Title: a form of madness
Author: Lily
Series: Tales of Legendia
Characters/Pairings: Shirley, Stella/Senel, one-sided Shirley/Senel
The Village of the Ferines used to smell like water and dust all the time. The smell hits you like something physical the first time you arrive and then slowly fades into the background until you leave, when you start wondering what it is exactly that you've lost, some important part of your breathing. Then you realize that it's the smell. You'll miss the smell for weeks, and it's in this smell that Shirley grows up.
At ten she is skinny and small; a raw-skinned sapling made of skinned knees and elbows and curious eyes. It is an uneventful day when she meets Senel— a warm, dry morning spent skipping her chores by hiding from her sister up in a tree until the sun slants hot and vindictive through the branches.
The first thing she notices is a mop of snowy white right beneath her dangling feet and it takes awhile before she realizes that she's staring at the top of someone's head. It takes another moment of careful deliberation before she decides she likes the soft-looking pale strands strewed messily about. But the ivory hair did not compare to when the stranger—a boy a couple years older than she— lifts his gaze at the sound of leaves rustling as she shifts to get a better view and reveals the startlingly loveliest blue eyes she had ever seen. Later she will grow to learn that he is perpetually intense; eyes flaring and brightening and dimming and darkening as his mood did, going from azure to cerulean to sapphire all in turn, sometimes to cobalt or Prussian blue, but they are always pretty, pretty, pretty. Much prettier than her own, in her opinion.
He blinks in the dusty light and scans her searchingly; something unreadable flickering across his face as she ducks her head shyly and flushes brilliant red. That's when Stella sternly appears, lean and sinewy and beautiful. "So that's where you were Shirley—" And then her sister, her great-tragic-older-beloved sister, locks gazes with the boy-with-the-snowy-white-hair-and-pretty-blue-eyes and really, that was the start—and the end—of it.
She looks at his lips and wonders how they'd feel pressed to her mouth, her hand, her throat, her breasts.
She looks at him sleeping so peacefully against her sister's shoulder and feels jealousy clawing and carving against her ribcage. It's like a living thing, this pain, a monster that was gnawing at her from the inside out.
It isn't fair.
Love—her sister once murmured—was the biggest mystery to ever exist. There was no rhyme or reason to it, no room for logic or simple equations. It was something that flowed, that moved, that constantly changed; it could not be tracked or charted. There was no recipe for love, and it could not be mapped; it could not be won by a blade and it held no room for lies.
Shirley still recalls her first failed Rite of Accession—
She had screamed and her spine had arched; lifting her back in an unnatural curve, and then just as abruptly snapping in the other direction. Twisting and thrashing, not breathing because she was still screaming and her body felt like it was being shredded from the inside out; burning in a fire that she could not control. There was blood in her mouth from biting her tongue but it was cooler then the flames that were turning her mind and her eyes to ash and…..
—like she recalls every single detail of how the village was attacked.
Bloody with cuts and wincing at the bruises that spite her with their sting, she trips and fumbles against Senel as they run away from the smoke and death polluting the sky; darkening it like a false sunset while Stella glows ethereal and golden to buy them time to escape as her poor home crumbles in the fire and she swallows the rise of bile in the back of her throat when she remembers her wish for time away from Stella with Senel all to herself, but no no no, oh please no this isn't what I wished for, not what I wished for at all.
Afterwards she will scour her skin till it aches crimson deep inside her flesh, just so she can taste something clean, something stripped of filth by pain, something purely beautiful. But Shirley climbs and falls so often now that the two directions are blurred together, and she is never sure which way she is going, only that it always takes an eternity for her to get there. She is caught in a constant cycle of motion and it perplexes and despairs her.
Senel's eyes are like an emerald mercury in the shadows of twilight, a swimming, unstable jewel that glitters in the dark. His lips are turned up in the faintest of a smile, and she knows he is remembering something, some far away sunlight tucked deep within the dark of his memories. He should smile like this more often, Shirley thinks. It is a real smile, not the scowl he puts up to mask himself from the world or the one he paints on for her benefit. It was how he had smiled before everything, before the attack on the village and before Stella's sacrifice, how he had smiled at a certain girl that loved him, memories pleasant and warm.
"I'll protect you Shirley." He vows but they both know he will do her ill sooner or later—knows he cannot help it. There is something in him doomed to hurt her, pierce her in ways they can't comprehend, shatter what hasn't quite yet broken—
Love, Shirley decides, is its own form of madness; repentance its method of an end.
end.