Deviation Actions
Literature Text
“Why are you so fixated on finding this person, White?” Rekus’ voice reached him from downstairs - an unwelcome interruption to his brooding. “If you really wanted to see her again, you’d gimme a name or something so I could help. Seeing you like this is as weird as fuck, dude.”
“Perhaps, I loved her,” he replied to Rekus and his own thoughts simultaneously. There was a split second of silence followed by the distinct sound of Rekus choking on his tea. “Correction; maybe I did love her.” White took a moment to scoff at the cacophony of an overturned chair and Rekus’ body hitting the ground in utter shock. “Stop being dramatic, Rekus. I’m perfectly capable of loving her.”
“I’m more worried about the fact THAT YOU LOVE SOMEONE,” the informant wailed, stuck under the table in a futile attempt to untangle himself from his chair. “Are you actually in love, or are you trying to pull a prank on me!?”
“Perhaps if my parents and brothers and sister had been there that first time I stepped into the gates of the Mage Academy, ready to be welcomed into the world of sorcery... Perhaps they would have read my expression and shared laughs and nudges and side-long winks at my expense,” White mused, a faint smile playing on his lips, “They weren’t there though, so there’s no one I can ask for a refresher.”
Footsteps rushed up towards White’s room, and Rekus burst in, face flushed with panic. “White, did you hit your head on something?”
Rolling his eyes, the man moved to the sole desk in the room and traced the the fine grains, his fingers dancing over the patterns. “The only person I can ask at all is her. But she needs to be reminded...” White took a moment to make sure that Rekus hadn’t had a heart attack yet.
Thankfully, Rekus had calmed down somewhat, leaning against the door, but still staring at him with alarm and horror in his eyes. “Okay, White, before you say anything else that sounds overly - I dunno - romantic, what is she to you? This person you’re looking for whose damn name you won’t tell me.”
White looked away again. “She’s my best friend, but she needs a reminder that she is indeed my best friend. But, at the same time, she isn’t quite my friend.”
“Your lover?” Rekus joked, trying to calm himself from this crazy situation.
To his horror, “Close to that. She’s closer than a friend but not quite a lover. She’s...” White frowned, not quite able to find an apt word.
Rekus decided that his remaining sanity would be better off if he took a walk around the city instead of staying in the same room as his crazy tenant-slash-friend, and promptly sprinted downstairs for his own good.
White chuckled slightly at Rekus’ retreat. “She’s the only one who understands me,” he continued softly, even without an audience, “And I am the only person capable of understanding her... I am the only person that will ever make her feel welcome.”
She woke up screaming.
Maybe that was a mild way to put it. After all, pained yelling that left a throat hoarse and raw followed by spatters of blood in a coughing fit, with the victim clawing at her throat and eye is not just a mere scream. Perhaps you could call it mayhem.
Noth rolled off her bed onto the chilling stone floor with a gasp. Images of White on top of her, with intent to kill and a knife in his hand - Researchers trying to force magic into her eye socket to regrow her lost eye - ‘FAILURE’ stamped on top of countless experimentation forms; forms with her name in the subject list - A child with fuschia hair that bounced in curls in step with her mocking posture and equally cheeky smile - An eyepatch to seal it all away; hide it all together with lost sight and lost friends and lost future-
“Why didn't you help me? Noth, we’re friends, aren’t we?” White’s voice echoed through her chaotic mind, bouncing everywhere. “We’ll be together forever, wo-”
“SHUT UP, WHITE!” she howled, banging her fist into the ground and not caring about the shooting pain or the blood that seeped from her hand. “WE SHOULD HAVE NEVER MET!”
If there was any time which she was grateful for the thick, soundproofed walls of her room, it was now. Noth crumpled to the ground, clutching her bleeding hand, and closing her eye as if it would dam the tears from coming. But they dripped to the side of her face with the heaving shudders of her body, whimpers almost like that of a wounded animal clawing their way out of her throat.
She hated crying. She hated episodes like this that left her scared and weak and like how she used to be; afraid of everything.
“Why are you crying, Noth? Tell me, so I can help you, so you don’t cry for the same rea-”
The whispered words from her memory snaked around her tightly bound emotions, picking at the vault’s keyhole and trying to open her up, leave her mind vulnerable. But she batted the words away, “It’s your fault, White, and you know it. If you wish to erase my problems, like that fantasy prince you pretended to be, throw yourself off a building.”
“Awww, Noth, don’t be like that.”
“Noth, we’re friends though! How could I ever leave you behind?”
“I’ll protect you from other humans, Noth, so you don’t have to be afraid anymore.”
“Shut up shut up shut up shutup shutup shutupshutup SHUT UP!” Noth cried, clamping her hands to cover her ears as if the voices were not from inside her mind. Blissful silence that she so desperately craved flowed over her, and she relaxed, forcing her breaths to even and muscles to unwind. Her eye closed again, this time with drowsiness.
But she had never been a fortunate person.
“Noth, Noth, guess what I found out today!”
With utter exhaustion, the elf peeled herself off the ground, staggering upright and leaning onto the wall for support. “I can’t sleep,” she breathed, “not like this, not with your voice in my head, White. You never would shut up.” Barely remembering to put on a shirt so that she didn’t end up freezing to death half-naked, Noth dragged herself out of the room, tracing her hand on the wall to support herself.
She could have been mistaken as an undead that night, had anyone seen her unsteady footsteps and the way her head jerked up every minute or so, her mind fogged with exhaustion, yet unable to relax and rest because White’s voice, like the man himself, refused to give her respite.
He was twelve when he walked into the gates of Mage Academy for the fourth time. The first had been to pass judgement on his magic, the second to suppress it, the third to offer him a new home, and the fourth to welcome him into it. It was Friday - an abnormal Friday - when he left his home. An unusual day which he bid farewell to his parents at the gates. A special afternoon where he was to become an official mage trainee, and yet, a normal hour which drew his attention from the other assembled children.
Normal children did not have white hair, nor purple eyes, but normal children had an insatiable curiosity, as well as a tendency to stare. He was used to the stares at the point; his entire family suffered them whenever they were outside the confines of their house. As his eye raked over the crowd, though, he wondered if there was any other person there that would match him, or even be his friend; a real friend that he could study with, or play around with magic with or, pull pranks with and be his friend. Not just a plant or a clinging person that only was attracted to him out of curiosity or for his appeara-
His brooding over his future was strangled - cut off as if a wall had popped out of nowhere for it to slam into - his orderly thoughts jumbling on contact and careening outwards with the recoil. His mind settled back in its nest, feathers very much ruffled as he sat up straighter, craning his neck to observe the wall that had halted the traffic of his mind, causing chaos before everything went quiet.
A child, just as fascinated by the runes as he had been, crouched at the base of a pillar and was tracing them. There was a curve where her mouth should have been, and White had to blink in order to process that it wasn’t a curve, but a smile.
Perhaps it was the way she was dressed - all brown and green and forest, with leaves in her pockets and sewn as decoration - or her ears - pointed, she was an elf apparently - or the fact that she had only glanced at him before she went back to tracing the runes, but his feet somehow guided him closer to her.
After a time, she looked up uttered a plain, “What?”
The boy’s teeth showed themselves, one by one until his mouth had stretched into a bright smile. “I am White Ahnas,” he introduced himself congenially, stretching out his hand for a welcome. “You?”
Her smile vanished and she moved behind the pillar, quick as a frightened cat. Unperturbed, he stepped around to her, hand still held out. Her yellow eyes narrowed at him, piercing as a panther’s glare, and she shifted uneasily on her feet, looking between his face, the hand, and the other children. “I am Noth,” she finally replied, words elongating themselves into a nice echo in his ears. “Noth Ruhtra, of the Sayieth.”
He tilted his head to the side, staring at her. “No,” he corrected. Her own head tilted to the side, confusion showing themselves in her features. “You are now Noth Ruhtra, of Mage Academy,” she blinked, and her mouth opened, but he stepped forward and took one of her hands with both his own. “I am White Ahnas, and I will be of Mage Academy as well, and we shall be friends now, won’t we, Noth?”
The girl was thankfully taken too off-kilter to refuse him or protest, and his smile widened when the guide finally showed his face in order to show the children around the guild. He released one hand, the other clasping hers tighter, pulling her along to follow.
Her black hair stood stark against their forward motion, her bangs as spiky as a curled-up hedgehog. His flowed out behind him, white as his name and carefully controlled. Whereas her eyes were a panther's, yellow and darting from side to side, his indigo eye shared the color of elementary Shadow magic and were affixed on the idea of having a friend.
We are complete opposites, he decided, and we will be the best of friends.
It was probably around midnight when she passed by the library and its grand doors. Noth looked up at the ornate sign that designated the guild’s library, her head swaying slightly. White’s voice and her memories came in bursts of childish happiness and long-lost feelings of friendship. Her capability to sleep followed them, making her body seesaw between drowsiness and full alert. Yet the moment she touched the doors of the library, the mental voices quieted, muffling themselves in closing books and turning pages.
“You hated it when people talked in the library,” she recalled bitterly, pressing a hand against the door and watching the light from the library spill out into the hallway she was in. “Never stopped you from talking in there, though.”
Noth closed her eyes for a single second before stepping in, but voices, external ones, made her think again about entering. “-few mages the other day were actually interrogating me about that Venus flytrap. Hah! Their expressions when they came trying to find me made up for that one time they messed up the fertilizer on purpose because they thought I wasn’t good enough to tell the difference. I managed to rope them into using their overblown magic to move some of the bigger root systems over to the patch near the gates before telling them that the flytrap was from stored magic in my staff runes. Their expressions after that were unbelievable.”
She stared emptily at the pair occupying the library, an elf with rust-red hair talking animatedly to someone who could have been perceived as ignoring him, a vampire with a single pale-lavender blossom in her hair. But the vampire’s head was tilted slightly towards him, keeping an ear on his words as her eyes pored over the words on the page in front of her, unfazed by the wild gestures her companion made. At the sound of the library doors creaking open, the elf looked up, but Noth had already closed them.
Regret has a way of making everything feel empty and tasteless, the capability to feel nice things fading away all too quickly. Regret filled her mouth, and she let herself choke on it, tears coming up again as she remembered the glimpse of the pair of friends in the library. Maybe she and white could have been like that. Maybe. In some parallel world where he hadn’t tried to kill her.
Noth moved past the library, past closed studies and shut-off rooms, pillars that shone with flamboyant examples of each Sphere's abilities. Her feet dragged, emotional weights trailing behind her like long chains that went on for miles and attached her to another person. Moving restlessly, she looked around for somewhere, anywhere where White would shut up, where she could possibly collapse in blissful silence without his whispers blowing phantom breezes over her ear.
“You always spoke over me, White,” she muttered at the voices. “And then you were irritated with how I barely spoke. What did you expect when you kept talking and and dragging me everywhere? Why did you even try to talk to me in the first place?”
“We are complete opposites, and we will be the best of friends,” a boyish voice murmured mockingly. “We were quite a pair together, you and I.”
“Emphasis on the past tense,” Noth hissed, reaching for another pillar to steady herself. But her body sagged, hand falling short of support, and the elf crashed onto the grass and marble with a dull thud, unaccompanied by any swearing.
She was too tired to even react to physical pain.
Lying facedown in the grass, Noth struggled for a moment to get up, to at least position herself as leaning against as pillar. But her body didn’t want to fight, the war taking place in her mind too exhausting. “Noth, who hurt you?”
“Shut it, White,” she slurred, the bitter taste of dirt entering her mouth for a second before she instinctively spat it out. Noth laid there for what seemed like hours; it was probably less than half. Her eyes closed every few seconds before fluttering open again, almost like a candle flickering, fighting a cold breeze that threatened to snuff it out.
The elf would have laid there for the rest of the night, unable to sleep, if not for a breeze that swept through the grounds, ruffling owl feathers and tree leaves and shaking windchimes. Air rippled with glassy notes that caused Noth’s head to lift up from the grass, eye focused distantly on the miniature garden that she heard the jingling from.
Her hands clenched in effort, and her eye closed again, this time because of concentration, and with a single leap, Noth was no longer lying on the ground next to a corridor. Instead, her body had teleported to the middle of the tinkling windchimes, their sound washing over her akin to a cleansing rain.
White’s voice faltered in her mind, childlike delight manifesting as he fell silent.
“You and I loved the chiming too much to ever talk...” Noth mumbled into the grass before finally falling into the welcoming arms of black, dreamless sleep.A week after they met, and they had already been eating sugar cookies together, Noth nibbling on hers in the shadows, her eyes darting around nervously every few seconds, while White sat a few paces in front of her, swinging his legs over the edge of the balcony.
Noth Ruhtra was an odd friend, he’d figured out a long time ago. She didn’t laugh - at least, he hadn’t heard her laugh at all - and barely talked unless she was answering questions. Even then, her answers were clipped and unsure. And, worst of all, she was scared of almost everything, except dark places, oddly enough. But if anyone tapped her shoulder or snuck up on her, she’d be found in the nearest nook or cranny moments later.
They hadn’t had many conversations, to his dismay. Even tutoyer didn’t get to her. However, she remained near his side, but at the same time not by his side. She just occupied a place near him whenever they had free time or were in the same class, but that was it. Her body was there, but the person he’d been hoping for wasn’t quite where he expected.
It had been a week, and they were eating sugar cookies during the afternoon break when White’s hempy mind offered an idea to see whether or not Noth really would be his best friend. “Are you done eating, Noth?” he called, bending himself backwards in an abrupt motion.
Her shoulders jerked, and her half-eaten cookie floundered in her hands for a moment before she managed to catch it again, looking at him in surprise. “Yes...” she whispered. If a mouse had scurried across the floor at that moment, it would have drowned out her voice.
White took his disappointment and stuffed in the same filing cabinet as his dashed expectations, licking off the few last crumbs of his cookie before he stood up. He pasted on a bright smile, one that he had not considering using around his would-be friend. “We should do something, Noth. Something fun.”
The elf stiffened, and he could see unwillingness to tag along written across her face. She stood up, though, and drifted next to him. “What do you want to do?”
White’s eyes surveyed the courtyard outside, settling on a wizened man clutching the flamboyant Staff that signaled his position of power as the master of Mage Academy. “... we’re going to prank the guild leader.”
If she had still been eating, White was quite sure Noth would have choked. It was a good thing that she wasn’t, at least, because the only way that she could possibly get duller would be if she died.
He walked away, ideas unfurling in his mind, and his mouth curved upwards ever-so-slightly as he heard the faint steps of Noth behind him.
Splitting up in multiple parts because ridiculous story length.
Also if you are confused, each section switches between White's perspective/the past with Noth's perspective/the present.
Pt 2: fairy wings and fairy good friends in this one
Nahbi Flowers (c)
Rotem (c)
There is something in Noth that I still find very creepy. I think i have a hunch!