Characters: Yuan
Rating/Warnings: T; mentions of discrimination, etc.
The morning looks bleak.
The sky is an ugly shade of gray, clouds spreading thicker and thicker in metallic sheets across the usually-blue expanse. The wind comes in great gusts, tangling everybody's hair and turning them right around into confusion. Wind-chimes crack into each other with loud, hollow thunks, ripped quite suddenly of their normal, whimsical music.
A storm's coming, everyone in the town can tell; it's that season, after all. Roughly two weeks before the leaves on the trees begin to change, storms — thunder, lightning, wind — wreak havoc on the little village, throwing many of the roofs to shambles and causing many of the inhabitants to take shelter in the old caves.
Nobody complains, though. The weather has been like this for as long as anyone can remember, and that's that.
A young man, perhaps in his early twenties, stands in the back corner of the cave with his head tucked low to his chest and a cape wrapped tightly around his thin frame. If not for his bright teal-blue hair, he would seem to melt entirely into the shadows.
People in town seem to avoid him. It isn't overt, but it is noticeable: how they all give him a fairly wide birth, the way they speak to him — short, quick replies, almost edging away from entering a conversation — even the way they stand around him. There is something about this man that makes people uncomfortable, and he's well aware of what it is.
Being a half-elf is, in his words, rather unfortunate.
But he considers himself lucky, in a way. The people of his town don't hit him or abuse him or, now that he thinks about it, punish him any worse than they might someone of their own, pure-blooded human race. Anywhere else, he knows, he would be much worse off.
Even then...
There are some lines that have been engraved for generations. They cannot be crossed, they cannot be rewritten, they cannot be ignored. Even if people strove to get along with other races, there will always be that same discomfort, that wary instinct prickling at the backs of their necks. Being honest, the niceties are an act; everybody knows they don't mean a thing. People are afraid of the unknown — they always have been, and chances are, they always will be.
Yuan knows this.
He's accepted it.
And, if he's still being honest, he hates it.