This is weird. I have no idea what anyone thinks of this. These first few chapters were mainly to get to know Elysia better-the next one picks up with the manga.
When Elysia woke up the next morning, she still had thirty minutes to get ready before she left for school. She decided to take her time eating, and made some toast to go along with her customary cereal. In her uniform, she hid her sai again, along with a few jackknifes. It was best to be prepared, because with her luck, bad things would happen.
Elysia locked the door securely behind her, jogging down the steps from her apartment. As she was walking down the sidewalk, she saw familiar brown hair. A smile lit Elysia's face, "Tsu-kun!"
He jumped, spinning around to face her, "E-Elysia-sempai!"
"Good morning Tsu-kun, how are you?"
"I'm well t-thanks. How are you?"
"I'm good." They walked shoulder-to-shoulder down the sidewalk, conversing lightly. Elysia tried to get to know him better, shooting off questions like a machine gun, "What's your favorite color? What kind of music do you like? Do you play any games? What are your parents like?"
Tsu-kun answered to the best of his ability, putting forth some of the same questions to her when he could. "Elysia-sempai, how long have you lived here?"
"Ah," She did some figuring in her head, "Three years, I think."
"But you know the language so well!"
"There was," –Gramps smiled, brown eyes crinkling as she mispronounced yet another word—Dark blood on the floor she had cleaned that morning, spreading in a pool around the prone body—"a nice man who taught me everything he could."
Not to mention, Elysia smiled bitterly, the benefits of full emersion.
"Oh, I see." Tsu-kun looked at her hesitantly, before dropping the subject. They talked through the walk to Namimori, stopping only when they had to separate to go to class. Elysia couldn't wait for school to end; Tsu-kun said he was going to take her to his home.
Tsu-kun was waiting for her again at the gates, and he smiled as she approached, "Ready?"
"Yeah," she smiled back. "Let's go."
As Tsu-kun lead her to his house, Elysia kept note of the route, mentally playing out a way to get there from her apartment. It would be handy if she had to help him at some point, like she thinks he might.
Tsu-kun opened the front door wide, calling out, "Mom, I'm home! I brought a friend!"
A small woman came hurrying through the doorway from the kitchen, a smile on her face, "Tsu-kun! I didn't know you had any friends!"
Elysia blinked. Tsu-kun desperately tried to shush his mom, but she completely ignored him, "So, what's your name?" Sawada-san smiled, "And thank you for befriending my no good son."
"Ah, I'm Redwin Elysia. It's nice to meet you Sawada-san." Elysia bowed to hide her irritation that Tsu-kun's mom also used that stupid and untrue nickname, and Sawada-san giggled, "Please, call me Nana."
Tsu-kun grabbed her arm, "Mom, I'm going to show Elysia-sempai my room. Can you call us for dinner?" He dragged her up the stairs, tripping once, but managing to catch himself and continue. "Here," he opened a door with a tuna fish on it.
Elysia took in the messy room, and chalked it up to the fact that he was a teenage boy.
They spent the time doing homework, Elysia helping Tsu-kun mainly, and playing video games. Dinner was a lively affair, because Tsu-kun was almost constantly flailing about, trying to keep his mom from saying embarrassing things.
She left when it was just getting dark out, waving bye to Nana and Tsu-kun, and promising to come back soon. As Elysia walked the streets, the smile on her face diminished to nothing and she made sure to keep her head down.
Elysia ignored the cat-calls from gang members, walking quickly but not running. Hearing footsteps behind her, she readied herself, feeling the punch coming—Duilio scowled at the blindfolded girl, gray eyes threatening. 'You,' he roared, 'need to sense!', slamming the little body into the floor—and ducked, grabbing the outstretched arm by the wrist with her left hand, pulling forward. With her right, she jabbed at the spots above his elbow and slightly under the shoulder, deadening his arm. Using the guy's momentum, Elysia tossed him over her head.
Without looking back she took off down a nearby alley, agilely dodging various trashcans and homeless people. She heard the man's friends come after her, the less athletic cursing when they ran into the obstacles she had avoided. When Elysia saw the dead-end she bared her teeth in an imitation of a smile, and jumped up the side wall, before jumping of that and grabbing the top of the dead-end. Hauling herself up, she landed lightly on her feet on the other side, sprinting off again.
Elysia stopped when she didn't hear any signs of pursuit after a few minutes, coming out of an alley to a sidewalk. She caught her breath, and sneaked up to the opening, carefully looking left and right down the street to be sure the men were not out there. Seeing a suspiciously empty street, not even any peddlers or pedestrians, she melted back into the shadows, examining the alley. Elysia's green eyes picked out a rusty fire escape and she smiled.
Grabbing the rungs, she pulled herself to the roof, hopping over the side. The roof itself was rather bare, thankfully. Turning around, Elysia measured the distance between the roof she was on, and its neighbor. Nodding to herself, she jogged to the other end of the roof.
Taking a calming breath, she sprinted across the roof and jumped to the other, rolling with her landing. Standing up, Elysia dusted herself off, before going over to the ledge that overlooked the street. There, grouping around the end of the alley that she would have been in, were the boys that had chased her.
Amateurs.
Victory, as seen in most novels, was something that she had long since given up on. Nowadays, victory was surviving, was living; Elysia herself also counted protecting her friends as victory.
Yeah, all two of them. Hibari doesn't even need protecting.
She ran along the rooftops all the way to her apartment building. There, she hopped off the nearest roof and took the steps two at a time. Inside her apartment, her shoulders relaxed a little, because the clouds were rolling fiercely around her, thick and dark.
Elysia took a shower, in a vain attempt to get rid of the dirt that clung to her. Entering her room, she flopped on her bed, afraid to shut her eyes. She didn't want to sleep, not tonight; but her eyes felt grainy and heavy, and before she knew it, her mind had fallen into a swirling blackness.
'Ah!' she cried, trying to stop the tears from falling. Her little hands were shackled together, and the chain connecting them disappeared somewhere bad. Bad, because every time she got a question wrong, the chain would light up and her body would spasm and lock. Bad, because the questions were really hard and she didn't have enough time to study before they were pulling her away from her books and chaining her down to the cold, concrete ground.
'Pathetic.' Caprice muttered, and she looked up fearfully. Caprice was mean and sounded funny, and punished her even though she didn't do anything wrong most of the time! 'You should be more tolerant. The things you'll experience in the future will be a thousand times worse.'
She just lowered her head, because she didn't know what she was doing here, or where her mama and papa were, and she didn't know anything so why were they so mean—
She squealed as five thick books landed on her back, slamming her small body to the ground, chafing her cheek against the concrete. Caprice spoke to an invisible person, the words rolling off her tongue in a foreign manner.
She sniffled, shifting the books off her and risking a glance at the ugly, ugly lady, only to jerk back to find blue eyes burning at her. Caprice took her shackles off with a quick flick of the wrist, and grabbed her before she could try to rub the raw, blistered skin. She whimpered as she was dragged into the dark corridor, toward the staircase. They went further down, down, and she realized Caprice was taking her to see that man with the funny name that she couldn't say. The man who was powerful and strong and who hurt her to make her powerful and strong. He was scary, but he wasn't mean. Just, she struggled to find the word, blank? He didn't do anything other than show her how to hurt others, and sometimes that meant being mean, but not as mean as Caprice… Rough, her mind supplied, and she nodded, that man was rough.
They were reaching the door to that big open spot the rough-man was in. Caprice pushed it open and snarled, 'Gualtiero.'
The man turned, brown eyes flat. Then he spoke in that foreign way that all the people she met here did, and Caprice just growled something and shoved her towards him. She stumbled, and fell to her knees before him. The door slammed shut, the noise echoing in the large space.
Rough-man sighed, 'Get up. Caprice is not satisfied with your progress. We'll have to train harder, more vigorously now.'
She made a face, wondering what that one word meant. Vig-er-us-ly?
A strangled noise came out of her throat as he picked her up by the back of her shirt and placed her on her feet.
'Assume position number one.' She took the stance, starting to feel the first trembles of fear shake her body as rough-man took the same stance in front of her.
'This is going to hurt, isn't it?' Her voice rasped from her earlier screaming, and she licked her chapped lips nervously.
His eyes were steady as he looked at her, 'Yes,' he murmured, 'it will.' He moved, and all she felt was pain.
Elysia jerked awake, blinking in the pre-dawn light. She groaned, scrubbing a hand across her face. As far as nightmares—memories, part of her mind whispered—go, that one was tame and relatively harmless. Elysia knew she would probably have one, what with all the action last night, but she thought it would be more damaging. In this, it was nice to be proven wrong.
She got ready quickly, eating an apple before grabbing her MP3 player and going out for a morning run. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays were spent this way, another training exercise to keep her sharp for Hibari.
It also helped her parkour skills, and Elysia leaped onto the top of the back of a bench, running across it. As soon as her feet touched the ground, she had to pivot quickly to avoid a classmate of hers—Sasagawa Ryohei. He shouted an 'EXTREME' greeting to her, and she waved to him in response.
Five miles later, Elysia slipped into her apartment and headed to her meditation room. Going through her kata was practically a reflex, and she concentrated on her breathing. A few muscle building exercises and stretching later and she was finally done. Elysia took another quick shower, doing her hair quickly before eating cereal and heading to school, looking forward to meeting with Tsu-kun and seeing Hibari.
In this way, she passed the first month of her second-year at Namimori Middle. She would train with Hibari, work at Reina-san's, give experimental pastries to Hibari and Tsu-kun to try, and she became good friends with Tsu-kun. The two were still her only 'friends' and she liked it. Tsu-kun was even starting to influence her personality, slowly combating the over-populated clouds that permeated her life. Better, Elysia was allowing it to happen.
Elysia was content with her life for the first time since she was eight, and she dared to hope that the rest of her life might be similar.
She should have known better.