idiosyncrasies
– because her hair was black and her eyes were blue. YOHIOloid/Avanna
A long time ago, when he was a little boy who could believe in castles built in the sky and mermaids singing to him from the aquarium of his fishes, he fell asleep and saw the perfect woman. Her hair was black, her eyes were blue and her face was perfect – a thousand ships would have launched for her, a million men would have died for her – and he spent the dream staring, marvelling at what the theatre of the night had brought him.
When he woke up from the dream and stared into the white, rough ceiling of his bedroom from the folds of his blankets he thought he could still hear her laughing somewhere from the misty realms of sleep he'd just departed from.
/
But that's all a very long time ago. Now he's near adulthood and he dreams of writing a novel. He dreams of a story that tells the tale of a girl – a girl whose name and face change constantly – and he wants to give this nonexistent girl life and immortality.
It is his first year in the final frontier of being a minor – welcome, high school – and he decides that he will finish this story before he graduates. Ambitions are a man's way, and five years is plenty a time for a story to be written.
He'll let it play out in the theatre of his mind's eye – he'll be a scribe who'll record the play that will make his raven-haired heroine a star.
/
i. the siren
He writes about a woman with hair like midnight's black and eyes like the deep ocean's depths. She is a temptress in the cold, salty sea who calls sailors to her with her song on nights when the full moon waltzes slowly, high amongst the stars. She calls them to her and takes them into her cold embrace – their last embrace – and takes all she can because she is empty within her beautiful shell.
Why? She once lost a love, a long, long time ago to the sea. She wept for days until out of sadness she slipped and fell into the foaming waves off the cliff where she waited, singing a swan song of despair and broken hearts until the end – only, it wasn't the end, not for her, who was forcibly given another chance. Her tears, once hot with anguish cooled rapidly into ice-cold apathetic hunger like the ocean that became her home, and she became a gluttonous witch who craved the souls of men.
Black ink on blank, cream, smooth, thick paper. The words are beautiful – until they are not. Until the actors inside his head toss off their costumes and wipe away the paints before running off stage, leaving him, the scribe, left without any more words to continue on.
Then, they become a mar on what could have been perfection in limitless potentials.
He locks the notebook filled with scribbles in a drawer, unable to throw it away yet repulsed by his very creation.
/
Is black hair common? Perhaps – but not where he lives and acts.
She is new. She has black hair. She has blue eyes.
Remembering a character of his planned and abandoned magnum opus, he introduces himself and shakes her hand. The blue stone beads on her bracelet clink together as her freckled face breaks into a wide smile.
Her name is Avanna.
They become fast friends, but that is not what makes him first notice the things about her that could be fate. He's seen this before he's known her.
Her hair is black. Her eyes are blue.
But she is not his abandoned character, and she does not make him want to revive his locked-away story.
/
That's not to say that he doesn't start a new one.
/
ii. the lovers
"Let's write a song," he suggests, strumming a guitar. The sun is out above their heads in its noon position and they avoid direct contact by hiding under the parasol of a tree woven together by a hundred, a thousand, a million leaves. What light that manages to come through is filtered green and her white dress appears to have been dyed light verdant. Shadows dance across her bare arms like moving tattoos, flittering skittishly and indecisively.
"About what?" she laughs and her laugh is one of the silver bells. Her skin is flawless, her hair is like shining obsidian – you could see your reflection within those silk strands, you could – and her eyes are like the summer sky.
A chord strikes sour but he continues on until the sounds coaxed from the cracked old instrument are somewhat sweet in the air of the lazy day. "I don't know," he says.
They spend the rest of the day making up silly rhymes and half-rhymes that don't fit in with the rhythm of the tune, and forget what they've sung when the sun begins to retire. The guitar lies forgotten next to them, and shivering at the dropping temperature, they huddle together and watch the once-blue sky painted in shades of pale orange, gold, pink, purple and red.
"I think I'd like to die like that," she tells him when finally, the canvas of the skies are blacked out by night's darkness. "Beautifully."
And that's where the movie pauses. He pauses, too. The pen quivers, dips and rises over the paper like an indecisive hawk – but hawks are beautiful, predatory birds, sure and swift in their actions, in their hunts – and never once does the tip touch the paper again.
He is not a hawk. He is torn and suddenly lacking of a muse that keeps the film rolling and him writing.
Try again, and he dips his beak down close to the paper where a dot is made by the rough ink of the cheap ballpoint pen on the lined paper –
No, no, stop.
His hand jerks up. That's not what he wants. That's not what he is. He is a simple scribe who writes the story of others when it plays out in his theatre, without script or true directing and he cannot write if the actors do not act.
He opens the drawer – only to toss in another notebook of now-silly notions. And he makes sure it is well-locked before placing the figurative key safe and close to his heart. The actual key is tossed in his sock drawer.
/
Her laugh isn't really the laugh of bells like he wrote – it's a loud guffaw and sometimes she sounds more like a hysterical crow than anything.
But she sincerely, seriously laughs at his jokes and words and efforts even when it's not funny, so he finds it somewhat pleasing to hear.
/
iii. the elf
The poem of a merciless, mystical lady wandering within the woods sends chills down his spine. It also sends him down the road of the supernatural again – but not on waters again, as alluring as the idea of ripples and waves may be. On solid ground in emerald forests does his new story take place, with a raven-haired elf searching for revenge the focus of his camera, the star of his pen. She wears green, carries protective stones of lapis lazuli carved into protective charms that match the shade of her eyes and has locks like the feathers of wise ravens who observe all from their branches like little gods.
There is something about the woman that makes mere mortals fall upon their knees – make them question life – and stay enchanted as she takes away what binds them as solid beings to this world, entrapping them forever as wraiths to wander for all of eternity searching for an impossible object.
Immortality bores his heroine and it bores him, the director – the journal joins his other works within the dungeon of the drawer.
The scribe doesn't even feel regret at watching the notebook leave his sight. Not anymore.
/
"What's your favourite fairy tale?"
It's a dumb trivia game they're playing and she's drawn the card about personal facts.
He decides to be honest. "Snow White."
And then, the director in him leans across the infinite-yet-small space within his mind to put close his grinning mouth to the sleeping scribe's ears, and says, because all princesses who deserve happy endings need not have hair like flax or spun gold or sunlight.
The hypocrisy - he is as blond as they come. But a new movie's prologue begins to play in his head and the background music is like a cheerful, piping flute bringing new winds to fill a tired and drooping sail. The scribe wakes up and finds himself in a theatre once more, pen and paper all its maximum possibilities again.
/
iv. the princess
And happy endings are a wonderful end to a 'once upon a time' but once upon a time fairy tales were bloody and horrific and so very nearly tragic a great many times.
Snow White is a lovely story of pseudo-deaths, peaceful sleeps, glass coffins, attempted murder, possible necrophilia, and a prince charming with the literal mother of all kisses of life packaged and painted with dissociation as a children's tale where the most evil things were disguising oneself out of jealousy and the most dramatic event taking gifts from strangers. Or, at least, that's how he sees it, no longer a child who thinks his goldfish are talking to him through bubbles and nervous movements. He wants to show the truths of it, make it a gothic, realistic fairytale where the perfect happy ending has been marred.
Perhaps it was the matter of a power struggle. Perhaps the princess with night-shaded hair with streaks of shining stars and pale blue eyes like ice was simply unwilling to be a pawn of the gray chess game life was just as she was unwilling to be her stepmother's rival for the title of the most beautiful.
And he writes a story where the queen is but one of many spiders that twirl and command pieces on the gray-and-grayer chessboard of life, where the princess fast-losing her naivety is nearly hopelessly entangled with the sticky spider-silk thread of politics as she tries to be unaffected by the power struggle and where the prince is but a suitor who tries his luck in the possible arrangements of marriage, a bond and a farce of love.
Or he tries. Movies, after all, rarely go past three hours and this is a wonderfully intricate storyline that cannot last as long as his imagination's stamina. His luck does not last and neither does his drive.
Just to the part of her faux-death, he begs his inner self – he bargains with himself, pleading, whining and even threatening to continue and to write on like a man.
It does not work; he cannot take his own threats seriously and the drive is as good as dead before he's even reached the protagonist's temporary death. He gives up on continuing and into the demonic temptation of abandonment – his still-unfinished notebook is thrown into the drawer on top of three more just like it, banished from sight.
His goal doesn't seem important – fancies of younger, foolish times – and he thinks that it's a hobby, but should be nothing more.
/
It's lunch, and amongst the aimless chatter flying all around he lets it slip to her that he wants to write a novel. Did he do it on purpose, or was it a true mistake, an accident of his loosened tongue and a careless act on his part?
She just smiles. "You'll have to let me read it one day."
"Maybe," he shrugs, slightly relieved – at what? "But I doubt I'll ever finish."
"Still," and she makes him pinky-swear above a half-eaten sandwiches and a thermos filled with tomato soup. "I want to read it when you're done."
They're in high school – realistically he's too young to be a proper novelist and in terms of maturity and pride too old to be taking promises sealed with little fingers seriously – but he promises.
And a new idea comes up. It fits to him and that night he opens a new notebook, crossing his fingers in hope that this one, hopefully, will get finished before he becomes an adult.
/
The heroine has flaws. She cannot dance without looking like a flustered duck, her face has freckles across her nose and cheeks, her laugh sounds like a crow's cry as it flies in a murder and, contrary to her preferred colour, she does not possess the green thumb because every plant she touches dies a horrible, shriveled death. She cannot pronounce certain words correctly – 'debt' with a 'b', 'often' with a 't' – she laughs off her mistakes and takes a long time to learn a lesson.
But her hair is black and her eyes are blue.
/
She does not ask about the story again.
If she did, he would have paused and given a vague answer. He knows he would have. And then somehow, through some equally vague means such as the butterfly effect where one slight flutter of gossamer wings led to a chaos-inducing storm, he would have found that the movie's film was cut and that his inner drive to write in the continuous world had died, bringing on the eternal writer's block to that world.
But she's always been intuitive in a blind way. She only laughs her crow's laugh, tosses her slightly ruffled black hair and continues to be his friend.
And he continues to write his story, pausing in between instead of quitting. The movie is made into a series of shows, running on and on and on until reaching the finale of the season with promises of more to come.
/
"One day," she tells him as she hugs him tightly, heavily leaning on him for support because she is standing on the tip of her toes to reach his ears. It is their graduation and he is not even halfway done the story that's grown past the notebook stage. He is typing it all into his computer and plans on continuing to polish the draft until he deems it done.
It may possibly take years.
"One day?" he asks when she lets him go and lowers herself back to her feet.
"One day," she nods and ruffles his hair into a crow's nest of messed pale gold, "you're going to be an author."
That's all she says on the matter, and maybe that's all that needed to be said.
/
Later, much later when years have passed from that graduation day, when his story is complete and he finally becomes the author he wanted to be he smiles at the first edition copy, tapping the hard cover to remind himself that this is not a dream or a hopeful story but reality, come at last as a blessing, for once.
He opens the green-bound novel with the shamrock's swirls embossed in gold on the cover and the spine. It cracks as all new, unbroken books do in the beginning, smelling of sharp paper and acrid ink. The book's prologue starts with the same words the book's epilogue ends with; because her hair was black and her eyes were blue.
And, in the dedications, it says two words.
To Avanna.
AN: Inspiration and title from 'Galway Girl' by Sharon Shannon & Mundy, a song introduced to me by a friend. For Ryuchu's Under-Appreciated Vocaloid Pairings Contest.