Summary: A series of character drabbles based on quotes from Hermann Hesse's Demian.
A/N: This was for a writing exercise, using this technique:
"Pick a book of any sort - novel, textbook, whatever - and take the first sentence off of pages 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, etc., as far into the book as you'd like. Using these sentences as a prompt, write a short drabble. You do not have to use the entire first sentence if you don't want to; a phrase or just a word is fine also if the sentence as a whole is not particularly inspiring. All that matters is that it is indeed the first sentence you are using - no picking and choosing, unless you come across something you really can't use, and in that case you just skip the page entirely."
As mentioned, I used Demian for the quotes. I did some for Death Note and some for Utena, but separated them for FFnet (hence all the missing page numbers).
Intro quote, just because I liked it:
"I wanted only to try to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?"
I wanted only to try to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self, but why was that so very difficult? Perhaps it was because even those promptings, even my own ideas of what was right and what was wrong, of what was cowardly and cruel and what was just, came ultimately from some outside source. For all the knowledge that had been drilled into my tender child's brain, how could I be certain which thoughts of my adult one were my own and which were really Watari's, my father's, my mother's?
Mother, you'd be called okaa here, or haha... There are so many words I've amassed to describe your relation to me, but I can't remember what I called you in the days when only your language was my own, when I hardly was aware that other languages existed. And Father, whatever you were called, did you ever scold me? Did you give me a lashing with a sapling's branch when I angered you, or did you sagely smile at my precociousness and sit me in a corner instead? People debate which kind of discipline is best for a child, and I'd like to say you were a good parent to me then, but I simply can't remember your methods any more.
Your deaths were splayed out on every news broadcast; still I know the plot I untangled to arrest your killers, how gruesomely satisfied I was to see them caught, but that's all I really remember. A child my age should have been in mourning, but already I think I'd forgotten your faces.