Uh, this is short and could probably be better, but I've taken too much time getting around to writing it as it is. School's started and all, and I have no free time anymore… ;;_;; I promise the next part will be longer and more up to my usual standards.
I realized recently that Merle wasn't in the story. At all. And I need to start rectifying that, since she's such a central character where Van is concerned. So, she makes her belated debut now.
PS: begging me to write faster will make me feel guilty, and I will write faster. ^^;
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She left his room before the sun rose, in the dark, fumbling and stumbling for her clothing lest the dawn catch her by surprise. Selena kissed Van on the forehead, lips moist as the dew and her glowing skin the only aurora he needed in the world. She said nothing as she carefully carried out her task, and the awful, eerie suspicion slithered up his back with cold scales that he had done something wrong.
"I love you," he muttered, hopelessly, dejection settling out of the fluid night prior, firmly lodging upon his soul.
And she said nothing.
He said it again.
Her sigh was the roar of a terrible tornado in his ears, her cry a cyclone inescapable even now, even so many hours after it rang in his ears, inarticulate with the terror that if she said any name at all, the result would cost her the only affection she had. She muddled her letters and sighed words that were safe for any man to hear, hollow of the risk she might break a heart.
And now she sighed another time, and finally replied, "You're lucky I have no one else in this world, Van Fanel. Not like I have you."
If he was not puzzled by the response, then her sad smile and her sweet, solemn kiss were enough to displace him from the realm of any assurance. The question haunted him in a way his nemesis never had, the specter of her overriding Hitomi's, her image replacing hers, her presence overwhelming hers, her shape supplanting hers as a passing wisp in his arms, her voice screaming and gasping and crying out nothing echoing with something sinister just loud enough to drown out every memory of Hitomi's soft assurances and frantic predictions.
He felt used, but at the same time had the guilty insight that Selena shared the sentiment.
In a rare and grudging concession of bafflement, he confided with the passage of a torturous week, "Merle, I don't understand girls."
His friend's curt reply was deceptively simple and condescending: "Buy her something."
Allen had covered that front entirely too thoroughly already for it to do anything but repel Selena. "She's not like that," he murmured helplessly. "She doesn't want anything I can give her."
Merle could only say, annoyed with him but more upset at any girl who would spurn him, "Then she doesn't deserve you."
That wasn't the way Van saw it at all. Selena stood, not far away, dressed in gray and holding her brother's arm, walking like dormant butterfly with the potential to burst from ash into a fiery brilliance at any moment. The energy of her transformations alone far exceeded the tolerance of any normal mortal. The suppression of Dilandau's passion and impulses gave showed her immense, inhuman self-control.
There were two things a being like her could possibly be, and he knew which she was: a goddess or a soldier.
No, he didn't deserve her.