan move the girl slightly behind him, as if he could protect her. It was Rika, in her quiet way, that protected him, though.
She smiled serenely at the woman, just as she had smiled at Tevan when she had first met him. Just as she always smiled, Tevan realized. It wasn't happiness, though. They'd talked during the day enough that he knew she hadn't had much happiness in her life. Less even than he had because at least he had a roof over his head and food to eat. Even the presence of his grandparents was a plus when compared to Rika's life.
"She's my friend," he asserted when his grandmother opened her mouth, probably to demand that she leave. "Her name is Rika and she doesn't have anyone and I think," but he faltered there because he never really got to think when his grandmother was around. She was the only authority in this household. But he pulled himself together and decided that today, he would demand something, for once. Not in anger for the rage was as far away from his thoughts as it ever had been. "I think that she should stay here. With us."
"And what does Rika think of that?" was the quiet question posed to him.
Tevan turned to her, never once having thought what she might think of the suggestion. When she was talking of her life, he just assumed that he would be allowed to make everything better for her. Perhaps she liked living out in the open, able to move from town to town when she was given the chance.
She wasn't looking at him when she answered, though. Instead, her wide eyes were staring at his grandmother as if she recognized something in her that wasn't exactly what she had expected. "I have been many places and met many people. Some prefer that I move on. I'm different, you see."
"She doesn't mind that I'm broken," Tevan announced, as if this was an important piece of information that needed to be shared before anyone came to any conclusions.
"Not broken," she reminded him of their previous conversation with a small smile. "You're just... you don't connect in all the right places."
He turned his triumphant smile back at to his grandmother, astonished to find that there were tears in her eyes. He had never once seen her cry, not even when Grandfather had first started to get sick and it had been scary to have a grown man raging like like Tevan often did. He'd always hoped that he would grow out of the moods but if Grandfather was broken like he was, was there really any hope of that?
"You can tell?" the old woman asked as she swiped at one of her eyes with the back of her hand.
Rika smoothed a hand over the side of Tevan's face and, like a puppy, he leaned into the touch. Before today, he'd hated to be touched but there was something different about the feel of Rika's skin against his. And then there was the whisper inside his head when she did it. Be calm, boy. Listen to my voice and find the calm you need. He remembered hearing his grandmother's voice like that when he was in the deepest pit of the rage but it was so easy to block it out these days. So much easier to just ignore it and carry on with whatever was driving him at the moment.
This voice, though, was much stronger and more insistant. He wanted to bury himself in the sensation of safety, lean into the whispered words so that he'd never fall into the pit of rage.
"He called to me at my first questing. There have been others but I can see him much stronger than I see others."
"How?"
When Rika shook her head, Tevan realized that he had leaned into her so that she was nearly supporting him, even though he was taller than she was and nearly double her weight. "I don't know. It's what I've always known."
"Then you aren't from New City?"
"Nor from Old. I've been to both but I don't like the press of all those people. I like the forest much better."
"You will stay here," Grandmother announced. "But I want to talk to you privately. Tevan, go make sure your grandfather has a full water glass."
He wanted to protest, not only because he wanted to stay with Rika but because he truly hated walking into Grandfather's room without Grandmother around. He never knew what the old man might do, what words he might throw like knives. No matter how hard he tried, Tevan always felt worse when he was around the old man. There was something dark about him that sucked at his soul and called to the rage. But he went because he always obeyed Grandmother, even when he really didn't want to.
But this time was different. There was the faintest of whispers at the back of his conscious mind but so soft that he could barely hear it. The buzz of the words was a comfort, giving him the courage to smile when his grandfather raised his head to watch him walk into the room.
"There's only room for me in her heart," the old man growled, his silvered eyebrows lowering so that his glare looked even more menacing. "She never wanted you here. Never-" But he stopped, just like that. One breath in and he was talking and the next breath out, he was leaning back against his chair with a smile on his face.
Thankful for the reprieve, Tevan filled the water glass and hurried back toward the kitchen. It was where his grandmother took anyone that visited because it was the warmest of the rooms on the main floor. Most of the other rooms were bare of furniture or too dusty to use until they were more adequately cleaned.
Sure enough, through the small opening of the poorly shut door, he saw the two of them seated at the table. Rika was leaning toward Grandmother, her hand smoothing over the clasp of the older woman's hands. "It's all I can do to keep them both sane. Both... in the same house. It's not healthy. Boyce dropped him off one day, claimed that his mother was dead and he could no longer care for his son. I guess I should be thankful that he didn't ask to stay as well. That would have sent one of them to their sure death. Boyce was always easier to handle than his father and I hoped, by marrying Athena, he might find someone to calm his own raging beast. But she was just pretty. He married her because she was pretty. Not because she could help him in any way. I hoped and prayed that Tevan would be sparred but it was useless. Even at that young age, he was already different. The other children shunned him almost as soon as they met him. His father's arrival was the talk of the village, after all."
Rika's question was too quiet for him to hear even though he stopped breathing so as not to make any extra noise.
"No, it's not my natural gift. I've done what I can but it's costing me in almost the reverse manner. To help him, I give up the very thing that makes me love him. I only feel indifference toward him now. How horrible for a grandmother to not be able to love her own grandchild? I look at him now and feel... nothing. Not like I should. Not like I did at one time. To call it love now would be a travesty."
As if she sense him there, Rika's bright eyes turned toward his. Be calm, boy. You can have mine. Don't worry. You won't be without love any longer.
Title: Words Spoken in Haste
Prompt: Childhood (Weekly Drabble #7)
Word Count: 444
Rating: PG
Original/Fandom: Original - Streetlight People 'verse
Pairings (if any): none
Warnings (Non-Con/Dub-Con/RPF etc): none
Summary: Rika finally tells Tevan the truth and he can't accept it.
And so she stayed with them. Long after all the other girls from the village that were close to Tevan's age were sent off to their special school. Long after Grandfather died and Grandmother's mouth no longer dipped into a continual frown as if her concentration was elsewhere. On the day that Tevan received his acceptance letter to Grantson Academy, he ripped it up because Rika hadn't gotten one. Grandmother sent off her own letter and went into town for a meeting, resulting in a letter that finally came with Rika's name on it.
No one questioned why a girl was sleeping on a boy's floor. Nor did anyone notice that their room was set up differently than anyone else's, complete with a washroom for each of them and a fireplace that warmed the rooms during the night.
There were many of those early days when Rika slept for days at a time. She often woke drenched in sweat, as if she'd wrestled dragons in her dreams. When he asked her what it was that she saw when she slept, she only shook her head. "I can't explain them," she would answer, her smile so sad that Tevan immediately felt bad for asking such a stupid question.
Then there was the day that Tevan realized that Rika's voice in his head had gotten more insistant. He told her about it, laughing the whole time. How absurd that he think she was talking to him in his head when he nearly lost control while on the pitch during games. She wasn't laughing with him, though.
"It is my voice," she told him, her chin lifted up to show that she wasn't ashamed even though he was staring at her as if she had told him the most horrible lie. "I talk to you. I calm you down. I make the connections for you that you're not able to make."
That was the day when he stopped leaning into her when they stood together outside the Dinner Hall. In fact, he stopped touching her altogether and refused to let her touch him. The lies of childhood had been ripped away. Here he thought he was doing better because he was growing out of the rage. No, she was just protecting him. A little girl, now nearly two heads shorter than him and without any muscle definition at all, protected him as if he was a babe in need of another to keep him alive.
"I'm sorry," she whispered but her voice was strong in his head. I regret nothing. No matter where you go, I will follow. We are family, you and I. I'm not leaving you without love.
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