BLUE EYES: Chapter 1

A/N: Honestly, I do not know how to classify this fic. The idea and the main plot just came to me a couple of months ago and I thought I'd give it a shot... even if I don't exactly know what I'm doing. I hope you'll give this a try as I have.


Oliver awoke to the unmistakable, rattling sound of distant drumming. He knew instantly what the rhythm pattern played on the bamboo blades represented. A life was being taken at the village gate in the presence of the tribal council.

He opened his eyes and turned to his side, lifting his upper body with his elbow so that he could look through one of the windows of his tree-house. The sun had barely risen over the horizon, and early morning dew had just settled on the tropical greens, yet everyone in the village seemed already wide awake to witness an execution.

Heaving a sigh, he shook his head and grit his teeth in disapprobation. The killings sanctioned by the leaders of the tribe were becoming increasingly frequent. The tension between the natives and the white-skinned foreigners could no longer be kept at bay for long.

"Wandatu and his warring party must have captured another white man," Oliver thought. Wandatu, one of the fiercest warriors of the Kinanyaos, had been hell-bent on exacting vengeance against the foreigners whom he blamed for the untimely and tragic death of his first and most favored wife Mempe, and their unborn child. Since then, Wandatu had no other goal in life but to see every white man he could find suffer. Oliver didn't understand why the council continued to allow Wandatu's irrational quest for the white man's blood to continue. He believed that nothing good would come out of it; instead, it would only aggravate the lingering animosity and instigate further hostility between two peoples, both of which he considered to be part of him even if he did not exactly understand it fully.

Oliver – better known to the tribe as Asintado because of his impeccable aim and skill in using the bow and arrow – lived and walked the thin line between two races. Despite his almost completely native clothing, his long, braided hair, and his tanned skin, his natural complexion and the colors of his hair and eyes betrayed his origin. As the adopted son of the tribal chieftain, he had grown up with the brown-skinned Kinanyaos since he was ten.

Through the years, he had imbibed their ways of ensuring survival, adopted much of their way of life, learned their language, and earned their trust and respect as a hunter and a warrior. He had not completely forgotten his origin, his former culture and language, but those had been pushed far back to his subconscious because of disuse and a lack of stimulus for him to respond to.

Five years ago, he had acquired his right of passage as a legitimate man of the tribe possessing free and lawful choice. Nevertheless, because he had always been keenly aware that a significant part of him did not belong, he had used that freedom to choose his life's path. He had long since left the Kinanyao village to live on his own in the fringes of tribal society, and had begun to rediscover the ways of the white man by occasionally visiting Christentown, the nearest settlement of the foreigners, which was a half-day's journey on foot from the Abu Mountains that the Kinanyaos considered their home.

Oliver put on his trousers and his boots – two of the few pieces of clothing that he had bartered for, in exchange for native deer skin at the settlement three harvests ago. After tying his hair and putting on his native headgear, he slung his quiver over his shoulder and picked up his bow. If he could intervene and stop another pointless killing, he would.

He descended the rope ladder from the doorway of his treehouse, and as soon as his feet hit the dew-drenched ground, Oliver began to run. The accelerating tempo of the beats on the bamboo blades signaled the urgency of the situation. He just hoped that he would make it in time. For even if his previous attempts had always failed, he was just as determined as before to plead with the chieftain and bargain for another white man's life. Perhaps if they spared that man's life and sent him back to his people unscathed, the foreigners would reconsider giving the peace talks (which had begun years ago) another chance.

Except, upon arriving at the village gate where everyone had gathered for an apparent execution, Oliver discovered that the life he was about to bargain for was that of a woman. A beautiful young woman, to be exact. A female whose skin was even fairer than his, and whose golden mane made her stand out from the crowd of black-haired natives who anticipated her demise with confused stares. Her hands were bound with abaca rope, made from the sturdiest fiber available to the natives for making tools, building simple structures, and tying things up.

Even from a fair distance, the blonde's blue eyes drew him in. One would have expected those eyes to be filled with fear at the prospect of near death, but what Oliver saw in them was not terror. He saw pure, unadulterated courage. Pride even. Oliver had seen enough faces in his past experiences in battle to be able to tell the difference.

Oliver hadn't seen a blonde-haired woman in ages. The last had been his mother, and her hair had not even been this bright and light-colored, as he remembered. The foreign women he had encountered in his visits to Christentown had brown, light-brown, or sandy blonde hair like him. Neither had he seen a pair of eyes bluer than hers (and his own). They reminded him of the first time he'd seen the ocean, when Robert, his father Robert by blood, had brought him on the longest voyage of his life yet, the one that had brought him to this island more than fifteen years ago.

Everything about the blue-eyed woman's appearance told him that they shared a common origin, and that intrigued him so. There was just something about her, and – if she lived through this – he intended to find out what it was.


A/N: So, what do you think? Worth continuing? Is this something you'd like to keep reading?

This fic will have chapters that are shorter than the ones I usually write. It will hopefully keep the plot moving forward. I won't promise an updating schedule, though. RL can certainly get in the way of regular posting, but I will try my best not to take so long in between posts.