Welcome to another Rio Neil story! Honestly I don't know how many more I have in me so I want to make this one great! This means I'll take more time to plan it out and not resort to cheap gags when I'm stuck. This story'll be a little different. First, look at the top left corner right beside my umbreon icon. That's right, rated T. My other stories are rated in the Ks. Interpret what you will. I want to put more Allen in this story too, since he's just so interesting but I tend to not write him- there's been so many interesting Allen fics out recently so I feel inspired. In honesty it's 100% his fault this is a T rated fic. I just don't think I can capture his essence otherwise and since the story is now T I'll be taking some liberties. (All this forewarning but I don't really have the guts to write anything too juicy- you guys will find it tame) They'll be the occasional joke in here because I won't be able to help myself but overall, this isn't a humor story like the others.
Also Neil's going to be showing a lot more tsun before you see any dere. I'm looking forward to writing this! It's going to be more challenging for me since there isn't this large extravagant subplot to make it interesting. We'll see how this goes! Thanks in advance for reading!
-Umbreonix
(And sorry for pulling you through this long prologue. I hate reading prologues so I sympathize. )
One last deep breath in.
She closed her eyes with a blissful smile, taking in the aroma of the campus greenhouse, the place that had become like a second home to her over the past couple years. Overgrown with both local and exotic flowers, the house's glass rooms brought forth a diverse amount of scents that nearly overwhelmed the senses.
The smell however, was not what shocked most first time visitors. Her eyelids reopened and the vivid sight of greenery filled her vision, still managing to take her breath away. There were some sights that she knew would stay with her forever, in this case it was the way the sun lit up every corner of the vast building, peeking through the untameable ivy that crawled up the crystalline walls that was simply enchanting.
It was the first time she ever truly understood the phrase "bitter sweet". Today was the day that everything ended, and everything began. Today was the day of her graduation, the ceremony was already over and many tears had been shed but the finality was really only sinking in now as she made her very last rounds through the green isles.
"Rio." A voice said, breaking her from her trance and in her surprise she tripped on her own feet, landing backwards on the hard, brick floor.
Smooth She winced, more from the embarrassment than the pain and looked over to the house's entrance where her friend Chelsea watched her anxiously. "I'm fine." She said and Chelsea sighed before giving her a good natured smirk and walking over to help her up. "Goodness your highness!" She said in a tone of fake dismay, "What would your loyal subjects say if they ever saw what a klutz you actually are?"
The girl named Rio groaned, "Please, just stop calling me that. We've graduated, can we graduate from that nonsense too?"
Chelsea gave her a half smile and extended her hand. "Sorry, you'll never be able to escape it but at least you've got a cool title." She grimaced, "they call me the Mage of Vegetables."
Rio took the hand and allowed herself to be hoisted up "Doesn't it suit you?" She asked.
"Mages are cool and all but I couldn't have been a princess, or even a maiden? Something gender specific? It would be nice if they could acknowledge me as a girl, you know?" She flicked at a loose strand of her brown hair, tossing it back with the rest behind her shoulder distastefully, "I'm not a complete tomboy, I like to be girly sometimes too." She pouted and then turned to Rio accusingly, "Meanwhile you have everyone fooled that you are this dainty and elegant noblewoman."
"I don't know where they got that idea from." Rio protested.
"Honesty, until Claire graduated and you inherited the Queen's position they called you 'Fairy of the Gardens', so unfair!"
The blonde shrugged, looking down at her feet. Chelsea knew how much she hated being called that, yet she always had to bring it up.
Rio Gold was an honours agricultural student who had been attending H.M University, a college world renowned for being one of the finest schools for biology, medicine and agriculture. The degrees do not come easy and successful graduates exit as leading experts within their fields. Within the departments, there were a few students who were locally famous on campus. These small-time celebrities were known as their department's 'royals' and gained cast-based titles. This was all entirely unofficial of course, a quirky little university thing started by some students with a bit too much time on their hands. Within agriculture, Rio was the queen, a title past down each year to a promising fourth-year female although she herself mostly just tried to ignore this title with slight embarrassment.
Her fame came from quite a few factors. First, her aptitude for all things plant related and tendency to always rank in the top spot for midterms and exams in the courses dealing with this material. Second was her responsibility as the student caretaker of the greenhouse- probably the first undergraduate to be given this position, and, last of all was the fact that in technicalities, she was a real life heiress though what she was inheriting wasn't wealth. In her family's name was a beautiful, nearly five ache farmland property. To some this was not much, but it definitely made her the envy of her classmates. It's unfortunate, but not everyone is given the same opportunities and as far as the agricultural society was concerned, she had it made, the Paris Hilton of farming.
Chelsea reached up to adjust her trade mark red bandanna agitatedly, only to of course find it missing, it didn't go with a graduation dress. Despite her resentment towards it, her title fit her pretty well. She was in a very specific strain of bioengineering with a focus solely in crops. A title like princess or such wouldn't suit the energetic and outspoken women. She was also the most approachable of the royals- though in actuality the title was inspired through the way she had been studying ways to tweak plant genes to improve crops. She was actually two years older than Rio but graduating the same time on a six year degree. Rio had responded to her kijiji ad in her first year looking for a roommate and they'd lived together and been inseparable since.
"Anyway I figured you'd be here, I was just stopping by to see if you were coming to the party tonight?" Chelsea asked this rather hopefully but she rarely succeeded in dragging her best friend into the social scenes.
Rio shook her head, "Sorry, I'm actually moving straight to the farm this evening. I can't miss the bus."
"That's too bad." Chelsea sighed. "Well I guess this is it then."
"Yeah." Rio agreed quietly.
In an instant Chelsea burst into tears glomping onto the girl, "Aww my little Rio! How are you even going to manage without me?!"
Rio awkwardly pat her back with a crooked smile, "Don't worry, I'm an adult now."
"You're only 21 you little fetus!" She bawled.
Rio chuckled slightly and pried the crying upper year from her, gripping her shoulders. "I'll be fine. Also this is NOT goodbye." She said firmly.
"I know." Chelsea admitted and then glanced around at the greenhouse, wanting to prolong their final moments. "It really is pretty here."
A feeling of pride like that of a mother's over a child welled up in Rio. "It really is."
"…I'm probably going to go talk to some more people before they disappear. Are you heading out now?" Asked Chelsea.
"Um, no. I just need a little longer… to say my last goodbyes to this place you know?" Rio gave a sad smile and Chelsea nodded.
"Alright, sorry to interrupt your alone time. See ya?"
"See ya." Rio nodded and the brunette left, not before giving one last fleeting smile over her shoulder and Rio returned it.
She looked back to the aisles with a sigh. Goddess knew how much she would miss this place, but she tried to set those thoughts aside and instead enjoy these last moments- but in the end all she could think about was how much she'd miss the way the air stood still and time itself felt like it froze, the way the rooms smelt after the sprinkler system made its rounds and of course each and every individual specimen that she help raise with utmost care.
It was hard to believe that by tonight she'd already be settled into her new life and this might all just feel like a distant dream. Four years went by way too fast. A mute panic had begun to fill her chest, she just didn't feel like she was ready for "the rest of her life".
It felt more like a death sentence than a hopeful beginning. Your whole life, everything is in stages, everything is temporary, elementary school, summer camps, high school and college. Then suddenly there's just the great beyond, the point where you are shot out with no safety net into the big wide world, like exile from Eden. That critical point where the decisions you make completely shape the rest of your life.
Her friends scoffed at her anxiety though. At least she had the rest of her life neatly lined up for her on the farm, which had just been waiting for her to finish her degree and claim it.
Others have to search for positions in their fields, there were upper years above her still on the job hunt years after their graduation.
She really didn't have anything to complain about she supposed, but she couldn't help but feel a great loss on that day. She finished her way around the green house and sighed, gently caressing a leaf of the mimosa, one of the plants she nurtured for the first year labs. As always, it contracted at the touch and she smiled sadly before finally heading out the door, locking up behind her.
She returned her keys to the biology department's main office and checked her watch, she still had time to visit one more important place before her bus came for her and at the perfect time too.
Just outside of campus, discreetly tucked behind the main plaza stood a small coffee shop. The atmosphere was relaxed yet sophisticated, the kind of place that the hipsters would rave about- if they had found it. She had come across it when she had been searching down a quiet place to study, Home wasn't always an option, not when Chelsea's engineer friends were over anyway- Goddess knows engineers can get rowdy with a couple of drinks in their hands. She had tried the libraries of course but really, there was no privacy for a 'royal' on campus, she could feel everyone's eyes on her all the time and hear the soft gossiping murmurs from beyond the book racks. That's when she started to seek places in less student oriented neighborhoods and found the café. It had soon become a special place to her for a couple reasons. First as an escape but a more prominent reason being one only she knew and was too embarrassed about to ever tell anyone.
If you asked anyone that seemed to think they knew her, they'd tell you that she was a straight-laced, down to earth kind of girl. That infuriating student that always handles things with a mature and calm demeanor and studies to the point that she can recite the lectures and material by heart.
She was praised for her dedication, rarely making it out to parties and never getting involved with relationship drama. Everyone was fooled into thinking she was machine, or a 'queen'. So often her friends would come to her in the middle of the night with mascara running down their cheeks to tell her how smart she was not to get involved with relationships and men.
It wasn't smarts though. Even Rio had a guy she liked. A guy she had never even spoken to who appeared at the café every week day but Friday from six thirty to seven thirty.
She saw him for the first time during her first year, he sat at a small corner table for two, one leg crossed over the other casually, clad in thick black buckled military boots with baggy camouflage pants tucked in. He also wore a long punk-styled red coat with a fashionably-scraggly woven black shirt underneath and the whole ensemble had him looking like the type of rock star that girls from 12 to 22 fawn over. He was also that lean-short of muscular that was hard to tell from under his layers if not for the way his collar bones protruded from above the low neckline of his top, forming hard lines that could make a girl almost drool.
The most shocking part of him though was the sharp ruby-red eyes under his mop of blond hair. At first she couldn't believe they were real, they had to be contacts but over time she had to concede that his eyes were in fact, red. They were the most clear and beautiful things she had ever seen, she deeply regretted how she'd never have the opportunity to see them up close.
This being said, at first it was unsettling to her the way her eyes couldn't help but follow him. It was impossible for her not to continuously sneak peeks at him when he was around. He wasn't the kind of person she spent time with, or even knew how to talk to. Her people were the biologists, the agriculturalists who were quiet and happy to be spoken to although for the most part, retained a sort of meekness.
His very presence was loud, and he carried this terrifying aura of complete unapproachability. He was such an entity that she found it shocking the way the café's life just continued on around him normally. She seemed to be the only one in the shop that was ever so drawn into his personal gravity field.
At the very beginning, her interest was merely curiosity. She had a very adventurous imagination and liked to imagine who he could possibly be. She had never seen him on campus or anywhere else but he was definitely young enough to be a student, but if he was he was probably in a different department. Maybe he was in music, or criminology.
She came up with all sorts of back stories for the enigmatic blonde, each more wild than the last, it was a refreshing break from all the studying and it was a perfectly harmless pass time, or so she thought.
Though in her casual observations she began to notice little details over the years. Such as the time she saw him smile a little to himself when the person in the table in front of him was watching animal videos on youtube and she learned that he liked animals. Or the way he always drank his coffee black, the utter opposite of her who practically ordered a cup of sugar with some coffee. It was in her third year that she finally realized her mistake, she had fallen in love with him. Against all rationality she had fallen in love with someone she had never even met, and likely never would.
Maybe it was the way he was always on his own… she wondered if he was lonely. Then again, she was always by herself too- though arguably to be putting this much thought into a stranger maybe she was just a little lonely as well. In all likelihood, he did have a group of friends. People who talked to him every day, saw him laugh and make the expressions she'd never seemed to see him make. Maybe even a girlfriend…
Anyway, in present time-
She walked into the shop and froze in surprise, it had never been this crowded before. The room buzzed and the staff behind the counter frantically raced around to complete the orders in a timely manner. Commencement had brought a lot of people to town, and that must have led to the discovery of the café. Students sat in large groups of parents, siblings and relatives. She sighed, realizing that she would have to get her very last drink to go. Until she saw it. An empty chair, but then, on the other side of the table was him.
She ordered her usual, a coffee with three sugars and a chocolate toffee bar then hesitated before inhaling deeply and taking the plunge, making her way through the swarms of people and the pushed-out chairs.
"Hi." She said to him for the very first time. A weight was lifted off her shoulders, she'd finally done it! She's spoken to him! It was a shame he didn't hear her over the noise. She felt more awkward than she even had in her entire life, it had taken all of her strength and courage just to say that single word to him and she wasn't sure she could do it again, but having stopped next to him she felt committed. She squeezed her eyes shut before opening them and tapping his shoulder.
He turned to her, glaring with his brilliant red eyes, for a moment she was frozen, partly in mesmerisation, partly in fear as they bore deeper into her own.
"What?" He asked irritably.
She stepped back unconsciously, "Oh uh, the seat… I mean the store's crowded, I was hoping-" Her sentences were going nowhere so she stopped and restarted, "Do you mind if I sit there?" She pointed at the seat across for him. He grunted and returned his attention back to the paper. She looked at him blankly for a moment not comprehending that meant exactly.
He looked back at her impatiently, "yeah. Sit." He said curtly.
She jumped, "Oh, right. Yes, sorry." She turned quickly to take the seat, bumping into the table, she managed to stop the drink in her cup from spilling but his own splashed a little over his paper. "Sorry!" She said again, "so sorry." She sat down regretfully and bowed her head slightly to hide her red face. She should have just taken it to go after all.
He just looked at her for a moment, entirely unimpressed before again, ignoring her. She fiddled with the hem on the skirt of her graduation dress, pulling it down a little to try and cover her knees but it was no use, she hadn't realized how short it was until she had first sat in it today and it rose mid-thigh. It didn't really matter either way, no one could see her lap under the table but it was more a confidence thing.
She gave up on the skirt and returned her attention to the man across from her. Despite all of the humiliation she had endured, she still almost felt like she should attempt some sort of conversation, both as disaster recovery and for closure on her four-year crush. She couldn't though and just resigned herself to sip at her hot drink awkwardly.
"H-hi." Said another voice that was much too meek to be the man across from her. It was a guy standing behind her.
"Hello." She said politely, smiling gently to reassure him. She could empathize with his terrified expression, she had been there before, moments before.
The boy blushed and fumbled to readjust his glasses. "Ah- sorry, it's just, I've been in the same classes as you for four years but never really spoke to you or heard you speak before. It's kind of surreal you know?" He did look oddly familiar, so that's why. "Anyway, I just wanted to congratulate you on graduating. Although of course you would since you're even one of them-" He quickly covered.
"Thank you." She smiled, "You too."
"So you're going straight out to work now?" He asked.
"Pardon?" She tilted her head.
"I mean, you have a farm that you can go to now I hear." He replied.
"Oh, yes. In a place not far from here actually, Echo Village." She said.
He shook his head apologetically, "Sorry, I've never heard of it." They paused and he lifted his cup slightly, "Anyway, I have to get going, but it was nice finally meeting you."
"You too." She nodded and again she turned back to the table. If only her other encounter today went that well.
Ruby eyes were now watching her with a sliver of interest. "Echo Village." He said, surprising her.
"Yeah," She answered it's a village just down-"
"I know where it is." He interrupted apathetically, "But you should just give up. That place isn't going to be on the map much longer, it's a total dump too."
She felt a little angry at how he was addressing her new home. "Well I'm not just going to give up without trying, I just spent four years of my life getting the degree to run its farm."
"What a waste." He shrugged and she clenched her fists angrily.
"Well whether it's the farm or even the whole town, if something's broken I'll just have to fix it." She said in a mighty declaration.
He raised his chin a little and looked down at her angrily and a shiver ran up her spine from the sudden chill in the air. "Optimists are annoying." He said roughly, "Don't make promises you can't keep." After that he stood up, grabbed his things, and stalked out the door.
That entire encounter from start to finish could not have gone worse. There was this empty feeling eating away inside of her. She had spent four years pining over this man only to find out he had the worst personality of anyone she had ever met. On the other hand, and least now she could put this whole thing behind her- as cringingly embarrassed as she felt, it's not like she'd ever have to see him again. Right?
Sure Rio… Sure I'll let you believe that for now.
Again I'm sorry for such a long prologue but it was important. Also I realize Rio's personality doesn't show through here but there is a very very good reason why- you'll see eventually. Now that I've actually thoroughly planned ahead for once I got to plant all sorts of stuff relevant for later chapters in. Its great! Why haven't I always done this?!