original shit

[beech]

dis all my original shit
click the ☆ for character info + pictures

amalthesia, the flying ship ► ☆
► friech & berette

feytalis ► ☆
► chesh & usartas

land of four seasons ► ☆
► aisuma & gable
► engel & gable
► aisuma & gable & nilak
► aisuma & nilak + gable
► aisuma & gable & nilak 2

magaug club, the ► ☆
► the whole magaug club

paradise island ► ☆
► lial & luceme 2 (chronologically first)
► lial & luceme

yozellin ► ☆
► palmer & asuen & lewin

Comments

→ aisuma • nilak (+ gable)

[beech]

You can’t live by yourself, Nilak recalled others of his kind saying to him.

Watch me. He had said something to that effect, now hadn’t he? Those others, they didn’t know anything. They criticized Nilak for his anger, his suspicion, his aggression, even when those were the things that kept him alive. You could not be naïve and vulnerable when you lived on a mountain teeming with wyrms, dragons, and other beasts that would like nothing more than to bite you and rip you into shreds.

His wariness had kept him alive. They lacked the same. Air-headed fools.

He would like to think much the same about Aisuma—he would, except Aisuma was as different from them as he was from Nilak.

He hadn’t known what to think of him. Here was a boy, a small boy, with serious eyes and hair that always cast a shadow over his face. Who bundled himself up completely to hide his curse away from the world. Yet, no matter how many things should make him angry, he reacted with a solidness that could be aggravating. Certainly, he quipped, he was sarcastic, he had no qualms with telling either of them when he believed they were being foolish. Nilak had seen him be annoyed, time and again.

However.

He didn’t get angry over what counted.

Nilak was nearly double in size, from how his wings had expanded, the feathers and fur on his body standing up. His eyes were narrowed into angry slits as he and Aisuma walked through one of the many small villages of the winter lands. He could hear them. Oh, whisper that they may, but his ears were sharp, more so when he was listening for things purposefully.

“Aisuma,” he growled, and Aisuma graced him with a brief sideways glance, “are you just going to keep walking?”

“We’re not going to get back to the inn any other way,” was his reply.

Strangely enough, it tempered some of his horrifically bad mood. Nilak’s feathers sunk down and his wings folded back to his body, at least, though his eyes were still narrow. “You know that isn’t what I’m referring to,” he said.

“You’re going to have to be more specific.”

Nilak hesitated.

He looked around them again. A mother pulled her child closer as they passed—her eyes were fixed on the horns (branching, late into his transformation Aisuma was progressing) and to the hands that he could no longer hide underneath the expanse of his poncho. His reptilian feet with their long, clawed toes, and of course his enormous tail that ended in a sphere ringed with spikes.

Nilak bore his teeth and brought himself closer to Aisuma’s side.

“No matter how often this happens,” he said to him quietly, “why won’t you get angry? You ought to glare at some of them, at the very least. I know that you can’t not have heard them?”

Aisuma looked at him properly now, with his dark, dark eyes. His mouth tensed, pursing into the sort of disapproving look he often gave Gable. Nilak drew himself up slightly. “It doesn’t matter,” Aisuma said at last, with a shake of his head. Rage sparked again, but this time at Aisuma’s inaction. He was content to let them say whatever it was they pleased about him? When they didn’t know anything, no, nothing at all—

“If I saw me, I would be afraid too,” it was so soft as to be a whisper.

At once, Nilak knew that he hadn’t meant to say it. The way Aisuma went rigid and then picked up his pace said that much. Letting out a small tch, Nilak hurried after him, caught one of his arms, and dragged him into the nearest alley. His leg hit against something or another, but it hardly mattered so much as crushing Aisuma’s body up against his.

“What fool things are you saying?” Nilak asked him quietly.

Aisuma refused to look at him.

“Stop being understanding.” Nilak gave his chin a swat with two of his fingers, but Aisuma only clenched his jaw. He could be a damn stubborn thing, when he wanted to. He was stubborn in all the wrong places! “There’s no reason to sympathise with people who judge you just like that.”

“I am a monster,” Aisuma told him quietly, pointedly.

“As am I! What of it? Your family has been monsters as well, haven’t they? That damn word doesn’t mean anything anymore! It certainly doesn’t mean you deserve to have every old man and every brat whispering about you on street corners when you’re just minding your own business,” Nilak hissed, bringing his face close. Aisuma wouldn’t look at him? Fine. He would just make it impossible for him to see anything else. Though Aisuma’s changing body certainly made him strong, he hardly struggled, though he did jerk his head when he realised Nilak had pushed him back against the alley wall.

“They don’t matter, Nilak,” Aisuma muttered, turning his head so that he, reluctantly, was looking into Nilak’s eyes.

“Oh, no?” He snorted. “Don’t think you can fool me. You may not get angry, but that doesn’t mean you don’t feel anything else, do you—”

“What do you want me to say?”

Nilak stopped. He had pushed too far. Aisuma’s voice had tightened. It wasn’t anger, it was something deeper, more raw. Pain. It was a voice that he didn’t hear from Aisuma much, and for good reason. Gable was so often present in order to mediate, to make sure one of them didn’t say something stupid. Nilak did the same for him. But, here he was, with Gable back at the inn, no-one to mediate.

What did he want Aisuma to say?

“I wish you’d get angry,” Nilak sighed. He couldn’t do anything but become honest, in order to avoid a fight between the two of them. It wouldn’t be the first, of course, but he’d be damned if he redirected the anger he had at the villagers onto the person it was tormenting. “I wish, instead of you allowing yourself to sympathise, you would be angry instead.”

Aisuma’s expression changed, subtly, and he looked hesitantly up at Nilak, waiting for him to continue. Nilak was terrible with this, but he brought a hand to his face all the same, touching tentatively at the skin of his cheek.

“You haven’t done anything worth fear.” No, that wasn’t it. “…You’re not frightening. There’s nothing wrong with the way that you look. Anyone should be able to realise that.”

As if to show this… he touched Aisuma’s horn. The one, tracing it gently. He found nothing odd about it, nor his monstrous hands, or his clawed feet, or that deadly tail of his. His scales weren’t scary, nothing about him was scary, no matter what people or Aisuma himself thought.

Aisuma was quiet, but he dropped his head forward until it nestled underneath Nilak’s chin. He leaned it against his collarbone and he just breathed there, quiet and still otherwise. Nilak slid his hand down Aisuma’s horn gently before cupping the back of his head, sifting his hair through his fingers repeatedly. He felt almost compelled to hush him, though Aisuma wasn’t crying and likely wouldn’t. He wasn’t the type. So he cradled his head and stroked his hair, smoothing it again and again.

“And here I was wondering where you two had gotten off to.”

Nilak glared up. There, at the end of the alley, with his hands settled to either side of the opening, was Gable. He was smiling in at the two of them, his eyebrows lifted, his head cocked to one side. Aisuma didn’t move immediately, though made a near-inaudible sound of acknowledgement.

“Shame there’s not enough room in there for me,” Gable chuckled. “I’ll just be out here.”

Here Nilak had expected more obnoxiousness. But, Gable turned his back to them both, his body blocking out any would-be passers-by. Was he doing it on purpose? (Of course he was.) Nilak looked back down at the form leaning against him and tentatively pressed a kiss to the crown of his head.

“Sorry, for getting so angry,” he said to him, quietly. Only after meeting Aisuma could he think that his anger was no longer so necessary, so important for him to hold on to.

“It’s all right. It wasn’t at me.” Aisuma’s head shook back and forth against his chest before he pulled back. In a moment that left Nilak as rigid as a statue and feeling hot, he leaned up to kiss the corner of his mouth gently before stepping out of his arms and walking down the alley. A knock of his hand against Gable’s shoulder had the elf moving to allow him out and Nilak, eventually, followed.