+ Fallacy, a 100themes Challenge +
Sarehptar
Theme: 3, Light
Characters: Kharl, Garfakcy
Pairing: None
Warnings: None
Need to Know Info: None
Title Provider: Fake Wings (.Hack)
Keep Your Eyes on Me, Now We are On the Edge of Hell…
Rose, White: Innocence, Purity, Secrecy, Silence.
There is something wrong, inherently wrong about us. I have ignored it; I have hidden it under the millions of more pressing things, but at times like these, in the quiet and the peace of a fading day, it is hard to ignore. It is growing harder.
For once, he is silent, working steadily with a hand that is more skilled than he will admit, a hand that is more skilled than any child's should be—but that is it, isn't it? I cannot help but cringe. This tiny, breakable creature is no child. He is hardly a hundred years younger than me. Inside that fragile skull there is a mind as sharp and calculating as any scholar, as any demon. Inside those tiny hands, centuries of wisdom, of experience, of age, sit ready to be wielded as powerfully as any blade. He hisses in indignation as he spots another weed, and dives into the carefully trimmed bushes to end the offending life.
He rages at it, takes personal affront to its presence, as if by having let it grow even one leaf, he has failed somehow. Maybe he has—the rest of the world will not expect anything of a little boy; he must set standards for himself. For a moment, it seems terrible, seems cruel and unsettling, and my hands itch inside my immaculate white gloves. As if someone has taken my old eyes away, I can see him for a moment as a stranger might: he is unnatural, purely and unchangingly foreign. For that second, I can not help but wonder how I stand every day knowing that he is and he is not real. A baby, a child, a monster, a murderer? It is as if I have polluted something…
How can he stand it? To wake everyday in a child's body and know that there are things he will never be able to do? How must it feel to look at every opponent and see them as so much bigger than he knows they are? How can his violent pride stand it—how can he not hate his own form every time he needs a stool to reach the cabinets? When he sits beside me, his feet don't touch the floor. When he has to leap to reach anything, it must sting like a reopened wound. And what do we all look like to him? Sinistra must seem cumbersomely giant when she curls up beside him, and he must lift his hand to pet her head.
He straightens suddenly, his normally browned skin darker today from dirt and sweat. He is bathed in the golden haze of the afternoon sun, and it makes his tiny form ethereal. His long hair, the black strands that never grow any longer, glint an orange-blue in the light, a color I have never seen before. Emerald eyes half shut against the glare, he turns to me and smiles—a child's smile, shining with simple happiness and innocence and a warmth that I could never hope to mimic.
"All finished Master Kharl!" His perpetually young voice chirps.
There is something inherently wrong with him, with me… But I want to ignore it a while longer.
