The first two chapters I plan, but I do have work so it'll be later for the next one.
Will's mood calmed, usually, in the water, but today the perfume of chlorine that scented the almost oily water which slithered past her skin and Will only became more frustrated with herself for every too-rigid movement which was displaying to any onlookers just how clumsily violent she could be when she was angry. And boy was she angry, because as she swallowed another blundering mouthful of the sour water, Will's thoughts had not been able to drift away to nothing, or something nice; not even to the Matt Olsen who flushed every time she reached the end of a length and happened to glance his way.
No, her thoughts were stuck; refusing to veer too far and every time she saw Matt blush, she saw Caleb scowl. Every swallow of water was Will refusing to swallow her pride, and Caleb's refusing to swallow his. Every time her eyes burned because she'd forgotten her goggles, she was Cornelia; the poor girl who could only know her best friend was walking into a tragic fate. Every stroke of water which surrounded her was this ill-seated fate of that meeting with Phobos and the entire drowning prospect that she could easily die tomorrow, and what would her mother think then? Nothing. Her mother wouldn't ever think, because her mother would be happy enough, and no one would miss Will for her astral drop, because no one could tell the difference. Inevitably Will reached the pool's edge again, this time looking up not to find him scowling, but for her heart to sink because Caleb was drowning too. Except that he didn't have a choice and he probably just wanted everything back to normal too, but Caleb couldn't just run away.
This time Will pushed forward with angry strokes and kicks that directed at herself, ignoring Matt Olsen and his raising eyebrow at her uttering herself a string of curses. Why did Caleb have to be so.. So. There wasn't even a word to describe what he was, because she supposed, the only way to describe him would be through a long list of both curses and compliments alike, and of course it only made her hate him more.
...
Prince Phobos had tried to find again, his formless sister and the waif of a snake planning to do away with her childhood. But they were gone, apparently, and it was possibly better, because Prince Phobos quite simply didn't want to look. Not at them. But something ad squirmed; possibly the thought of two so ugly together, but something had made him search by word of murmur. But they weren't there and Cedric had not been heading for the door, and Prince Phobos only knew one place that murmurs could not be heard, as carefully as one might look, and one place he had never been, for his mother had forebode him from the corridor of hers and her fathers. To be truthful once he had ventured, but never inside the door to the room, and that was less as he'd been a child, and his mother had been there at the time to chide him.
How dare Cedric take such a pest into that corridor, and if he were to break her in his mother's room, his mother would never have forgiven him. Prince Phobos frowned a tired frown - bags were almost forming on near-translucent skin, and now the beauty of the pale was beginning to look more like the sickly of the weak. Elyon had done this to him.
Or perhaps Cedric, and Phobos knew he would play and tease at the snake-man's capabilities; to fight, to kill, to stand and bow to the murmurers he so hated, but Prince Phobos was unsure whether to be pleasantly surprised (later a feeling he would mull upon, but not yet) or simply snarl and let the murmurers feed off of Cedric's skin for being so damn spineless to use his sister to spite him. To use his sister's body - a body Phobos had freely given - to revenge the Prince himself by dirtying his mother's cloths. Who knew what else he had inspired in her - the hugs and touches, and possibly the idea to clutch as she did on that damned sketchbook.
That damned sketchbook, which plagued Prince Phobos' mind; how dare she not give him the privilege to look and how dare she constantly peek herself in his presence, and how dare she. How dare she keep it clutched to her bosom as though it were a child in a way that Prince Phobos could never hold a love for anything. Everything was ashes and dust in Phobos eyes. Nothing he touched would last. His mother. His father. This whole damned castle and the colors of mourning that Elyon herself had banished. Because he couldn't afford to mourn in front of her. And for ever smile he felt dirtier than his clean skin had felt in a long time. Emotion, even that of disgust, had no place in Phobos' throne. Pleasure was the only thing worth having. And pleasure was power: love was simply a state of mind that fools fantasized as such a feeling of pleasure.
With one last fleeting look into the seeing sands, Prince Phobos stepped through the swirl of his own dirtied reflection; spoiling a near perfect image, though he saw a trout where should be a dove. He would step, today, into his mother's room for the first time in seventeen and at least a good half of a year.