Sacred Heart Academy

[XCandy and LunacyX]

“The school board is weird about that kind of stuff,” Katie explained in response to Rynn’s concerns, giving a little sigh, “We can only go to the dance with other students---not specifically of this school, but some high school.”
“And no same-sex couples,” Alistair added, ruefully pursing his lips with disagreement.
The vaguest glimmer sparkled deep in Holt’s eyes, seeing an opportunity. “You sound like you regret that,” he teased, lightly enough, grinning at him, “What, did you want to go with a guy?”
But Alistair surprised him. Sitting back with his elbows on the table, he turned and gave Holt an unusually straightforward look, answering easily but firmly, “I did.” The entire group fell silent, a little surprised at the utterly frank answer (Gretchen hid a bemused grin behind her hand), and Alistair gave a little shrug, dismissing the atmosphere. “Not that he’d go with me anyways. But it is what it is. I get to watch Gretchen pick fights in a fancy dress, so at least something good will come out of it.”
“It was me, wasn’t it?” Tyler sighed, jokingly, as if it was a shame, laying himself languidly down along the table at the expense of several spilled bags of chips, “Ah, and you had to settle for Gretchen. The cruelty! The misery!”
“It wasn’t you, Ty,” Alistair said, sweet and utterly, cruelly definitive, turning his attention back on his lunch, and Tyler’s forehead thumped heavily onto the tabletop in dejection.
“Ack! The heartbreak…”
It was while the others were teasing him that Geoff paused by their table, his piercing eyes narrowing critically. “How unsightly. If you want to act like a mongrel, McClair, that’s your business, but don’t force the rest of us to put up with it.”
Tyler rose up with a scowl, tossing back his unruly locks. “Run along, tosser. You’re a downer, you’re bringing me down.”
Geoff gave a peculiarly refined roll of his eyes, beginning to turn away when his gaze caught with Katie’s stare of disapproval bordering on disappointment. He briefly froze, the vaguest hint of regret flickering deep in his pale eyes, before hastily turning and striding off with Allen at his heels. When he was gone, Katie cleared her throat and forced a smile, her eyes a little more moist than usual. “Ah, sorry guys, I’ve got to…erm, the locker room. Before gym. I’ll see you there.” She barely even managed to grab her things before slipping away, the rest of the group meek as they stared pityingly after her.
Gretchen, giving a faint groan, rose after her, snatching up her bag and chasing after her, “Kay-kay, hold up!”
Alistair, for one, pursed his lips, murmuring thoughtfully, “Katie…she really gets to him, doesn’t she?”
“She did,” Tyler answered after a moment, agreeing halfway, “He was almost bloody bearable when they were dating. At least he didn’t walk around handing out judgements from on high. She’d get all ‘disappointed in him’---” He rolled his eyes, wiggling his fingers mockingly. “---you know, in that Katie way, and he actually looked like he felt bad about it then. I’m not really sure what happened, Katie won’t talk about it, but apparently his brother heard Geoff was dating a commoner and told their dad and the tosser got all embarrassed because she wasn’t good enough for him and dumped her. I told you he was a right ********, didn’t I?”
“That just means we have to make sure she takes a proper look at James,” Holt asserted, nodding to himself, “So they’ll both stop moping. As much as bubbly, lovey-dovey Katiekins annoys me, I hate this moping bullshit. She keeps crying. What the ******** do you do with a crying girl? Seriously, what am I supposed to do? Do I…do I hug her? Do I give her candy? What do I do?”
Alistair, meanwhile, sighed and let his head fall to the side, brushing a stray curl deftly behind his ear. “What a ******** fool,” he murmured, and the others all gave a little start at the unusual sound of Airi cursing, “He gave up something he loved for pride, and now he can never have it back again. I would say it’s tragic, but I have no pity for that kind of nonsense.”
“How unusually cruel of you,” Thorne muttered with a dry sort of amusement.
“There are different forms of pride,” Airi responded, shaking his head, “And that pride---the personal kind, the one that comes from nothing and doesn’t do any good---I loathe it. He liked her---he might have loved her---and he threw it away because someone else’s rules said it wasn’t appropriate. What sense is there in that?”
Grinning, Tyler threw his arms around Alistair’s shoulders, planting a kiss on his temple and purring, “I love it when you get dark on me.”
“Ty, geroff---” Airi whined, utterly restored to his usual self, pouting and wriggling away from the other boy’s hold. “The bell’s going to ring, we should get to the locker rooms.” The others agreed reluctantly, gathering up their things and rising from the table. Alistair, meanwhile, plucked at Rynn’s sleeve, holding him back for an extra moment so that no one would notice the way he cocked his head to the side and his eyes flashed like a kicked puppy, whispering in his ear, “Did you not want to see me, Rynn?” He gave a disgruntled little sound and immediately set about making Rynn regret it, tossing his head and raking his fingers back through his hair so that the sunlight caught on his curls and gave a fiery glimmer, his porcelain skin luminous. The sight set an excited ripple through the girls in the courtyard, their gazes all narrowing at Alistair as they whispered amongst themselves. “Careful you don’t end up like Geoff,” he murmured, eyes narrowing sharply, “It’s such an easy trap to fall into, distancing yourself from someone for ridiculous reasons. But I’m not as forgiving as sweet Katie.” He shifted then, just enough that the rest of the courtyard couldn’t see his lips brush Rynn’s ear in the lowest, sharpest whisper, “And I’m not my sister.” He withdrew then, in a natural enough half-step on his way towards the hall. “Admit it to yourself already, Rynn.”
Oh-so carefully, he let the flicker of hurt show in his eyes. Just a little, just for a moment, but it was there. The hurt that Rynn had compared him to Antha, that he had briefly linked them in his feelings. And that was something Airi couldn’t abide. As patient as he was with stubborn Rynn and as much as he loved his sister, the moment that he was thought of as an alternative for her, it was over.
Alistair wasn’t a replacement. He’d spent twenty years being nothing and no one, a pale shade, he wouldn’t tolerate being someone else’s shadow now, even Antha’s, even for Rynn.  

[Okimiyage]

Liesse could not suppress a shiver, staring after Katie as the girl retreated. So that’s what love could do to you. No wonder Rynn was so wary of it. It was like she hadn’t been able to see it until it went out—that aura of warm, lovely light that Katie emitted like a candle-flame. But they had all felt the chill. Tugging her coat on, Liesse rose to her feet, wondering whether to run after Gretchen and Katie as they disappeared. “I’m sorry, I just can’t imagine those two together,” Rynn said, voicing her thoughts with his usual tactlessness. “Geoff’s a poisonous little serpent, Katie has to have better taste than this.” “You’re one to talk.” Liesse said, without thinking. “I mean, look at the way…” Rynn kicked her promptly in the shins, before she could finish that thought. “Ow! Cripes, Rynn—“
“Maybe Geoff just needs a good woman,” Rynn interrupted, in a tone that reeked of desperation to change the subject. “We could set him up with whatshername—Rowan? She seems like she has the force of will to keep him in line.”
Liesse shook her head disparagingly, and lifted up one hand up in a beseeching manner towards the sky. “Never become a matchmaker, Rynn. You’ve no head for it at all.”
“Thankfully, I have other career options.” Rynn muttered, slouching over and letting his eyes flit across the table towards Airi.
Despite the vast quantities of sweets that he had consumed, the red-haired boy was looking decidedly unhappy. Rynn felt his brows lift in surprise.
“You’re not supposed to do anything when girls start crying,” Liesse was lecturing Holt. “I mean, unless you barged in on it, and then you leave. Or if you made her cry, and then you apologize. Or if she’s crying because of someone else, then you could try sort of patting her on the shoulder and offering her a handkerchief…”
“I dunno, I can see how it happened.” Rynn said, tracing circles on the wood-grain with his fingertips. “Family’s hard to forsake, even for good reason. You can never really cut those ties, not totally. He probably felt…pressured…”
Rynn didn’t say what he was really thinking. You could live without love. Katie’s grief, while not unwarranted, seemed almost—childish, really. If Geoff had not stood up for her then, was he really the type of man that she wanted to entrust her heart to?
But then again, in comparison to the dramatic and tragic love life of the Mayfairs, this sort of thing seemed fairly piddling in comparison. No wonder Airi was merciless in his pronouncement of the whole thing as ‘nonsense’.
But despite the glimmer of ‘darkness’, as Tyler had called it, Rynn had not suspected that it had anything to do with himself until he felt the familiar tug on his sleeve, as the others rose to leave.
“I did want to see you,” Rynn responded, trying not to let the hitch in his breath give away the sudden thrill of excitement. He kept his gaze cool and level as Airi preened for him, like a magnificent bird, the spill of sunlight down white marble of his throat making it an even more impressive bit of plumage than his hair. Or maybe that’s just where Rynn’s eye was drawn to—it was an excellent view, admittedly. Then, he jerked back to reality with Airi’s warning: ‘don’t end up like Geoff’. “Now that was uncalled for,” Rynn interrupted. “I’m not a complete a*****e.” Then, his eyes narrowed, and his gaze flicked up and down Airi’s body like a whiplash. “And I never compared you to Antha, not out loud. If you don’t like what you find in my innermost thoughts, I’d suggest that you discontinue the practice of examining them without my consent.” With that, shouldering his already-stuffed schoolbag, Rynn strode away from Airi and tried very hard to pretend it didn’t feel like he was running.

The rest of the afternoon, Liesse could sense her brother’s distress. She tried to corner him in-between classes, as though she could prize the secret of his malcontent from his mind by the sheer weight of her presence, but Rynn only made half-hearted excuses about the ‘coursework’ and avoided her eyes. Liesse found herself biting her nails far harder and more often than she intended to, during that final period before the bell. She briefly considered asking Gretchen and Katie what they could imagine the reason for his bad mood to be, but then cast the idea aside—if she, his own sister, with full awareness of what the situation of their household was, could not conjure up a reason, how could they?
She found herself waiting outside the school for Rynn, where the ‘Jacquelyn’ that she had met in first period was furtively smoking a cigarette and watching for her bus to arrive. When Alistair came out, posse in tow, Liesse spotted him from a mile away by his hair. “AIRI!” she called, her hand shooting up and waving frantically. “Over here!”
Behind her, Jacquelyn cursed and stubbed out the cigarette quickly. “You couldn’t have been a little more subtle?” she asked, blowing out the last smoke left in her lungs.  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

At the sound of his name, Airi glanced up, startled. He gave a little smile then, making pointing gestures to the sports field next to the school and mouthing ‘soccer practice’ before gesturing for her to come with them.
While Alistair, Tyler, and Holt slipped away to the locker room, Katie went up to Liesse, waving to the vaguely familiar girl with her and then seizing her hand. “Come on, it’s going to be fun! Gretchen hates it, but…” She trailed off, somewhat guiltily. Even if Gretchen didn’t usually drag herself scowling to the bleachers, and even if she hadn’t been curious to see how Alistair would do, today she would probably do anything Katie wanted without too much complaining. She had stood guard in the locker room while Katie had bawled before gym class, and nearly decked the first girl who had ventured to comment gleefully on her puffy, reddened eyes. Ill-fitting as they were, Gretchen and Katie were at least utterly loyal to each other.
They waited until the rest of the group had joined them and a whistle sounded on the field to head towards it, avoiding the massive crowd of cheering, screaming girls already gathered on the sidelines as long as possible. Gretchen dropped her backpack on the bleachers and stuffed her fingers in her ears; Katie joined them. “Look, look, look!” Katie called excitedly to Liesse, pointing in the direction all the other girls were watching, “It’s Airi, in the gold!”
“Yes,” Gretchen grumbled, rolling her eyes, “Look at him run. So very interesting.” Though, she was watching him, too. It was hard not to, Pierce had picked out his practice uniform for him specifically to match his coloring, his jersey gold with a white collar and green piping, fitted to perfect looseness on his slight form, rippling with his every movement as he ran up and down the field with the other boys. Pierce did love to make people pretty.
One of the girls nearby paused, turning to scowl at Gretchen. “I knew it was a lie. There’s no way he’d take you to the dance.”
Gretchen fought her absolute hardest not to look smug, and mostly succeeded. “He absolutely is,” she purred with a sudden mischievous smile that brought out the prettiness of her face, which people tended to overlook with the way she scowled, “Keep annoying me and I’ll make him take me to prom.”
A whistle blew on the field, the coach shouting irritably, “McClair! Get your head in the game!” The group turned back to the field where Tyler was hastily looking away from Gretchen, his cheeks red from more than the heat.
While they were all paused, taking the opportunity to catch their breath, Alistair’s head turned and his eyes narrowed at one of the windows on the school building. On the other side of the glass, Geoff was half-listening to the discussions of the rest of the student council, watching Katie cheer in the field down below.
Meanwhile, Gretchen was watching Alistair as they resumed practice. He almost seemed normal---almost, all laughter and sparkles and the massively unfair innate charm that absolutely dripped from every inch of him---but there was something just slightly off. Something vague, quiet…buried beneath all that good humor. She had been trying to place it for two hours, and it took her another half-hour of watching him dash across the field, kicking the ball all the way back across it, ducking and jumping around the other boys when he had the ball and crashing into them when they had it, before she finally managed to place it.
“He’s angry,” she declared with acute victory, sitting back against the bleachers with her arms crossed.
“Who?” Katie asked, stealing a fleeting glance at her, long enough to see her nod towards Alistair. “Who, Airi? That sparkly, bubbly boy laughing over there?” She looked back at him, joking around with Tyler and Holt after the latter had tripped and face-planted in an attempt to steal the ball. The look on her own face was dubious. “I think you’re imagining things.”
“Nope,” she responded easily, shaking her head with utter conviction, “He’s angry. He’s been angry since lunch, I just couldn’t quite tell what it was.” But she shrugged, not daring to speculate aloud. Only one thing seemed to get a rise out of Alistair and stick, and she had already promised not to blab about that.
Thorne, not knowing the details, was less certain. “Is this what the hair thing was about?” he asked in a low murmur, but got only blank stares and so elaborated, “He asked me after gym if I thought he should cut his hair. He seemed to think his curls make him look too much like his sister.”
“He’d better not!” Katie gasped, utterly scandalized, “Oh, that would be such a shame! His pretty, pretty hair!”
That was when the whistle blew again and the coach barked for the boys to hit the showers. Instead, the adrenaline-filled teenage boys all went for the sidelines, specifically to the group of girls with the hopes of picking them off once Alistair had skirted around them with Tyler and Holt’s help. With a particularly broad grin, he demanded proudly, “How did I do?”
“Pretty well, actually,” Gretchen answered sincerely, and Alistair beamed with satisfaction, sweeping back the damp, darkened curls of his hair. “Airi, don’t taunt them.”
He blinked at her as if he didn’t understand, a bottle of water to his lips and the hem of his shirt lifted to wipe the dripping sweat from his cheek, baring his pale stomach. Gretchen laughed outright, watching the flush of cheeks and listening to the sudden ravenous hum of murmurs nearby. She could practically see the swarm of hormones permeating the air. “You’re doing this on purpose.”
“Nothing of the sort,” he assured her with the sweetest smile, so brightly cheerful that he had to be lying. His new friends were slowly getting better at being able to tell the difference between these things---the cheerfulness that meant he was hiding something versus the cheerfulness that meant he was lying versus his usual sparkling disposition. Of course, as they were all aware, that was only when he wasn’t trying to actually hide anything from them. If Alistair had real secrets, they doubted they would ever know it.
“You’re an awful flirt,” Gretchen accused him with a grin, throwing his backpack into his sweaty arms.
“Hey!” He pouted, genuine now as he protested, “I absolutely am not. I never flirted with one of them. That’s Tyler’s job, and I’m happy to let him have it to himself.”
“Thanks, mate,” the boy in question beamed, clapping him on the back, “I’d be screwed if you were. Holt’s not a problem, but---”
“Hey!” Tyler and Alistair snickered, running off towards the locker room together just as Holt started to pitch a fit, chasing after them with shouted protests.
When they were gone, Gretchen turned her slitted gaze on Rynn, a look clearly meant to convey that she thought him an utter idiot. “You do realize that was for you, right? Alistair wouldn’t put on a show like that for anyone else.” She paused, sighing her exasperation as she unfolded herself and got to her feet. “Give him a break every once in a while, alright? It looks ******** exhausting trying to pursue you.”  

[Okimiyage]

Rynn would have tried to avoid going to see Alistair’s soccer practice, but Liesse had very keen eyes and had managed to pluck him out of the moving crowd much like a hawk might pluck a fish out of water. He compensated by being so sullenly quiet as to render himself dead weight, at least until his sister gave him a sharp elbow to the ribcage. “Ow! Liesse, what was that for—“
“We’re supposed to be showing support, Rynn. You could try cheering. Or at least, I don’t know, smiling? You look like there’s just been a death in the family.” Rynn’s shoulders fell in an exhaustively searching sigh. “”Look, Airi’s got lots of cheerleaders, already.” He made a listless gesture in the direction of the girls screaming over by the fence. “He doesn’t need one more. Anyways, it would just be wasted right now. I’m tired, ok? It’s been a long day. I want a cup of tea and a bath.”
Liesse’s eyebrows knit in perplexed intrigue. “It would just be wasted?”
“He’s cross with me.”
Liesse’s face changed swiftly. “What did you do, Rynn?”
Rynn had been making a pretty sad scene out of himself, leaned over the top of the chain-link fence like a mournful, wilting Adonis. At this, he straightened up indignantly, his voice going sharp with outrage. “Me? Why do you assume it was me? For all you know he could have been the one who started it—“
“I know you—“
“Well, you know Airi, too—“
As the twins continued to squabble sociably with one another, Jacquelyn drifted over, placidly chewing a mint leaf to mask the smell of cigarettes. She was a thin girl, built long and narrow, and had a way of hunching her shoulders that disguised how tall she really was. Her hair was black, close-cropped, and her cheeks were dotted with glittery stickers—rainbows, cat heads and shooting stars. Aside from the battered sneakers and weatherbeaten windbreaker, she had yet to change from her school clothes, and her appearance was utterly uniform. The stickers were the only clue that anything resembling a personality or even a thought lurked behind that plain, somber face, and the girl’s the curiously colorless eyes. One might not have thought that someone like herself and Liesse would have much in common, but Liesse—with her usual compelling magnetism—had been determined to ingratiate herself with her classmates, starting with the closest desk. Jacquelyn had been that lucky soul. Now, it seemed like she was—if not welcomed, at least to be tolerated at the fringe of the Mayfair’s little unofficial social club. She’d heard rumors—it was amazing the things you picked up when you didn’t spend all your time talking. Even the teachers thought there was something a little uncanny about Alistair Mayfair, especially the ones who’d been there long enough to remember his sister’s reign. Even Jacquelyn found him attractive, and she was ordinarily only one for the girls—who had gone absolutely batshit since his arrival, mind. The locker room gossip was downright embarrassing to witness =at times, hearing them mooning over him like some kind of celebrity. Then again, he was—in a way. Jacquelyn scratched her head, dislodging a cigarette from behind her ear, and watched thoughtfully as Airi scored a goal and the gaggle of girls at the fence—she winced—burst into thrilling shrieks. Begrudgingly, she had to admit that he was pretty good at soccer. Or maybe the other team was just appallingly bad, it was hard to tell.
Finally, Liesse and her cousin seemed to be at their wit’s end with one another. Jacquelyn had to admit, good looks seemed to run in the family—the Calais kid was as pretty as a girl. Then again, Jacquelyn liked the brooding type—and she wasn’t alone in that. If Rynn wasn’t careful, he’d end up with his own little fan club.
Rynn twined his long fingers into the chain-link fence and made it sag a little as he leaned back. Liesse had gotten her explanation out of him in the end, anyways—like a torturer of the Inquisition— only he didn’t know why he’d put up such a fuss. He hated how overblown the whole thing had become. He’d only meant that Airi looked like Antha, the bone structure, the color of their hair, the mad glint in his eye that Airi got after a few drinks, especially—
But he hadn’t explained that, had he?
And there were some things—as Alistair seemed keen on reminding him, and Rynn had to look away quickly because otherwise his blush would have given him dead away—that were utterly different between the two of them. And he liked them that way. His fingers went taut against the chain-link, remembering what it had felt, caressing that unmarred white canvas of a chest—the word perfect came to mind—from underneath, the warmth of their breath mingling ‘till it coaxed their bodies to sweat…
Looking away hadn’t helped all that much.
Anyways, the point was that Airi wasn’t a substitute. Rynn was fully willing to admit that. But the thought that Airi had pried into his—well, thoughts—left him more than a little unnerved. Rynn hadn’t noticed. For someone who had once prided themselves on being a kind of magical prodigy, this was downright unsettling. But it wasn’t just that—Rynn had always been taught that it was tremendously bad form to pry into someone’s mind aside from Liesse’s, especially the mind of another witch’s. Airi had done it as casually as breathing. This kind of thing made him nervous. Rynn liked his privacy. Would he have to practice only thinking good thoughts in the future, lest Alistair be monitoring him? That seemed impossible…
“Rynn. RYNN.”
Someone was tugging at his sleeve.
“Practice is over. Jacquelyn asked me ’n Katie ’n Gretchen if they wanted to get coffee before we headed home.”
Liesse was looking at him, a faint line etched in her brow, then leaned in close.
“Look, just apologize. Or explain, or whatever you want to call it. He’s changing now, he’ll be out in a sec.”
Rynn sputtered something incomprehensible as she skipped off, which gradually resolved itself into:
“This isn’t my fault!”
Turning back to Gretchen, he snapped. It was something about the way she was looking at him, in the way one would look at a very small, impossibly incompetent child. “Look, I didn’t say or do anything. He worked himself up into this all by himself, ok?” He growled, withdrawing his hands from the fence with a force that made the whole length of it rattle, and shoving them deep into his pockets. “I don’t know why you and Liesse expect me to be responsible for his every mood, I just wanted to—“
Rynn stopped, and then started again, very carefully. “Anyways, I don’t know what you mean about ‘pursue’. Not that it’s anybody’s business.” His gaze slid away from Gretchen’s, and he crossed his arms self-consciously.
“Look, I’ll talk to him, OK? If it really bothers you that much. I don’t like seeing Airi in poor spirits, either It’s like a cocker spaniel that’s been kicked.”  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

Sighing, Gretchen poked a finger lightly against the side of Rynn’s head, rolling her eyes at him. “Yeah, no, don’t play dumb with me. I already figured out about you two---I don’t see how anyone doesn’t, with the way you look at each other---but anyway, Airi had to tell me about it to keep me from getting carried away. Don’t worry, I won’t tell---he was very clear that that was important to you, that no one know about it. I like Alistair, we get each other, I wouldn’t go around gossiping about him anyway.” She shrugged, carelessly. Really, she didn’t care to divulge anyone else’s business to begin with, and if anyone else knew, it would be a lot less fun to tease him. “I don’t know what you fought about, he was down all afternoon and he mumbled something about his sister being greater than him---which, let’s be fair, he’s a secret black prince but her very name reduces grown men to tears, but then they’re both marble gods---but I know that if you’re fighting, it’s either because he’s too brutally honest and straightforward or because you’re neither, and the issue there is that it’s hard to fault him for those traits. Apparently they’re virtues.” Another shrug, conceding that they were traits she also shared, hauling her backpack onto her shoulder and turning to Rynn with a little thoughtful hum. “About that, though…Airi doesn’t really have ‘moods’, hadn’t you noticed? Except when it’s you. He smiles and sparkles through everything else, whatever it is, like he doesn’t give a ********. But on the rare occasion that he is in a mood, it’s not even a question, it’s over you. You’re the only person that gets to him.”
And then she abruptly shut up, because the boys were clamoring out of the locker rooms in their school uniforms and there was no way in hell she was going to let Alistair catch her talking to Rynn about him. She didn’t want to be on the receiving end of a fit from him.
“What happened to Liesse and Katie?”
“Coffee,” Gretchen answered, very simply, “With some dour, glittery girl.”
“Dour and glittery?”
“No idea. Anyway, what’s the plan?”
Tyler, ignoring that the question had been posed to Alistair, rolled his eyes. “Obviously we’re going to hang out at Airi and Rynn’s house.”
While the group started off, not even asking permission from the two residents much less consulting them, Alistair hung back, his eyes narrowed at Rynn. “I wasn’t prying,” he said after a moment, a little irritably, as if he’d meant to say it earlier but hadn’t had the chance, “I couldn’t shut it out. Those kind of intent thoughts about me, directed at me like that, I can’t help hearing them. Not everything, not even most things, but those intense thoughts about me…I hear them, I can’t help it. If I could help it I would---I don’t like the dozens of fantasies I see about myself from strangers’ heads in any given class period---but I haven’t had the chance to build up those walls.”
Further up the sidewalk, Tyler called for the boys to hurry up. Alistair, glancing off towards the field and tucking a strand of vivid, curling hair behind his ear, out of the reach of the breeze, gave a little laugh beneath his breath, his usual dazzling smile playing so easily on his lips. “Not that it matters. Because I’m never going to let you go anyways. You can think any awful thing you want, you can hiss and snarl and run away if you want to, but I’ll just follow you. I’ll always chase after you in the end, no matter what you do.” That was just his nature. Alistair was, from his very core, absolutely single-minded about the things he liked, and as faithful as a dog.
And above everything else, Airi liked Rynn.  

[Okimiyage]

Rynn rarely qualified for the fidgety type, but he did now. His chest felt a little bit too full. “I can think any awful thing I want, huh?” he said, quietly, reflectively, his hands working over a strand of thread that had dislodged itself from his cuff. “I guess you were listening in this time, too. I’m…sorry, then.” The word felt unfamiliar, thick and leaden on his tongue. “I mean, I wasn’t…I never…” thought of you as a replacement. I never wanted that. In some ways, you’re all the parts of Antha that were protected, that remained pure, while she bit and clawed and ******** her way through this world, through her pain. Rynn stopped himself there, abruptly thrusting up shields that were sheathed in thorns, an impossibly high wall with which to fend off this overflow of—
His throat felt tight. He worked a swallow through, and then met Alistair’s eyes. The rays of cloud-filtered sunlight caught the flecks of gold within them, and he smiled, a little grimly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. You’re—you shouldn’t compare yourself to anyone else, you know?”
Rynn couldn’t imagine what it must have been like, living voiceless for all these years, a shadow in someone else’s body. In a way, he didn’t blame Airi for—insecurity, after that.
Rynn’s gaze dropped, and the thorns within his mind rustled against the wind which moved across his skin.
“Anyways, we should…we can talk about all of this at home. There’s no point in sticking around waiting for it to get dark.” His eyes flicked upwards for just a moment. “You did play a good game.” Everyone else had looked absolutely inept and hopeless and duck-footed in comparison, but Rynn didn’t know how to express that without sounding like the rest of Airi’s giddy schoolgirl cheerleaders. “If you’re not careful, someone’s going to scout you.”

On the way home from the coffee shop—a rather dingy but charming hole-in-the-wall, attached to a bookstore, in which Jacquelyn had recommended a variety of different home-brewed herbal teas—Liesse noticed that Rynn and Airi kept exchanging furtive glances. She was no idiot—as someone whose soul had been attuned to Rynn’s since birth, she could tell when he was on edge, and his mental shields were at red alert.
As usual, she was trying to fill the ominous silence, and doing it poorly. They’d been talking about the dance, in an effort to take Katie’s mind off the whole…well, he-whom-we-do-not-speak (and Jacquelyn had nodded sagely at this, remembering the gossip she had heard around school at the time of their break-up), and now Liesse’s mind was filled with all sorts of fluffy ideas about ball gowns and full moons and rose gardens at midnight. She had already memorized the playlist for the evening, and recalling—well, rose gardens at midnight, and the last time she had been in one, and whom she had been with—she sighed happily in the middle of her recitation, and abruptly turned to Rynn, who was sitting nearly to the glass with his chin propped in his hand.
“Rynn, you need a lover.”
“That sounds nice.” he said, vaguely.
Liesse scowled, and sharply tugged at his sleeve.
“You’re not even listening, are you?” she accused. “You know, if you weren’t my brother…”
“What? What did I do now?” Recoiling from her raised hand, Rynn’s voice went high with indignity. “I said it sounds nice! I was listening!”
“No, you weren’t, or you’d be squawking all over the place—“
“Anyways, I’ve already had one, thank you. Now you can bugger off.”
That stopped Liesse cold. After a moment, she managed to rally a refutation.
“No, you haven’t. I would have felt it. You know how we are, we’d notice something like that—“
“Well, maybe you were distracted.” His eyes flashed up, with something curiously akin to anger in their narrow glance. “We haven’t been spending as much time together as we used to, you know.”
Liesse’s mouth dropped open just a little. “Well—if it’s true—then who?” A thought seemed to horrify her, and she leaned in close to whisper. “It wasn’t Cousin Dorian, was it? You know what they say about him, no matter how charming he seems, and three children all in one night—all by different mothers! He—“ Rynn couldn’t hold it in any longer. He burst out laughing. “I’m sorry, you think Dorian is charming? I never knew you had such horrible taste in men, Liesse. If I was Malakai, I would be very nearly insulted…”
Liesse sat stock upright, turning brick red. “I never—I never said I found him attractive, merely that he is charming. And he must be, or the faeries wouldn’t have chosen him for their revels, would they?”
They continued to bicker amicably, some of the edge removed now from their tone, as they continued down the road, Liesse willing to withstand the barbs of Rynn’s teasing as long as it drew him out of his shell. And Rynn, for his part, could not help it if—ever so often, now that he was no longer glaring at passing roadsigns—his gaze couldn’t help but slip past his sister and meet Alistair’s, green as sin. It was very hard to resist a smile, but Rynn’s efforts were valiant, even if doing so made him feel quite light-headed and tight in the chest.