Of Destiny
The car sped down the empty stretch of road in the night, leaving a wake of leaves in the still snow-less December twilight, not one of the three passengers inside was paying much attention to what was ahead. Mariko Brea and her two daughters were going home from ten-year-old Maya's recital.
"So, what did you think?" Maya asked her younger sister for the umpteenth time that night, "pretty good huh?"
"OK," said Aya, "kinda long though."
Maya snorted, "Kinda good, kinda good??? Ahhh what's the use in having a younger sister anyway?" frustrated, she raised her hands in the air in defeat and descended into huffy silence.
Aya--as usual--ignored her sister's taunts. Age wasn't a big deal to her, although sometimes her older sister acted if she were from another planet due to her years, Aya waited this one out, her older sister never managed to keep a freeze-out going for any appreciable length of time. And so silence resumed in the car for a full five minutes.
Eventually, as predicted, Maya couldn't stand fidgiting in silence and leaned in close her sister's ear. "You know," she said hesitantly, "I've noticed something, in the past few days..." She bit her lip and looked very reluctant to continue. "I'm starting to feel really odd sometime, and it may be my imagination, but weird things seem happen around me when I concentrate hard. It's freaking me out."
Rolling her eyes, little Aya stared at the ceiling and wondered what story Maya was going to feed her this time. She may be young but she was not stupid, no matter how old she got, Maya never stopped trying to scare her somehow, and she was not about to fall for it again.
"No really," continued Maya after seeing the expression on her younger sister's face, she thought for a second, then a flash of inspiration hit her. "here, give me your arm."
Then she snatched Aya's skinny arm up, eager to prove herself, and held it with both hands, eyes shut with an intense look of concentration on her face. Aya frowned, her arm started to tingle strangely, like it had been asleep for hours, and started to turn splotchy red.
"Maya" she tugged on her reddish arm urgently.
Her sister--eyes closed--didn't seem to hear her.
"Maya stop" whimpered Aya a little more urgently as a burning sensation was starting to form in her fingers.
No response.
"Maya stop it, you're hurt--"
Suddenly, an old oak tree on the side of the road just ahead of them, a very large one, seemed to writhe for an instant before ripping out of the ground and falling sideways right in front of the car. Mariko, too late, tried to step on the brakes, and the car skidded at 75 miles an hour into the large tree trunk.
Aya was thrown against her seatbelt. Hard. But Maya, who never bothered with the nuisance of it, was thrown right out of her seat towards the windshield...
...And five-year-old Aya Brea started to scream.
Under the steaming hot jets of the shower, a now 25-year-old Aya shook herself out of the spell, something she sometimes got into taking her after-work shower, under the hot jets, unpleasant memories seemed to float to the top of her brain, and simmered there in some grotesque mixture of hate, fear and self loathing.
With a wet hand, she turned off the torrent of water and stepped out of the stall. Towelling off, she changed into more casual wear, jeans and an old grey sweatshirt, in which it's absolute ugliness was only counterbalanced by how absolutely comfortable it felt. She strode out of the bathroom, sat in the only comfy livingroom chair, and stared up at the ceiling.
"What the hell am I doing?" She asked to no one in particular.
Pain
Aya opened her eyes in the hospital bed, the world came into soft focus around her. Flickering flourescent lights set into the ceiling bore straight into her brain. A medicinal smell tickled the hairs in her nostrils and made her feel slightly nauseous
"Maya, stop it-..."
Memories swirled around in her mind
"...you're hurting-..."
"...stop it, you're hurting-..."
"...stop it..."
"Stop it"
"STOP IT!"
OH NO!
Aya Brea sat bolt upright in the bed, her small frame shivering. She wasn't dead, she was in a hospital, where was Mom? And...
Something was wrong with her vision. There was something covering her right eye, a bandage. Was it lost in the accident? Hurriedly, she started to rip off the gauze in panic.
"I don't think you should do that dear," said a woman's voice.
Aya's head whipped to the source of the voice in the room, was it Mom? It turned out to be a young nurse sitting in one of the chairs at her bedside. Her heart sank.
"Don't worry," continued the nurse, "you didn't lose anything important. That bandage was put there because we used this chance to fix a problem with your vision. We never got around to it because of cost, and we never had a donor be-..."
The nurses's smile drifted away, and she averted her eyes.
Going into the kitchen she sat down at the table, poured herself a Coke, then picked up the newspaper, and started idly flipping through it.
The locker crumpled slightly inwards as Aya slammed Jacob's body into it. He whimpered slightly and slid slowly to the ground. "Why did I have to do that for?" she thought unhappily, "all he did was grab me by the shoulder. Why am I overreacting?"
She already knew why.
She extended her hand to her prone friend, "I am so sorry," she said hauling him up, "I thought you were Kevin for a second."
Unbidden, Kevin's cruel words flew back to her, "Hey Aya, why are you such a wierdo? Is it 'cause your Mommy died? Awwwwww too bad Aya. Aya? Aya?
"...Aya?" repeated Jake again, she focused on the present; on his concerned features, somewhat obscured by unfasionable coke-bottle glasses..
She let go of his arm and tried to smile convincingly. It failed. Jacob, took it in stride, a quality that had much to do with the fact that he was the only person in school with whom Aya talked to. He smiled back.
"I don't blame you for trying to hurt Kevin though," he grimaced, "that little cretin goes too far, too much."
And then the hall was silent.
Aya leafed through Sports rapidly, it wasn't football season anyway so she dumped it and went to the next section. But still, no matter how hard she concentrated, her earlier question kept repeating itself in her mind, buzzing like an angry gnat.
"What are you doing Aya Brea? You don't belong here. You're a fraud Aya Brea..."
She silenced the mocking voice and desperately tried to concentrate on the comics.
Her right eye itched.
Constable Davis wanted to go home. Badly. "I hate doing the High School circuit," he muttered to himself for the umpteenth time that afternoon.
And he did, he really did. In his view, it wasn't like dressing up in uniform, sitting behind a shoddily made presentation table, and being made fun of by the Jocks or the Drug dealers, actually helped the NYPD get more recruits. He checked the time.
Twenty minutes 'till freedom. Twenty agonizing minutes.
"I'll just go now anyway," he grumbled, "it won't make any-..."
"Excuse me," said a soft voice, "is this the Police Career Information desk?"
He looked up, and his eyebrows started to play tag with his hairline on their own accord.
A female student was standing in front of him wearing a backpack and carrying a binder. To Davis, who hadn't had much luck with the fairer sex, she looked incredibly attractive. "Lordy, lordy," he thought to himself, "they get even more stunning every year." He started to sweat down his back.
"Err, yes. May I help you?" he said in a voice half an octave too high. He cleared his throat and concentrated on staring only at her eyes. "Oh my god, I've never seen such a shade of green eye colour in my life," he though excitedly. NO! She's a Student. She's a Student. She's a Student..." he repeated in a mantra over and over.
Unaware of Davis's thoughts, the young woman answered, "I was thinking of going into law enforcement, and I wanted to get some information."
Davis wordlessly handed her a blue pamphlet, he congratulated himself; his hands were barely shaking at all.
"Thank you," she said to the nearly incapacitated Cop.
Davis regained his voice quickly lest she leave right away. "Well Miss..."
"Aya Brea," she supplied.
"Oh God, even the exotic name," he despaired inside.
"Miss Brea, are you serious about joining the Force?" he finally asked aloud, in his head he prayed, "pleaseohpleaseohpleaseohplease..."
She answered slowly. "You know, I think I am." she smiled at him, "I certainly have the marks and athleticism for it anyhow."
"YESSS!" screamed Davis. In his head. Silently. Very Silently.
"POLICE SOLVE TRIPLE MURDER." Blazed the headline. Aya tilted her head in interest. She was one of the detectives in the picture.
"Wonder why Daniel never told me about this," she mused aloud, "he usually loves it when we get into the newspaper. Then she realized that he was with his son Ben this week, and tended to exclude the outside world.
The itching in her eye got stronger, and she rubbed it slightly.
Cadet Brea lay in her standard Academy issue bed with an Academy Issue pillow over her face while she was trying her damnedest not to cry into it. This and past day's events drove a hot knife of pain deeper into her gut as the Academy went through the process of breaking her inside. When she had first arrived, she wondered why there were almost no other women candidates.
She knew now.
Aya frowned. Why was she thinking of the Academy now? But there was no denying that The Academy had a profound psychological effect on her. All things considered, before her training, she was very meek and introverted. When she finally graduated, and moved back in with her father until she got posted, he said that she had changed, had gotten harder, more stubborn. It saddened him she supposed, because the last vestiges of her mother and sister were gone. Stripped away when subjected to cold, hard, institutionalism.
Her eye went from itching to burning, and Aya wondered whether she had any eyedrops.
The new recruit stood at wooden attention, looking out of place in the unkempt office she was standing in, the smell of tobacco was unabated by the noisy ceiling fan. Chief Baker--however--looked entirely at home sitting behind his comfortable mess of a desk.
"Aya Brea is it?" asked Baker.
"Yes sir."
"This will be your first assignment as a Detective. Correct?"
"Yes sir."
"I heard that you came from Valgardson Academy."
"Sir?"
"I mean," said Baker leaning in his chair towards Aya, "I know what it's like there."
Silence.
Baker wore a slight expression of distaste on his face, "and knowing the rest of the NYPD, it wasn't much different when you were a lowly officer."
Again, silence from Brea. She wondered if he could tell that her knees were shaking slightly.
"Well things are different at this Precinct, I'm teaming you up with Lieutenant Daniel Dollis. Dismissed."
"Yes sir."
When she left, Chief Baker allowed the smile he had suppressed to surface. He knew all about Lieutenant Brea's problems with misogyny, he knew her psychological profile by heart. Dollis's shrewd mind, he knew through a completely different method. Experience.
"If nothing else," he chuckled to himself, "this pairing is going to be interesting."
Suddenly, the newfound pain in her eye started to spread to the rest of her body. And suddenly she recalled (not quite knowing why) the night in the car with her mother and sister, and the odd sensation travelling up her arm before the car met with fate. And oblivion.
Her eyes were glazed when she slowly picked up the Entertainment section of the newspaper, almost as if it were in reflex, she would later only clearly remember one thing.
The hand that started to flip through the newsprint, the hand of which Aya never gave much thought of, simply developed a mind of it's own. It wasn't hers anymore!
Then the misty state she was in stopped. Noise returned. Vision cleared and the first thing that Aya's eyes fell on with her regained lucidness, was a small advertisement, near the bottom of the page.
It was for an upcoming Opera at Carnagie Hall on Christmas Eve, she furrowed her brow.
"Go," whispered a small voice in her mind, "you have to."
Aya snapped out of her daydream. What was she thinking of again? Ah yes, going to the Opera. She needed a date. How about Scott Campbell, the city councillor's son? True he was a bit over impressed with himself, but still if nothing else...
It would get that man off her back and stop the endless calls and messages he left her.
And, uncaring of the overcasual clothes she was attired in, she grabbed her coat and keys and armed with the knowledge of a excellent dress shop, went out the door to start off a chain of events that would cause her to later wonder on the subjects of Luck, Kismet, Cause and Effect, of Fate...
...or...Of Destiny.