The Graduates
Inpired and named after a Alan Harnum fic.
Chapter 1: Shards
She was a dancer. So she said. I knew better. I always know, that's my curse. Nothing can be pure, nothing. I smile and pretend. Pretenses are as important as seeming. The illusions that dance around me and I remember another dance. I thought I knew the reality and all I saw was her illusions. Her.
Her. Her. Her. The word resounds and I down another sake. My eyes are guarded and she doesn't see it. The thing, that taint. I chose and I chose badly. Wrong wrong wrong I just choose. Choices have consequences and I didn't like the consequences so I see it as a bad choice. Either fade away or have a little role to play. I learned that much.
Didn't I? I have pondered this a thousand times in the years since.
The dance was one that had been danced a thousand times, by a thousand generations, an empty motion machine. Tra la la. She only saw my passive face and didn't wonder, just made associations and worked harder at her dance to impress the foreigner. When I left, she didn't have any stage directions for that and was thus confused.
I have been to many places like this and many places that were not. I was impressed by Orleans, not so with Paris, and found London and New York tiresome. I have been to those big, famous towns and I knew their places, how they would change and die one day. I am not one given to melonchaly. I shall leave that to Saionji.
I am an adult now. Twenty-six years of age and still I attract admiration and am attracted to power... but unlike ten years ago, I know the price. I know the sacrifice. Still, I find myself yearning for something I can't remember. Oh, I remember her.
It is my curse that I cannot forget, I cannot throw away the memory nor the feelings that will drive me to San Francisco tomorrow and St. Petersburg in a week. I won't even blink or stop if I see familiar blond hair, talking to one with a head of brown-black tresses, bindi on the latter, men's clothing hiding the form of the former. It's not that I don't want to, it's because it'll be an illusion. I shall never see those two again. Not really.
I smile at my reflection. Still fair. I've been called a beautiful man. I've been lost and so many have asked me to find myself in their arms. They could not hold me and I could not banish the memory, the face, the temptation I failed.
Wealth has been my companion for so long, I have forgotten the faces of other companions, of other things that mattered to a too-beautiful boy child with a poor family's clothing, hair cut and poorly attended looks. I just don't think about it.
Splendor follows me and depravity once greeted me when I was sixteen. He stole the heart of my first love and it shattered me.
Perhaps I am still looking for the pieces.