Dark shadows were hiding in the corners of the wide, lit up room. Cool air filled the inside of it, and the lights were bright and steady on the ceiling. Teresa sat at the wooden and metal table, her eyes staring off to space in front of her, her arms crossed on the table with her head wrapped in them. Her arms covered half of her face, revealing damp purple eyes and a cold, cooling face. She sat uncomfortably and carelessly in the old wooden chair, lost in her won thoughts, her eyes wandering off in a trance. No improvements had been made since Minoa had talked to her.
"Show me how to use those eyes," Teresa remembered asking Minoa with a strong willed voice. She was confident to learn back then, referring to the Visible Darkness eyes that belonged to the two relatives only, the two at least five hundred years apart.
"Let me ask you something. What do you think of good and bad things?" Minoa had asked her, surprising her with the sudden topic of question. Teresa answered truthfully, saying that there was no such thing as good things, and that bad things scarred you for life. That's what she really believed, and after hearing her words, Minoa rejected her.
She found a little of her confidence again over time… but then, she lost it again, crushed by the same people. How am I supposed to pay them back… pay myself back, if I can't do anything?! Teresa thought, echoing off her trancelike state, her eyes dull and showing no emotion whatsoever. Her purple hair swept in front o her face lightly, tickling her cheeks and tickling her nose with its gentle, delicate touch. Violet eyes glimmered in the old light above, and warm yet cold arms wrapped around her mouth.
She had awoken that morning sad, finding herself in all of these new clothes. She didn't really care how they did it or why they wanted her to wear these things, but she didn't care at this point. She'd wear the ugliest clothes in the world if she had to, just to find her confidence back. Just a sliver of it, an ounce. But no amount ever came. She wore this netted vest underneath a long sleeve, sweater like ebony purple shirt with the longest sleeves ever, reminding her of her old straightjacket. Long shorts came with them as well, grim and gray in color, her old, worn out and dirt caked sneakers now old Asian slippers. The sleeves were so big and wide, it went inches past her fingertips. It kept her warm, and somewhat safe on the inside, but never deep enough for her needs.
Teresa's mouth curled into a shivering frown behind her constricting arms, almost suffocating even to breathe. A cold tear stayed at the side of her face, her back slanted to such an extent that it seemed lazy, only her arms resting her head on the table, the only support she had. Teresa shut her eyes, closing her trance and trying to make a deeper one for her to fall into, so she could forget everything that ever happened to her. She still was not convinced that everything she had gone through in her so called "life" was real. What was real? Was it something I all ready experienced, Teresa thought. Or is it something I have yet to even scratch? To even surface on top of on? Just how the hell do I know that I'm not hallucinating a life? Her eyelids were shut tightly, pushing all the blood into them, feeling the warmth wrap around her retina with a bare touch. She sniffed as her nose felt moist and began to dry, wishing her lost stare in the violet pool to go away, trying to call upon a much advanced, more helpful type of sight.
With force, Teresa opened her eyes, confident yet hopeless to pour something out, something new from her eyes. She felt no change, and from the outside, she was right. I saw them when I was younger…Teresa realized. How come I can't use Visible Darkness anymore? What have a I lost? Nothing's really changed, has it? Teresa thought, giving up on a solution to her problem and sighing. She sat up a bit straighter and ran fingers through her stringy hair, feeling the comfort of the damp, unique hair color. A piece of her felt missing. Something wasn't right anymore.
Suddenly, the door slid open from the side of the room. It opened quietly, sliding into the interior of the adjacent wall. The redwood entrance was soon out of sight, and Teresa settled back to her original state, wrapping the bottom of her face in a tight lock of her large sleeved arms. The door slid with a rolling sound against the plaster floor, an impossible sound to not take attention of.
From the side of the room, barely away from Teresa's c corner of her eye, someone walked in. All in his new clothes, he had a tight expression on his face, as if he were mad, yet kind at the same time. It was Kahibi Eric, the Fire Minor.
He walked slowly with a pace of a snail, his new clothes getting a while to get used to him, and vice-versa. He no longer wore his bandanna with the fire logo on it. Now he donned a plain red bandanna that kept his head looking elliptical. His eyes were as dark and secretive as ever. Eric wore a regular black short sleeved shirt underneath an old style Japanese coat with no collar, or much shoulder support. The coat was red, and over his heart was an image of a tree branch sticking out, its glossy, bushy leaves just growing naturally. It was to represent respect for all plants that helped kept fire alive. Eric's coat's sleeves were no longer than past his bicep, and he wore a sash-like strip of fabric that was colored red on his finger, having the Japanese word for fire written in black on it. The ribbon wrapped around his finger like a snake of blood red colors. He wore fingerless gloves as well, colored a bright red with a white written word for fire in Japanese as well. He wore dark blue cotton pants that were rolled up to the midsection of his forelegs, and his feet donned the click-clack slippers that some of the Minors had been forced to worn.
Not caring for his opinion, Eric walked forward toward Teresa, the clicking and clacking of his shoes hard against the floor, almost to a point where it annoyed someone. Teresa seemed to not care or notice, keeping her head directed at the same position as it always had been since that morning, staring off into space as if something phenomenal was taking place before her very eyes. The only phenomenal thing that she saw today is the amount of time she thought and cried over and over again like a pattern. The wooden knock of his shoes neared more and more, until it finally stopped, the eighteen year old boy appearing in front of the Mind Minor, both parties sure that she had noticed him by now.
Teresa didn't seem to care and continued to stare off into space. Her eyes were dead with boredom and half closed in sadness. Her eyes glimmered glassily a bit more until finally dying out, like drying in the dim lights. Eric stared back at her with an expressionless stare.
"What's the matter?" he said quietly at first, picking up the left side of his coat with his right gloved hand, the coat slanting off of his shoulders, a little too big for the broad shouldered teen.
Teresa didn't answer. She didn't show any reaction of acknowledging his presence, even though she really did inside. Eric's large shadow fell upon Teresa, her eyes darkening, her glimpses less tearful now. The sixteen year old girl gave a short sigh under her breath that only she could hear, and looked up slowly. Her eyes wandered upward, meeting with Eric's shadowy stare, his figure traced by the darkened lights. "What do you care? It's not your problem," Teresa muttered quietly, returning her stare back downward, falling into her spacey trance again,
"For one thing, I heard you whimpering outside for a while now. People in a state of pain bother me. And another thing… from the look in your eyes… you're obviously worrying about something," Eric explained, sighing deeply and then snaking his arms around each other, intertwining them in an eternity of a lock. His appealing, strong forearms would've surprised normal people, but Teresa basically didn't have a care in the world for something materialistic.
"Why should I tell you something to amuse you? My sadness is not to be your treasures," Teresa said quietly, her words coming from her heart. Her stare was like so completely dull, it seemed like she was being possessed by a spirit who had forgotten how to use any bodily functions except speaking, and was talking dully and mysteriously through the voice of the Mind Minor. Oh, how Teresa wished that was true.
"My treasures? Something like that being a treasure to someone is overrated," Eric stated loudly and clearly, shifting to his left a little, letting some light fall on Teresa's face. Teresa didn't answer. It was like his words were processing through a computer.
"I…I don't want connections," Teresa stated demandingly, closing her eyes in resistance, deciding to no longer talk to the fellow Minor she barely knew. She didn't plan to get to know anyone in the rest of the group anyway. Although, deep inside her thoughts, she knew it was almost impossible to do. She was even failing right now.
Eric sighed loudly and a bit annoyingly. He shut his eyes as well, but reopened them a second later to find Teresa staring blank off into space again, her circle stare like a glare that was waiting for something to happen. Not once did she even glimpse away from her target that was nonexistent. "If my not being happy is the case," Teresa said, breaking her promise all ready. For some reason, she couldn't help it. She didn't know if she was that desperate to let her problems out, or if she just found him interesting. Either way, she didn't plan on making the growing bond with someone last long. There's no time for those kinds of things anyway, she thought. "Then you don't look too happy as well on your part," she told Eric, the boy putting a look of finally being caught on his face, the portrayal of it obvious and genuine.
"I've had my own problems in the past, you know," he told her, moving a little more to the left, more ceiling light spilling on the left side of Teresa's face. "You're not the only one going through these problems. The Water Minor has problems, too. And who knows who else."
Teresa shifted her stare slightly to her right to find Eric staring back at her with a stare tainted with different emotions, yet unreadable, as if he were a painting that had the portrayal of a varying mixture of colors everywhere, so well mixed and hidden that it was confusing and baffling to just look at it, just to take a short glimpse at it. She looked at him longer, until he finally realized what she was asking for without words.
"Fine, I get your point," Eric told, a few of his mixed colors wearing off, as if sliding off the picture like it was a splotch on glass. "To put a long story short, I was an idiot who made a promise he didn't plan out to keep, and in the end, lost both his parents by someone I still don't know, and just had to leave my village for a new life."
Teresa didn't answer. She knew there was more to it. And when she fake-begged with her eyes, he followed. She had scorned him for the apparent attempt of using problems of the past and present as an interesting story to remember in the future, but now, she was doing the same thing to him, but really, at this point, she really didn't care. Eric sighed as he continued. "I thought if I was strong, I could've protected the people I cared about. How stupid I was," he scoffed, turning to the right to avoid eye contact for the last part. He shifted most of his weight to one leg now, feeling a bit nervous that he was finally letting out his past that he had never told anyone before, because there was no one next to him to tell it to. "A test, was what I thought. Yeah, life was a stupid test. And I messed up on it. Bad. But that doesn't mean I can't go back and erase my decisions of the past. I can make that value up, with the best answers I can give in the future."
Life's a test? Teresa scoffed in the depth of her thoughts. Protecting the ones you care for? Her thoughts raced again. This is why I don't make connections. That's why I try to avoid people as much as I can. You'll always end up failing the people you care about one way or another, and as a result, you just get hurt in the end. It's pointless to do that kind of slow suicide on you.
"Without people to care for, I had to find new people. And that's just it. That's what I think and what I went through," Eric stated the last piece.
"Protection, huh?" Teresa said in her quiet, blunt voice. "That's something I can't do, even if I wanted to." I'm just too weak, she thought loudly in her mind, slapping herself in the interior depths and corners of her mind.
"I'm part of the Miroku Branch of a family," Teresa began explaining. Eric listened closely. He was surprised she had decided to tell him all of a sudden. The wooden table tilted a bit as Eric solemnly took a seat at the opposite side of the table. Now, electric lights fell upon both of them, wrapping around them in invisible warmth that was never felt. As she felt the seconds pass by, she felt her connections grow stronger, her shields weaker, and her panics stronger. "I recently found out that my family has an ability to see ghosts – the child of every ninety-seven generations," Teresa noted, the bottom half of her face still wrapped in her protective, failing arms. "That ability's called Visible Darkness, and then when I became the Mind Minor, I realized that mine was stronger than all five of the Base Minor elements combined, which gave me the sense I had a lot of power."
Eric nodded along with a solemn look on his face that made him look a bit tough, like he was a strong person capable of what he said he wanted to do – to protect the ones he cared about. Teresa continued with the monotonous tone and quiet voice. "Before I actually knew that my ability was named Visible Darkness, the people of my village labeled me as crazy, and put me in a mental hospital in an accusation of psychotic murder. How stupid I was to have told them that 'Ghosts killed my boyfriend and parents.' But even so , after spending three years in a place like that, I began to believe that I really was crazy, that my life wasn't real – it was all a hallucination. As time passed on, I realized that I couldn't make connections. Somewhere along the line, the spirits came back, and I believed that if I ever made more connections, it would just hurt me even more. Making connections with others means breaking them after a while. A year, a set of months, days, maybe even minutes a connection can start and end horribly."
Eric cleared his throat as she stopped talking, swallowing all of this in. He looked calm through the whole thing, but somewhere along the mosaic of different colors, he realized that he couldn't keep cool-headed deep on the inside for long. Teresa continued, this time adding a bit more tone to her voice, remembering her happy memories that she claimed later to be fake, tears beginning to form at the bottom edges of her eyes, ready to stroll down and be liberated. "Now knowing that connections were useless in my life of forgotten identity, I went on a Half-Spirit power outburst, killing hundreds of people in the mental hospital I was locked up in. I knew that kind of thing wasn't right, and even if my life was real or not, I had to pay off the debt I gave myself. And for another thing, too, that I really don't want to talk about right now. Now, knowing that Minoa-sama won't teach me Visible Darkness, and knowing that I can hurt myself or even kill… myself during exercising my element, I feel powerless. Without the ability to change things, how can I pay off my debt. Someone like me is just completely useless."
Eric sighed through his nostrils. He didn't feel like using his mouth for anything else other than talking. "You can," was all he said after a short while.
"What?" Teresa said, narrowing her stare in suspicion and a bit of confusion. She wrapped her arms around her face tighter, like a constricting boa.
"You can protect. You do have the ability to do so. Trust me, I know it. I've lived through it," Eric said, a bit reassuring, but that kind of thing only lasted minutes, Teresa knew.
"Tch, why should I take your word for it? You may not even be real in my life anyway. You could just be another hallucination – another, separate life I created in my own fantasy that I find myself stuck in," Teresa stated strongly in a rising voice, her monotony fading away into a loud, demanding yell of anger and emptying. "Even if my life is real, you're just a stupid connection I accidentally made. This conversation has been officially marked pointless!" she cried out, the first tear streaking down her face, releasing the suffocating hold of her long purple sleeves, Eric finally able to see all of her face that screamed for help deep inside her piercing, violet eyes.
Eric looked hard at the cool wooden surface of the table. He ran his tanned hand through it, his large fingers trickling the runny surface. "Well, then, if what you say is true," he muttered out in a slight voice. Teresa widened her stare a bit with streaking tears that wouldn't leave. "And that connections are really pointless, then what if…"
Teresa continued to listen carefully, not realizing that there could ever be a person – or hallucination out there that could talk about the things she never expected them to talk about. Eric continued in a steady voice full of emotion. "What if two people have a connection all ready, and one of them reads a note, saying that connections are pointless, and you're the one who gets hurt in the end by the other person. Then the other person sees it lying around, and starts to believe in it as well. Then, who's the one who gets hurt in the end?"
Teresa cried out in disbelief. She couldn't answer the question. Why couldn't she answer the question?! Hours and hours, days and days, months and years worth of thinking and she never came across this kind of scenario? Am I really crazy? Teresa thought, her violet orbs shaking almost violently enough that settled in her eyes. The dim lights seemed to grow increasingly stronger, reflecting off her eyes, like hitting a mirror, and making Eric's structures seem more angelic as he continued his words. "How can anyone get hurt like that if both of them think the other one is going to hurt them in the end? If they are truly scared of losing the other one, then they will not harm the other one, since they do not want to give that feeling to the other person. So if it goes like this, then, how will the connection end by someone getting pushed away?" the insightful Fire Minor spilled out his new thought.
Teresa looked down at her bare feet. The bases of her toes were outline with the slipper parts, and the cool air trickled between her toes as she moved them around, like she were playing piano with them. She sighed as she continued to look down, her violet hair falling in front of her face, her mind and body not giving a care in the world for the few strands that fell to the front at all. Her eyes were completely shaded away by her bent head, as if she had become more depressed by talking to someone, and finally answering his question, she stated, "One of them die."