Elendili by hadastheunseelie

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Part Two: Naomi

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Naomi doesn’t like being outside at night, not anymore. The stars and the moon are too bright, too close. The shadows are too far away.

She doesn’t look at the stars, or the moon. She has enough self-control to keep from doing stupid things.

It is cold, or it should be. Everyone else is wearing jackets. She’s wearing a scarf, and a tank top.

The group of girls around her are loud. Mercifully, blessedly loud, in the loud way that only other people can be. The shadows are still far away, too far away for an alley.

The street is full of lights, and shadows, and loud people. She tries not to breathe a sigh of relief. It is only a little ways up the street to the shop. She can’t hear her boots on the sidewalk.

Her group pushes open the door, and crowd in, the bell on the door jingling. They spread out to stare at pastries and ice cream. They take off their coats and Nickets, and relax in the warmth.

She stiffens the moment she walks in, and very quickly slumps again. No one notices. She can feel one of them. (There is a better name for it than intuition, but somehow Spidey-sense doesn’t quite fit.)

One of the other girls, Kate, makes a joke, and Naomi smiles, and gives her order to the man across the counter without even looking. He hands her a cup of chocolate icecream, and she hands him a couple dollars.

She chooses the table without thinking. The rest of them follow her.

She sits in the corner, or as close as she can without looking like she’s trying to hide. Naomi stabs at her ice cream as she scans the room. There is a moment of pain- more revulsion, pity, and happiness all mixed together really- when she spots him.

She blinks, and smiles at another joke.

He’s old, she can tell that just by looking. As old as- but she stops herself before she can continue. It doesn’t help, she reminds herself.

He is tall, taller than most of his kind. And his hair… she has heard stories of the prince with red hair. A crown might have fit him once, but crowns are passé.

He moves like the rest of them, she thinks. Ever so calculated and ever so graceful. (She doesn’t remember the last time she tripped. It was over a year ago.)

She scans the room again, and this time she sees the boy sitting across from him. (It’s funny, she thinks later, that everyone feels younger than her. But she doesn’t allow herself to go any farther before she distracts herself.)

She knows why he was chosen.

There is something to him, something in his hair, which is dark but has veins of gold running through it from the bad mood lighting that the café chose. There is something in the eyes too, (there is always something in the eyes.)

Her glance passes over them once again, and she feels the same punch to her stomach when she looks at the elf.

There is a word that she might have used for herself once, one that fits the boy now- that she sketches out on the table. Her icecream lies abandoned. She used to spend days writing out that word in cursive, all full of e’s and l’s and i’s. (There was another one too, one that started with an A, but it is long gone now. All the homework it was carved into has been burned, and she does not dare spell it out again.)

The boy has become aware of her now. The elf knew the second she walked in. She almost wants to say that he is more uncomfortable than she is, (his mask is porcelain-thin,) but that would be a lie.

Naomi meets his eyes. They are gold. (Overwrought, she thinks.)

They break the exchange, and she thinks about making a joke to the people around her about he-knows-that-I-know-that-he-knows situations. Then she thinks of their reactions, and she does not speak.

She listens to the prince and boy leave, and misses something about sheep and a bottle of Listerine.

                She is scared.

                Naomi imagines the boy pressed up against the other one in the cold, and realizes what it is.

                It is even harder not to look at the stars on the way out.

 

                Last year, if you had asked her to find someone in her town, she would have told you to fuck off. Naomi would still tell you to fuck off now, but she might be able to do it.

                It’s not magic, not really, or so they told her. They were right, it’s more like listening, if by listening you could pick out someone’s life essence from your room. She never does it. It leaves her tired and feeling of something she does not know the name for. They had a word for it. (In her less worn moments she thinks they had a word for everything, and some words for things that didn’t even exist. She laughs.)

                It’s not hard to find the one from the coffee shop. It might be, if he didn’t want to find her as well. They can sense each other calling out, and he is there in the senior parking lot after school as she passes through it, just like she knew he would be.

                He is leaning against the fence, and the punch hits her all over again. (She thinks for a minute of the time in the seventh grade when she took a wrong turn on the way back from school and saw a man sitting alone in an alley. His sleeves had been rolled up, and he had been holding a needle just close enough that he could look at it and just far enough away that he could pretend he wasn’t going to use it. She had stayed there, watching, as the man pushed the needle inside his arm. His shoulders had tensed, and then relaxed. She had believed that he had achieved nirvana. Naomi almost wants to laugh. At least people believe you when you say you’ve found heroin.)

                “You fear me,” he says, when she is a few feet away from him.

                “I frighten you,” she replies.

                “Then we are on equal footing.”

                She smiles at this, because equal footing requires both to first have shoes.

                “Which one of my cousins did you meet?”

                She fumbles, (and does not think of dark hair and grey eyes.)

                “What do you see in the boy?” She says back after a moment. (She has heard the stories. She knows full well what he sees.)

                He doesn’t say anything. She has scored a point.

                “I will not stay away from him.”

                They stare each other down for a moment, and he turns and leaves.

                She shoves her hands deep into the pockets of her threadbare green jacket, and shivers, thinking of snow white skin covered with more white and silver.

Silver too, is overwrought.

 

The boy is not hard to find.

He does not call her. His spirit is not bright. But she is strong. He is outside her father’s class when she finds him.

She grabs his wrist. She does not dare let him escape, not when he still feels so solid against her hand. He follows her. (She doesn’t think about the expression on his face. It doesn’t resemble anything like the way he was looking at that one.)

There is one thing she needs to ask him. She is in the sunlight, and her hair is up in a coronet where she left it. It is shining, her back is straight.

“The elendili,” she asks, “Do you know what they are?”

She knows he doesn’t know. If he had known, he would never have gone near her.

She steps back, and closes her eyes.

“He’s going to hurt you, you know.” He doesn’t believe her. She wouldn’t believe her, not before. (Humans are intrinsically stupid, she thinks, and realizes she sounds like a teenager.)

“I know you don’t think he will, but he will. It’s how he’s made.” (It’s how they’re all made.) There is a silence.

“Do me a favor,” she says finally. “Don’t-” she does not know how to phrase the next part. He should not give away his- not life essence- it is something else. Humanity? But it is not that either. She is all too human, she can see it in her hands in the sun. “Don’t give everything away to him.” Everything is the only word for it, but it is the wrong word. “Keep something apart, something safe.”

If she had the energy for regrets she might have them. Or maybe she has too much energy, and every regret she has is bound up in containing it. She is too tired to figure it out either way.

He nods.

She looks at him one last time, and leaves. Her dad is waiting.

 

He has not listened; she knows it when she leaves. (She knows it before she leaves, but she pretends not to.)

He is outside the building. She called, maybe. Maybe it was the boy.

Naomi mutters something about the bathroom to her father, and slips out a side door, into the shade cast by the building. She does not step into the sun, not yet.

He is waiting for her, leaning against the side of the next building, ten feet away. He does not come closer.

She looks him in the eyes, and steps out into the late afternoon sunlight.

She is glorious, she knows without looking. Her hair shines golden, her eyes are bright, and her skin is casting off a light of its own.

Leave him alone, she says, or maybe she uses different words. She might not have spoken English. She might not have spoken at all.

He looks at her for one second, for two, and she can see his mask cracking. His gaze drops from hers, and he almost runs. (He would be running, if he hadn’t learned not to long ago.)

She doesn’t step out of the sun, not yet. She looks down at her hands, and unpins her hair, and feels it fall down her back in spirals.

                Naomi closes her eyes, breathes in, and holds it for as long as possible. The sun is bright behind her eyelids. She cannot feel its warmth on her face.

                She lets her breath out, ties back her hair, and goes back into the shade. She takes another deep breath, and walks back into the building to find her father.

 

Next time, it is the boy seeks her out.

She doesn’t watch him. She slips by him, in the shadows, and pushes the piece of paper into his hand that she wrote moments before.

 

He is there waiting before she is. She tells him to follow her, and he does.

Once, long ago, when her father was busy at the university, he used to drop her off here, and she found the courtyard. The owner let her go there when she was small and bored. The owner might be too scared of her now to put a stop to it, which would be funny, except that the owner is six and a half feet tall to her five and a half, and at least hundred pounds heavier.

The courtyard is full of still-flowering plants. (Naomi does not think about how she learned their names.)

“Catmint,” she points out, “And Siberian Irises.”

The boy nods. “It’s beautiful.”

She smiles. “Yes, it is.” (The other her might have monologued about evolution and beginnings and endings. She wants to now. She doesn’t have the right words.) She is silent.

“What happened to you?”

She thinks for a moment. (She has answered this question many times. To friends, who tell her she is more aloof. To her parents, who watched her try to write a sentence and fail. To the girl next to her in art class who complained that she never talked anymore. It was easier to answer then.)

“Sometimes, people are born different. Not in the downs syndrome way, or even the Albert Einstein way, but in something… less human. And everyone born that way learns to hide it, or make it manifest differently, but it’s there. Like your art.”

The boy is silent, his face impassive.

“We get noticed by them. Your boyfriend’s one.”

“He knew you,” the boy says.

She wants to smile. She nods. “It’s like that he-knows-that-I-know thing that happens. I knew what he was, and he knew what I was.’

‘His people… they are old. He is old. And I? Well I got too much like them and now I’m old. Only I’m not- so I’m fading instead.’

‘You asked what happened to me. That’s what happened. I’m fading.” (There is a different word for it, a better word, but she can’t remember it.)

“I think I understand,” he says. He almost does. For half a second, she can see something near comprehension flit across his features and she thanks the world that he has listened. But she looks him in the eye, and watches him, and there is a light there that is growing, and she sighs.

                (She thinks that if she were in some period piece about War and Life she would probably take a drag on her cigarette, and stare off into the distance. But she doesn’t because she’s a fourteen year old girl and where would she even get a cigarette anyways.)

                “No you don’t,” she says, and watches the flowers.

                “When you said keep a part of myself,” the boy sounds very young, “what did you mean?”

                She doesn’t look away from the flowers, she doesn’t think she could bear to look at him.

                “When I met them,” she says, (and does not think of summer nights where she learned to dance,) “I gave everything I was away.” (She does not think about the songs she heard and sang.) “Every sentence, every word, every bit of my stories.” (She never spoke in a circle of firelight while they watched.) “Then they left.” (Her voice doesn’t break.) “Your Art, don’t give it up to him. Or else- or else you’ll become like me.”

                He isn’t looking at her, but she is looking at him, and she watches him. The terrace they are on is overshadowed, and none of the afternoon light reaches her, and she is glad. He has finally seen her, Naomi can see it.

                He runs. She stays and watches the plants. They do not die.