ENTITLED. Sweet As Blood Red Jam
FANDOM. Tales of Xillia
LENGTH. 4,700
SETTING. Both games, into the speculative future.
DISCLAIMER. I don't own Tales of Xillia!
NOTES. SORRY I'M NOT SORRY?
SUMMARY. Growing up, Alvin teaches Elize the things she doesn't want to know. — AlvinElize
"Sticky little girl hands," Alvin called them, at the beginning.
Back then, she'd tug at his sleeve to be lifted, or duck behind his leg to be protected, and Elize knew before anyone that Alvin had a body made from granite, from scar tissue. They'd all seen the lash marks on his back, the grooves across his torso. Elize was too young to know she was supposed to look away, and when he caught her staring once while he wrung his shirt out after a thunderstorm, he asked, in his most carefully flippant tone, "Scary?"
"N-no," Elize stuttered, while at her side, Teepo roared, "They look like lightning tattoos!"
Alvin laughed, his shoulders slumping. "Lightning tattoos. That's cute."
"Why are some of them raised up?" Elize asked hesitantly. She edged nearer, fascinated by the long white stripe cutting over Alvin's left shoulder.
"Sometimes lightning strikes twice," Alvin shrugged. He held still while she patted at his skin. He was as mottled as a slab of marble. His back seemed immense to her as a child, though when she grew older she would realize he had never been the giant she imagined. "What about you? Any scars?" he asked, once she withdrew from inspection.
Elize held out her right hand, spread flat to show her palm. "Only this one. I slipped when I was peeling an apple."
"Hmm," he held her hand up to his face, squinting seriously. Almost casually, he pulled her hand up to his mouth and licked across her open palm, from one end of her scar to the other. "Yep. That's apple, alright."
She'd shrieked, and slapped him with that same hand, a slap so feeble and small he'd only laughed harder.
Back then, Leia had once asked her, "Why's Alvin so much nicer to you than the rest of us? Are you blackmailing him?"
And Elize had believed this was true. She had believed in Jude to direct her, believed in Milla to inspire her, and believed in Alvin to protect her, in the most grounded, physical sense of the word.
Even when she knew the truth about Alvin, even when she'd been working so hard to hate him, she'd known he was the loneliest man she'd ever met in her life. The hole he carried inside of him was so vast that she could drop down into it with her arms spread and never touch the sides. It would have taken an army to fill that space, but instead there was only Elize.
Maybe that was why it was so hard to crawl back out of him, even when she knew better.
Maybe, even as a child, she had thought it fitting to find someone as empty and starving and frightened as she was, her dark mirror.
At twenty six, he looked awkward and lost on a child's swing, his knees reaching up to his chest, to the head that dropped down to meet them. For the first time, she kissed his cheek as a child does—with the desire to somehow make things better. It was a moment she'd replayed a thousand times in her head, before and after the actual act, a thing that always had to happen. She saw it in her mind's eye from a God-like perspective, a heavenly approval. She saw his head raise. She saw the kiss seep under his skin, and flow through him like a golden bead that burrowed, like a bullet, into his grey, torn-up heart.
And as with most things, the memory corrupted. The moment had come too late in her childhood to be forgotten. It clung on, even after the journey had ended and Teepo was sealed and Elize began wearing her hair pulled back from her face.
Elize, thirteen now, thumbed her apple-scar and pretended not to listen to herself.
On her fourteenth birthday Driselle bought her presents that are frankly babyish. Elize, whose body's new cells were born knowing to adore Driselle, didn't mind. She modeled her poufy new skirts, and dutifully completed her books on star-signs, and the nine key personality types (her profile was "The Lover" and she pretended to be irritated and dismissive, but was secretly, secretly pleased).
Rowen sent her books of knowledge and pictures, and from Leia there arrived a batch of slightly mottled-looking cookies, with a gushy card that has also been signed by Jude. Milla, of course, sent her nothing, and Alvin turned up three days late to give her a gun.
"Am I even allowed to use this?" Eliza asked primly. A sudden suspicious occurred to her, "Are you?"
"Come on Elize, lawlessness is the true romance of life," Alvin called back. He was across the field from her, perching empty bottles in tree branches.
"Well, you certainly know enough about the lawlessness," she sniped, still clinging to her prickly adolescent coolness. She hadn't seen Alvin in nearly a year. There was a void, somewhere in her chest, resting right alongside her memories of him, so that she could push them away into the nothingness, the day he finally didn't come back for her anymore.
"I know a lot about both!" Alvin laughed. "Anything you need to know, you ask me. Any boys at school?"
"It's an all-girls school!"
"Fine, I know more about girls anyway," he grinned back at her with friendly familiarity, and Elize's face colored. The gun was slippery in her hand.
"My history teacher," she said, never looking away from his grin. "He's new this year. I like him."
"Ooh." Alvin mimed a stagger. "The first shot is fired!" He finished distributing bottles for her and Elize watched as he strode back across the field towards her, hands shoved into his pockets, mismatched as ever with that perfect-rich boy posture and alley-cat swagger. If she squinted, he became a dark shadow, backlit in the morning sunlight, some dark stranger who moved like he knew her.
"So? You have advice for me?"
"Nope, no way. I'd just as soon not help you put your first man in jail."
Elize sniffed. She raised the gun, pointing carelessly towards the nearest bottle, but the trigger wouldn't pull back. Alvin rearranged her hands, pulling one down o support, showing her where the safety was. "All I've got for you today, is showing you how to kill this guy if he touches you."
"Maybe I want him to," Elize said wildly. She sniffled pathetically at the end of her sentence; nose cold in the autumn morning.
"I'd say in my expert opinion that you don't," Alvin stepped back, snapping his tongue at her when she began to shift out of his carefully constructed posture for her.
"Expert? What makes you an expert? Exactly how many women have you been with!" Elize demanded, with a surge of irritation that was hard to explain or place.
"Been with? Define that for me."
"Hmph. You've said enough." Elize turned her small back on him. At nearly fourteen, she had bitterly conceded that she would never grow out of her minute proportions. She would never be as tall as Presa or Milla, or as well endowed. That was the type of woman men like Alvin liked, wasn't it?
She fired, and the recoil jammed her elbow so painfully she dropped the gun and began to sob, and it was only after Alvin had spent a quarter of an how stroking her hair and murmuring apologies before she had enough presence of mind to heal herself.
Afterwards, Alvin brought her a smaller, elegant hand-pistol made from pure silver, and spent an entire day making her reload and unload it, flicking the safety on and off. The bullets this one fired where a fourth the size of those slugs hefted by one of Alvin's gun, so he had her rounds taken to a blacksmith, to be sharpened and the ends.
Elize kept it in her drawer, with her socks, unloaded. Sometimes she'd take it out to look at it nervously, without touching, and always the day before Alvin arrived at Sharilton to do his business, take her to dinner, and then have her shooting things by the next morning.
Elize was a terrible shot. She flinched every time she pulled the trigger, still expecting her forearm to kick back up into her elbow, her right side to go numb and terrible. She could feel Alvin's patience at her side, larger and fuller than she would have ever guessed, while her own dwindled away.
"Why do you even bother with me?!" she shouted, finally, wincing as her own voice pierced at her headache. She threw her beautiful little silver gun across the field as far as she could, wondering how she could hate something so beautiful, wondering why she even needed it. Once, her history teacher had touched her lower back, pressing her gently out of the way. That had been almost a year ago, right around when her shooting lessons had begun.
She could feel her body shake with anger—or maybe with fear, because Alvin was dangerous in the way that a cornered animal could be, in the way that she herself became vicious with fear. She had never known how which direction Alvin would move in if he was pushed.
She knew even before he turned around that he wouldn't take her anger seriously. Her face flushed yet darker as he smiled at her, but his eyes had gone soft instead of mocking, and his voice came to her without an edge. "Hey. I was alone once, too."
For a second, she tried to imagine if it would have been worse to watch her parents lose their minds, rather than their lives. But there were too many things she didn't know, too much she couldn't remember. His pity stung her, in the same way he would have been insulted if she showed mercy now. "I'm not alone anymore," Elize said quietly. Her face dropped as Alvin sauntered away from her, and only raised again as her about-faced and returned, little silver gun in his hand. She squeezed her eyes shut, swallowing a little noise her throat made when he tousled her hair.
"Yeah, you'll be alright. You're a good kid," he said, and tugged gently on her hair so she'd look up at him. She squinted upwards. He still had that awkward, almost pained smile on. Her insides twisted.
"When did you stop being a kid? When will I?"
"Who knows? It's a good question. But you get more free stuff when you're young so my advice is, take it. You'll grow up the same as everyone else, eventually. Anyway. I'm sorry, Elize. I didn't realize you hated it so much. I just thought—I mean, I know how strong your artes are. But sometimes, this is just quicker."
Elize nodded, not trusting herself to speak. This was it, the goodbye.
"I don't have a lot of friends, so I'm not very good at it," Alvin said. She looked up at him, shocked. He was still smiling at her, which meant nothing, he had a thousand different smiles, and none of them meant happy.
"Next time just take me out on a date," she said, and it came out querulous though she'd been trying to make a joke. "I-I am a girl, you know."
Her history teacher, who'd been not yet thirty, broad shouldered and brown-eyed, tall with rakish hair, who should have looked like Alvin but was never nearly as handsome, as unbreakable—he had told her she had potential, she had danger.
On her sixteenth birthday Driselle takes her shopping for, among other things, real, proper underwear. Elize falls in love instantly. The lacier, the more ruffles, the better. She walks home feeling like a queen and falls asleep still tricked out in bows under her nightgown.
When she wakes up, he's there.
"Oh," he says, somehow noticing she's woken up even before she had. "Hey princess."
"Creep." She snuggles back under her duvet and peers out at him. "Are you stealing from me?"
"Ouch," he laughs softly. His hair is shorter than she's ever seen it, and he looks respectable, almost. "I was trying to leave something for you. Presents make me uncomfortable, so don't say thank you."
Elize wriggles upright. She throws her hands out, palms up, and stares up at him with shining, expectant eyes. Alvin drops down to sit, laughing, on the edge of her bed. In one hand he places a bottle, in the other, a pair of earrings whose color she can't immediately guess.
"Do you have a light? I wanted to show you. They're Alexandrite, so they change color." He located the lamp at her bedside, and flicked it on. The earrings were blue for a half-second, or maybe Elize's eyes did something strange, and then they were glowing a warm, plum-colored hue.
"They'll go blue in the sunlight," Alvin added. "Anyway. I hope they're alright. And then, the other thing—that's just booze. I figured, Driselle's not going to give you any. You need me around to teach you the bad things in life, right?"
Elize was still beaming at her earrings, shifting them to admire how they twinkled in the light. "I love them. They're perfect."
"Don't get carried away," Alvin laughed, looking embarrassed, but he bent obligingly when she held her arms out, and let her wrap them around his neck. She held on tightly, until he finally gave in and looped an arm around her waist, pulling her close to him. She pressed her cheek hard against his neck, growing pleasantly dizzy from the scent of his cologne.
"I don't know when your birthday is," she whispered. "Would you tell me?"
"Alright," he whispered back. "Because it's you, I will, but this stays between us."
A month later he came back to Sheridan on business, and he picked her up right at the school gates during lunchtime, leaving her friends gawking. Elize called, "I might be late for fifth period, someone take notes for me!" She exited with enormous satisfaction.
"Childish, aren't you?" Alvin laughed.
Elize stuck out her tongue, hurt. She tugged angrily at the hem of her school uniform. "Aren't you supposed to be sweet to me? Some friend you are!"
"Wow, easy," Alvin reached into his pockets, turning coins over so the clinked pleasingly. "Let me appease you?"
"You can try," Elize decided haughtily, now following him to a popular outdoor café, sliding into the chair opposite his own.
"What a girl."
Elize ducked behind her menu, blushing with pleasure. She wondered what the girls back at school were saying—what thrilling truths or boring excuses were being told to the teacher. Well, it was fun to imagine, anyway, even if it wasn't true.
"How're your classes? I've got Jude to compare you with, you know."
"Wh-What's that supposed to me! Of course, I'm doing fine!"
Alvin grinned. "I'm jealous, you know. I hated school for the few years I got to go. Funny how things work out."
Elize bit her tongue. "It was hard at first. I was so far behind everyone else."
"Hey, I always knew you could do it," Alvin shrugged, and then turned away as a waitress approached. His smile changed, became wolfish. The waitress, who was very pretty, simpered at him. Elize wrinkled her nose, and growled her order when asked.
"What's up, sourpuss?"
"Nothing," Elize grumbled. "I just feel bad for her."
"Why, because I'm a heartless, uncaring rogue?" Alvin asked lightly. Elize shot him a nasty look.
"Hmph! You're respectably employed now, put the rogue thing to rest."
Alvin swatted her with his menu, "Oh, calm down. It's harmless. You'll understand it someday."
Elize fumed.
That night, fueled by indignation, she finally worked up the nerve to attempt the cinnamon liqueur he'd brought her, and she trotted up to him in a dark corner of his inn's bar with her ears glittering and her stomach hot and turning like it was swimming on itself. He laughed too loudly when he saw her, and caught her when she fell across his lap. "Hey, where's the party?"
"Do you really think I'm a kid?"
"You're a kid," he laughed, still holding her loosely. She leaned against his chest, the way she did years ago, when she thought him indestructible, the man of a million bruises.
"Well, you're a liar, and I don't care about your opinion anyway," she huffed, without any real ire.
Alvin grinned. He touched her ear. "You wear these for me?"
"Of course," she said, determined to meet every bluff.
"Well, I was right. They look nice on you."
"Thank you," she said, and pulled curiously on his neck, which bent easily at her touch, maybe almost by reflex—but she didn't have time to think about that, not when her mouth was pushing on his lips hard enough to feel the teeth behind them. His grip on her tightened infinitesimally, and she pulled away quickly, frightened even through the happy haze alcohol had pulled over her mind.
His eyes, when he opened them, were lighter than she remembered.
"No," he said. "Like this."
Her eyes slid down with a heaviness that seemed impossible to lift, and she felt the soft heat of his hand run up her arm to caress the side of her neck, before he kissed her, with slow, soft deliberation. Elize whimpered low in her throat, and felt herself falling towards Alvin in the same way that people fall asleep; slowly, and then all at once.
When it ended she kept her eyes closed, and her head nodded forward to rest against his.
"You need to go to bed," she heard him say, and he laughed a laugh that was full of self-loathing.
Elize knotted the front of his jacket in her fingers and made her feeblest noise.
"Alright, fine, but at least walk out of here so no one thinks I'm kidnapping you."
Elated, Elize slid to her feet, and toddled obediently after him to the door. She wondered for a half-second if anyone had seen her—if this would be whispered about at school, if she was letting Driselle down in some way—
"Alright, come on," Alvin said, as soon as they were safely tucked into the anonymous night. She stepped into his arms, and he lifted her easily, as he had done countless times before.
"I've missed being carried," Elize mumbled.
"Baby," Alvin laughed.
She wanted to argue but fell into a deep an uncomplicated sleep. She didn't wake until he shook her, now at the back door to Driselle's mansion. "You gonna be okay, Elize? Not so much next time, huh?"
"I'm fine," she mumbled, stumbling a little as he set her down. She scrubbed at her eyes, and looked back up at him, but it was too dark to make out his face.
"Elize," he said, and then stopped. He started again, "I went too far. I think I have to go away for a while, now."
"No!" she cried, much more loudly than she should have. They both froze, listening. A minute passed. They remained undisturbed. Alvin sighed, and crouched down.
"I can't mess you up as badly as I did myself," he said softly. "Please try to understand. Please, let me be the good guy, just for you."
Elize's head was still unsteady from liquor, but clearer from before. And, now, she felt sick. "You'll be lonely," she said. "You can't."
"Hey," Alvin tousled her hair—but somehow differently from before, slower. "Don't sweat it. It suits me. Drink some water before you go to bed, trust me."
And then he was gone.
Elize staggered to bed, drank a glass of water, and cried so hard she vomited into the sink. She cleaned everything in the darkness, and then climbed into bed with Driselle, still crying.
Alvin kept his word and stayed away, but he couldn't stop her from coming to him, just as she could never quite manage to pin him down.
"I worry about you traveling by yourself," Driselle fretted. She'd taken to wearing a pair of smart reading glasses, and the very beginning of worry lines had already started to cut in at her eyes. "Rather than running all over, why not stay here? He'll come back eventually, Elize. He hasn't missed a birthday yet, has he?"
Elize scowled and stalked the room. Driselle, watching her, smiled a little.
"He's changed."
"No, he hasn't."
"He's more honest now, more dependable. I used to really dislike him, but now that I understand everything he's been through…well, I suppose I can understand. And anyway, it's no business of mine if you want to stay friends with him."
Elize touched her lips, spun the bauble lodged in her ear. She never took them out.
Driselle pretended not to notice.
A week later Elize could stand it no longer. Deciding he must have changed his GHS number, she dashed off a reckless note, and sent it before she could change her mind, addressed to his office of business. She had apologized, and said little else besides her desire to see him again.
His reply came two weeks later, along with a pair of intricate lace gloves she was almost afraid to wear. Please understand.
She didn't.
That night she stripped down to nothing in front of her full length mirror, pulled the hair up from her neck, and stared seriously at her own thin, small body. She wasn't a girl anymore, but at one point could she call herself a woman?
She put her new gloves on, and slid her hands down her breasts, stomach, buttocks and thighs.
In the morning she sent them back. I don't want these, I want you. And she told him where the lacy things had been.
He didn't reply.
Night after night she lay in bed with her head crammed beneath a pillow, burning with shame, certain that where ever Alvin was, he was busy kissing the dusky parts of some real woman's skin. How stupid she'd been! Elize ground her teeth, grew thinner. She borrowed Driselle's tasteful cosmetics and bought new clothes, which she folded away until the morning of her seventeenth birthday.
She was sure he would come, no matter what she'd done or said. A whole year had passed since the last time. He couldn't just leave her.
But it turned out, he could.
She didn't sleep that night, waiting for him to show up, make up still on, her small breasts pushed-up and uncomfortable.
The next day, she left school in the middle of her lunch period. It wasn't clear to her what she'd done until she'd finished packing her bag with clothes for traveling, for trying to track him down just one last time, and Driselle had come up of her study, to help re-tie her boot laces.
"Let me hire you a guard," was all she said. Elize's lip trembled.
"You're not angry at me?"
"Not really," Driselle smiled. "No, not really. I did the same thing, once. You owe it to yourself to follow your heart."
"Did it work?"
"No," Driselle laughed, turning away. "But I had to try."
On the ship to Elympios, unescorted now, Elize spent night after night lying awake with her once-hated gun clasped to her chest. Her heart beat like a war drum in her ears, always, too loud to sleep through. Her eyes watered, itched, leaked down her face. She felt ill and dizzy and furious all at once, a mess on the inside, she stumbled into walls and nearly fell when disembarking, but was caught. "Whoa, easy."
She looked up, and crumbled. She tried to say something to explain, but hiccuped every time she opened her mouth. She was practiced at tears.
"Don't cry little girl," Alvin said. "I'm sorry."
Elize, still crying, shook her head. She let herself be held.
Later, after she'd rested some, he told her Driselle had called ahead, demanded he wait for her right at the harbor. Elize wondered what else Driselle had said. Her face burned with shame.
"Do you hate me for coming? Am I a bother?"
"Not in the way you think you are." He smiled at her. The ends of his eyes creased upwards.
Elize sat quietly for a moment. Her fingers were so tightly locked together, her knuckles had begun to ache. "Tell me what I have to do. I upset you, right? When I kissed you?"
"Hold on," he said. "To start, I kissed you."
Elize shook her head. Things had started to blur together, a long time ago. "I don't understand," she whispered. "I thought I was important to you. I thought I meant something. How could you just walk away from me? Were the things I did really so wrong?"
"Elize, you didn't do anything wrong. It was always me."
"How?" she cried, and threw herself forward, face buried into the blanket covering her knees.
"Do you think you're an adult?" he asked, almost aggressively.
"In a year, I will be."
"That doesn't mean anything, Elize. That's just a number they picked, because somebody needed to draw a line, somewhere. Have you ever had a boyfriend? Have you ever let anyone touch you? There are so many things you don't know, and I can't be the one to teach you. Please, please understand. Please don't make me be the guy who takes all of that away from you."
Elize glared at him, her heart hammering in her chest. "You want to do all of those things, don't you?"
Alvin groaned, dragging a hand back through his hair. Elize bit her lip. "You said it yourself, just now. Someone drew the line somewhere, but it isn't always right for everyone. You don't get to decide when I'm an adult, I do. If you don't want me, you have to say it. That's the only way I'll listen." Emboldened, she swung her legs free of the inn bed he'd had her resting in, and stood to face him. Even now, fully grown, she didn't even reach his chin.
Alvin shuddered slightly. "Can't we just—"
Elize reached for his face.
"Give me a break," he moaned, and sidestepped her. "Hey, whoa. You. Don't make me into that guy. Come back when you're nineteen, come back when you're twenty. Have some adventures, have some decency."
"I can't! By then, you'll be thirty three!" she tried mincing a little closer, and he hopped backwards again, grimacing at her.
"Ugh, it sounds terrible when you lay it out in a number like that."
"I'm not any different now than when I was sixteen, and I won't be different in a year either. This is killing me. Please."
"But aren't you different now, compared to when you were twelve? We all grow, Elize, just too slowly to realize it."
"And you?" Elize challenged, "Are you any different from when I met you five years ago?"
Alvin laughed openly, catching her wrists when she pummeled him, and holding them to keep her away. His hands seemed enormous to her. His brown fingers wrapped halfway up her forearm. "Why would you ever want to measure yourself against me?"
"Because I thought you were the one who would teach me the bad things in life," she answered. "Do you really want me to learn from someone else?"
"No," he whispered. Was she imagining things, or was he leaning towards her now?
"You'll keep me safe."
"Of course I will," he said, not blinking, looking tired, the exhaustion-giddy surrender. She stretched up on her toes, tugging on his thick, dark hair.
"I wanted you right from the start," she murmured. "Did you?" His hands were hot on her waist, as big as she remembered them, as big as when she'd been a child.
"I don't know. I don't know when it started. I don't know anything anymore." He muttered, then laughed, looked at her quickly, and closed his eyes. "Shit. All I can do is screw up."
And he pulled her towards him.