Welcome to Gaia! ::

It was easy when you were able to write your thoughts, your feelings down. Yet as she wrote, they were not thoughts nor, were they feelings. They were numbers. Totals. Estimates. Theoreticals. Reals. Positives, imaginary, whole, negative- numbers that came with meanings that came with implications. Implications from her. To her. About her. Solia wasn't a math house. She wasn't someone who liked the subject or even excelled at it, yet there she sat at her desk with her laptop, fingers clicking away at keys while she did math to further her own understanding.

It wasn't exactly a death oriented practice, what she was doing, yet it bothered her. How many hunters died in the field? How many off the fields but related to horsemen? To infection, to this and that and weaknesses? To human hindrances? Did being a hunter cure things? Did it expidite certain qualities of life- questions asked before she'd asked them, yet answered in ways that left her asking more. Why had she'd become curious? Why did now, did such thing matter to her? Did genetics, did history, did that constant cycle of life and death now rattle her mind and drive her thoughts?

Because now she had a family. Now she had someone in her life who understood. Someone she could relate to, not just in feeling but in blood. How close, how far, how did they tie together? How did they factor into it all. These answers were slow to find, slow to digest, slow to find the courage to voice. Slower stilll to find the will and inner courage to ask. Did she ask the doctor directly? The lead who no doubt had more important matters on his hands than entertaining the curiosity of a trainee not even in his own division? Did she go to Caelius? The lead who was despite all Israfel's optimistic thoughts, was so violent and unpredictable in a way that made even those loyal to his own division hesitant to seek his council? Gale? Who was for all her ideals, just another hunter? Lex, for his new rank, was indeed, just a newly minted hunter? Ami, who was ever cold to her, despite wanting just to be her friend? Did Solia seek hunters? Did she seek assistants? Did she seek for something that in the end, no one would have an answer to, no solid ground on which to give her basis, to give her fact? It drove a part of her mad.

She wanted to feel like she had answers, like the facts had been facts and no these intangibles. These imaginaries. Solia was in her own mind a free thinker, a free spirit that was unbound to structure. Yet her own irony came in that small muffled self realization that she was nothing like how she wanted herself to be, that she imagined herself to be. She was a creature focused on realities. On conclusions made with harsh set in stone formulas and reasonings. She drew her mirth and merriment from facts and not fictions. The fiction was the mask. It was her disguise. It was what sheilded her from her own reality. From her own cold factual self.

She was someone who knew too much, all while knowling too little. She knew her mother and father had long ago sent her away. That their slow removal of her from their lives had been their way to cope, to further themselves and cast off a child who was seen as problematic. Daddy couldn't go into politics if his daughter was insane. Mommy couldn't play the game of social butterfly with a little girl who'd forever be the subject of scrutiny. It was easier for them to deny she existed, to deny she belonged to them. To deny that Solia had even at one time been a child they'd loved.

Bitterness had a way of dwelling inside the human heart, inside the mind like an infection. Bitterness at a sister who's name she never even knew. Of someone normal, living a life that should have been hers. For existing in a role that would have been her's, had she not been 'different' had she'd never have been marked.

Her jaw clenched, tightened as the numbers stopped appearing on the screen. The page half filled with data, she saved the file and shut her laptop slowly, all her bitterness, all her questions dwelling in her mind never exposed, never seen.

She smiled as she walked back to the dorm rooms. Smiled as she set her laptop down on her desk back into the small little room that had been her home for the better part of a year. She moved with a smile on her face, even as Israfel felt each emotion in her mind growing, consuming.

She smiled when she reached the training feild.

She smiled when she screamed.

She rolled over and stared at her weapon, who so calmly sat, devoid of fancy dress and polished boots. A simple swath of white cloth, pinned with something akin to a ribbon. Bit he said it wasn't right. It was wrong. Missing something. She didn't know how to answer him, to tell him that she didn't know what was right, what did go there. She didn't know what to give him, what would make him happy, what might alleviate his fears, aid him in his thinking that perhaps, he need not worry about what was pinned to his clothes but rather to his past. What made him drawn so to that item? Why did it have value. She wanted to ask what she knew he couldn't answer and it frustrated her.

Yet he sat, peaceful. Calm. She knew him though. He worried. He worried about her, about them, about her heart and her mind and her whirlwind of thoughts and how maybe, just maybe, she ought to seek counsel in others. In elders. But her's were secrets, secrets that would lead to complications, problems. She filed her reports. She did her work silently. Unknown. It was better to remain silent, unseen.
Better to not know, then to ask.
Then to ask and not know how to answer.

(wc-217)

"Why a rose?" She asked one day, eyes moving to where his would go. The flowers sat in a vase in the life labs. Real, whites and yellows and red and pinks- an assortment given from one hunter to another in a show of affection. Something cliché, contrite. A physical representation of affection in a manner that was set by a society they had not been a part of for years. Roses were not part of their world. They were fragments of the past they had sowrn to leave behind. Not required remnants of a human life that had died when they had bonded to weapons.

Israfel looked at the flowers reaching out to touch the petals, hand stopping millimeters from them. "I do not remember." He frowned, his voice going an octave lower. She knew better to ask about him, his memories, yet she did so. She pried and prodded at him. The strain was real, and it hurt them both. Not because she so much as asked as he simply couldn't answer her. They were curious. They asked questions. They wanted answers. They were the ones that would always ask about the past. Yet looking at the roses, even the siren was left to wonder why.


(wc-20 cool

Solia looked at her laptop laughing as evil-y as a girl who wrote terrible fiction could. Five bucks, dinner- or maybe something else. All so she wouldn't write about them. It was so hard, they gave her such good material too. The eyepatch, the glasses, the possibility of farming and yaoi and maybe just terrible things that most guys were apparently against having people thinking about them as. Megane or no, her fingers itches as she ran over her list of possible victims. Oh don't write they said, don't dare write. But Solia did dare to write. She always dared to write.

Write the wrongs of the world that is.


(wc-110)

She’d studied it religiously. Each word memorized. Drilled into her memory. Each tiny spec, each drop of information she could get from his remains choked out. How long had she sat at the desk, pouring over the book like it was her lifeline? The one thing that mattered most? Not long enough. It couldn’t be long enough. Words scrawled in a ink that faintly hand blue pigment, paper that had yellowed and smelled musty. Pages that stuck together, the air of the island warmer and wetter than it’s original place. Solia had spent half a day just combing through it, her only breaks to go use the rest room and to drink a glass of water. Hunger was pushed aside as she studied. As she read each word as gospel truth.

How lucky she was to have this in hr possession. To have stumbled across it? She was blessed. God had given her hope when she’d been so struggling. It was the possible key to her past. To her future. The letters home- they were snapshots, little blips and sparks of a life that wasn’t her own. Obsessive. Compulsive. Manipulative. Sides of her that worried Israfel, that had him reeling back, grabbing at her mind to keep her grounded. To remind her that her path didn’t have to go that way, all she had to do was set it down, walk away. That was it, that was literally it. It was just a journal. Just a memory and a life that wasn’t her’s. It was a life that was over. A life that she had no rights to get involved in. That was the past. She had her own future and it was at deus. It was there and it was safe.

Sure she had to fight monsters, risk her life but she’d chosen that hadn’t she? She’d given her life up for this one. Solia didn’t see Israfel’s thinking as logical. Hell, she knew her own reasoning wasn’t logical. It was half insane. But she wanted it. She wanted it so badly- just to have that chance, that hope that maybe she could move forward, that she could get things done. That perhaps this time, she’d not be a failure. That she could feel normal. That she could finally, be wanted, needed.
What of Jason Israfel asked. What of Shu? Of Gale? Of Lex? Of all the other hunters- what of them? Was she so ready to abandon them?
She wasn’t, even she knew that. Her heart began to break away as she dwelled on it all. Of what it would mean. Israfel kept trying to reach her but it fell on deaf ears. Solia and he both knew her mind, they knew where it would go, where it would end. And while they fought, they both knew the inevitable. They both understood.

She didn’t set the book down, rather, she sealed it away. She hid it like a dirty secret, a prize that was for her only. Solia had to keep it secret, even from Jason. Jason who she loved. Jason, who she’d have to kill on the inside if she ever wanted to get what she needed. But for now she mused, for now she’d get closer, stay with him. Just a while longer. A while longer, until it would be time to let him go and fall down the path that would be her own ruin.

Solia had pulled up the chart on a whim. An old thing. A survey people could do online. Typical questionnaires that they'd fill out and have people ask them based on numbers or symbols. It wasn't a new concept- They'd been around for years- yet she'd never really filled any out when she'd been on the site. Now after a trip back out to the world- it was odd. She was thinking more about herself as of late. About What she wanted in life. Where she wanted to be, what she wanted to do. It was strange but- maybe it would help her. Help her think about what exactly, she was finding. What was missing.
What ultimately, would be what she doing in the end of it all and what kind of legacy she'd leave behind.

The questions started simple- but she figured that going in small batches would be best. No use going through them all at once. Else what point would there be? She had to work through them. That was the point wasn't it? To work though them to work through herself? It was strange but not all together so.

1. Who was the last person you held hands with?
Solia remembered because it had been so nice. Jason's hand in her own. His fingers slipping into her hand. Jason who she was so afraid of. Afraid because she worried if she was falling in love with him. That she liked him. That if messed up he'd get hurt because of her. Jason was sweet. Nice. Pure. And then there she was. Solia the girl who'd smiled blindly at her own heartbreak- who swallowed lie after lie to make others happy. Who had tried to make everyone so happy she'd forgotten how to be happy on her own.
'Jason.'

2. Are you outgoing or shy?
Shy? Outgoing? Solia again wasn't sure about things. About herself. She kept so many secrets. Secrets for herself. From others. Jason again. She didn't tell him, didn't let him know. Didn't tell him that she was used goods. That she wasn't pure. She wasn't the girl he saw. She was mean, she was death for god's sake. She would- she had to be- She wasn't supposed to be- Solia's fingers typed the words on the screen. She felt her mask forming, that smile cracked and fake fitting back over herself again.
'Outgoing'

3. Who are you looking forward to seeing?
She felt bile rise up. There was one person she wanted to see. To meet. But that person would die if that happened. If Solia went looking for them, went to see them, she'd risk them. All of them. No. It was better to stay away. To pretend they were not her family anymore. That she'd died and they had moved on. That she's not looked up her own grave, her family. Her sister- Her baby sister who had their mother's eyes. Their father's hair. Her baby sister- who was a Delacroix.
A cursed bloodline- a hunter's bloodline.
'No one.'

4. Are you easy to get along with?
She hoped so. But she knew that was a lie. She was loud, obnoxious, she was insistent, persistent, she was misleading and demanding and thinking herself oh so clever when the reality was not as clear cut. She knew that about herself, about others. Solia was a creature of her own over imaginative creation. She was a paradox because she would say yes to everything and anything, yet scream no at the same time. She wanted to stop a war, yet was at the same time willing to kill for her cause, just like the very ones she condemned in the same breath. She was a liar.
'Yes.'

5. If you were drunk would the person you like take care of you?
Her chest tightened. Her heart beat raced as memories of stupid things of her past surfaced. Of saying yes when she should have said no. Of wanting to be happy. Of thinking always saying yes was good. That if she said no then she'd only hurt herself. Yet syaing yes had hurt so much. Cost her so much. Yes had hurt, saying no hadn't. Jason she said yes to. He made saying yes feel safe. That she could say yes to him and not be afraid he'd leave her. That maybe he'd stay, maybe he wasn't afraid of her. That he saw more than a smile, a pretty face. Solia wanted to say yes to him. To touch him and tell him she would say yes. Yes, forever yes- just please don't say no. Never say no.
'I hope he would.'

Hope was something she did all the time. Hope was her mantra, her only thing real.
Hope kept her alive.
So far.