D. Gray-man Fan Fiction ❯ White Roses ❯ Stage One ( Chapter 1 )

Stares. Piercing, nerve-wracking, utterly and completely uncomfortable stares, eyes that were unwanted, bringing even more unwanted attention that was so well hated, and completely and utterly disregarded when someone found something of interest to stare at, despite the object of attention's dislike at the rather rude gesture. Thin shoulders rotated, shifting in light, subtle sign of discomfort at the many pairs of eyes that were focused upon the slim cloth covered back, a head graced with smooth, silky strands of ebony hair cut at an angle lowering closer to hover over the small plate of cream tinted porcelain, in danger of submerging the tip of a small nose into the cooled icing of a half eaten cinnamon roll that lay upon the plate, irises hewn of a deep, alluring amethyst trained upon the remaining half of the sweet pastry as though it were the most interesting thing in the world at the moment. Of which it was, actually, to the young girl who sat at the bar of the small cafe near the train station that was established within the small, rather homey feeling town with it's close nit houses and buildings that brought a sort of nostalgic comfort to those who entered the gates of the town. Shifting her head, the girl's eyes slid closed in a smooth, liquid like movement, remaining closed as the soft glossamer strands of her hair brushed against her lower jaw in a gentle, feather light caress that tickled the sensitive nerves beneath the smooth, alabaster skin of her delicately shaped face.

The slender hand that held the silver fork in mid air above the pastry, prepared to sink into the soft, cooked to perfection dough of the delicious smelling cinnamon roll lowered, placing the piece of cutlry onto the smooth, freshly cleaned surface of the counter with a small clink, and the girl's lips parted in a soft, nearly silent sigh of relief as most of the stares concentrated upon her back disappeared with only a few, lingering eyes trained upon her form as she lifted her head, and the the same, captivating violet orbs swept upwards to connect briefly with the green ones of the waitress near her seat.

"Miss, could I get the check please?" she asked softly, startling the blonde woman as she glanced at the dark haired girl who flashed a simple smile as her head tilted to the side as the waitress jolted.

"O- Of course miss!" the woman stammered in her haste as she scrambled towards the cash register towards the girl's left, and the girl glanced at her as the chiming of the drawer sliding open reached her ears, and her eyes focused upon the tarnished brass plate that was pinned to the woman's red shirt that held her names, the black letters that were engraved upon the simple metal reading 'Alice' in looping letters, and she felt her small, content smile widen as she glanced at her plate.

'Alice, huh? Nice name...' she thought, shaking her head as she laughed softly under her breath, her eyes rising to look at the woman now deemed Alice walked back over to her, handing her the small piece of paper that the girl took from her, and she glanced at the price she owed before placing the paper on the counter and reaching back for her pocket and pulling out a wallet of a deep heliotrope color and opening it, pulling out a few bills and placing them on the paper before placing her wallet back into her pocket.

"I-if you don't mind me asking miss..." Alice trailed off as the purple eyed girl looked up, blinking in an unspoken 'huh?' as she watched Alice fidget for a moment. "Are you going somewhere?" she finally blurted out, and the girl smiled as she leapt off her seat, her simple black shoes tapping against the relatively spotless domino tiled floor and she bent down to pick up her dark cobalt colored backpack from the floor and slinging it over her shoulders as she lifted her arm, a small cuff of black iron wrought into a simple link that encircled her wrist sliding up the afore mentioned section of her arm slightly as she flicked a stray strand of midnight black hair from her visage.

"No, I just don't want to miss my train." she replied softly before turning and striding quietly towards the double doored entrance to the pleasant cafe, and she pushed the door open slightly, pausing as she looked over her shoulder.
"Have a nice day." she said and departed, the door closing behind her as she headed down the sidewalk, back towards the train station in silence, a slight wind toying with the soft locks of her ebony colored hair that glinted with a blue tint to it as the sun reached it. Once again raising a hand to brush her hair behind her ears, she continued her trek towards the train station, and she glanced around as she reached it, purple eyes scanning before alighting upon the correct train that she needed to board to arrive at her destination on time.

Blinking twice, she glanced up at the clock that was attached to one of the enormous, looming pillars constructed from a mixture of concrete at the top that joined the archway high above her head, and then the orderly bricks that began halfway down the pillar and reached the dull gray concrete ground that was littered with cracks,gum and stains of who-knows-what, and she quickly read the time, the amethyst depths widened a fraction, realization hitting her like a tone of bricks that if she didn't hurry, she wouldn't reach the train in time. Jolting slightly, she quickened her pace into a light jog, her feet beating a harsh rhythm against the harsh, unforgiving ground beneath her, and she barely reached the train in time, slightly out of breath, but she managed to hand the conductor her ticket, and with a smile, he waved her in and she nodded, not quite having regained her regular breathing pattern as she boarded the train and scanned the occupied seats in hope that she would find a vacant one, not wanting to sit with someone she didn't know.

Actually, when it came down to it, she supposed that she was rather closed off or for lack of better word...antisocial, when meeting new people,perferring to keep to herself and choosing to talk as little as possible. It was almost second nature to her now, ever since.....With a violent shake of her head, she rid herself of those thoughts. It wouldn't do well to take a trip down memory lane in the middle of the isle of a train, or anywhere else, for that matter. And to add onto the subject, she had worked so hard to supress those memories, and she really didn't need them to resurface to the top of her mind like a buoy on water, seeing as then she would be in a rather brooding mood when she arrived where she was headed.

Finally finding a vacant seat in the next compartment, the alabaster skinned girl slid into the booth gratefully, sliding her heavy backpack off her now rather sore shoulders, and she rolled them to regain some of the feeling within them before unzipping the cobalt bag and pulling out a novel, re-zipping her bag before flipping the book open to where a blood red ribbon marked her page, and she pulled it out as she resumed reading from where she had stopped previously.

So submerged within the world of small black printing upon the pale white paper of the flimsy paper jacketed book was the girl, that she failed to notice as the train slowed down considerably until she was nearly knocked from her seat as it came to an abrupt halt, and she sighed, marking her place and putting her book away as she inwardly pouted.

>'And I was so close to the ending, too...' she mentally whined before berating herself, now wasn't the time to whine like a child, no matter how much she wanted to. Readjusting her backpack on her shoulders, the girl departed from the train, and she blinked in obvious confusion as she glanced around at her surroundings. 'Okay...we have a problem. I'm lost....' she thought, and she sweatdropped. Her master knew she had a crappy sense of direction. "Stupid Sadisitic old man." she grumbled under her breath, her once fairly happy mood disappearing like sunlight on a rainy day. Wow, I need to think of better similes. Aaaannyyyway, back to the subject at hand, instead of reading the authoress babble about pointless things when she should be writing about the story.....right. I'll get to that now.

Ehem. Anyways, the girl began to mutter incoherent things under her breath, earning her weird looks by passing people, and she only shot them a glare before continuing her unintelligent mutterings of death threats directed towards her master once she got her hands on him...wait, how would she when she didn't even know where the heck he was? Seriously, all he had said was to go to the Black Order Head Quarters, and then he was gone when she had woken up the next morning. Really, what kind of mentor was he, ditching her like that?

"A beyond stupid, lacking in the common sense department(though I am too,) sadistic, perverted old man." she ranted, her eyebrow twitching as she strode angrily out of the train station and stomping down the nearly deserted sidewalk, her now irritated mood staying with her like a hovering dark cloud that continued to rain upon her perverbial parade and ruining her rarely cheery mood in an instant, due to her lack of direction. She had asked several people, who had only looked at her like they thought she belonged in the loony bin before she had flipped them a rather crude gesture of her fingers and stormed off, her mood becoming increasingly irritated- no, more like flat out ticked, and now she was more like a ticking time bomb with a very short to non-existent fuse, ready to blow up at the next person who dared to talk to her or look at her the wrong way.

Oh, did she forget to mention? She had a very, very short fuse, and if someone pushed her buttons the wrong way, they became on the recieving end of her notorious bad temper, finding themselves being called every cuss word under the sun, and a few in other languages before just utter nonsense was spouted at them in her rage. Her master had, unfortunately for him, the poor guy, been on the recieving end of her anger several times, and he swore that it was the worst thing he had ever seen her do, especially when she had began to hurl books from the nearby bookshelf at him, a few hitting their mark and slamming into his head. Oops. Off subject. Let's get back to the task at hand, instead of chattering about the possible mental scarring of her master.

Uttering a string of words less than acceptable for the ears of people under the age of 18, her hands clenched into fists as her teeth gritted together in barely supressed anger, resisting the urge to throw herself onto the ground and scream at the top of her lungs, of which she would have, had it not been for being wary of the sidewalk beneath her, seeing as god-knows-what had been on it, and she really didn't feel like landing face first into something rather unpleasant, like something she'd rather not say, for the sake of being civilized.

Deep pools of liquid amethyst narrowing into dangerous slits, she let out an angry huff of air in frustration. 'I swear to god, if I don't find this stupid place soon, someone is going to get lynched.' she thought, 'perferrably master.' Why she was so fixated on the doom of her master, the rest of the world shall never know, nor does the rest of the world need to know. All that needs to be known is that it involved alchol, a 11 year old her, and a thoroughly drunk master, as well as several hookers. Just thinking about that unspeakable incident made her twitch, and though she looked relatively calm on the outside- okay, she didn't, she looked rather ticked off- anger boiled just beneath the surface of her somewhat still intact facade, and she suddenly blinked as a long shadow fell upon her, and, out of curiousity, her gaze swept upward.

"..." Twitch.Freaking twitch. There, as plain as the fading daylight itself, stood the very thing she was searching all over god's green earth for, and there it sat, atop the large cliff, as ominous looking as though it had came from a child's fairytale book. Twitch, twitch twitch. Crossing over the small expanse of grass at the right of the sidewalk, she craned her neck back at a painful angle that made her neck throb and she covered her eyes from the somewhat diminished sunlight, though it was still bright enough to hurt her eyes, and possibly render her blind if she stared into it like an idiot. Was she that much of an idiot to do such a thing? On one of her more sugar high, possibly hyped up on an illegal substance or genetically modified poppy seeds[1], probably. Now? That was a definite no.

Now considerably calmer but still definately irritated and still dangerously close to a major blow up, she gripped the rocky texture of the cliff in her hands, the stones scraping against the metal of the cuffs that encircled her left and right wrists, creating a high pitched scraping noise and making her wince as the noise threatened to break the sound barrier or at least burst her eardrums, she sighed as she realized there was nothing she could do about it, and she tried her best to ignore it as she climbed up the cliff, her footing slipping multiple times as she clung to the side of the chunk of raised earth desperately, seeing as falling down to the ground and going splat wasn't on the list of things she wanted to do, and she glanced up, noting with faint hope and relief that the top of the grassy outcropping was nearing and she tried to climb faster in reborn determination- or maybe she really, really didn't feel like falling all the way back down. She didn't feel like being an volunteer to be the first potential exorcist pancake. Though pan cakes did sound really yummy right now.....

The girl's now dust covered hand gropped blindly ahead of her and brushed against the evergreen blades of grass, gripping them tightly in her grasp as she pulled herself onto the top, collapsing in a heap as she turned her head to the side, struggling to regain her breath. Wow, she should work out more. An involuntary shudder ran through her body as she recalled the vigorous training she had gone through with her master, and she vowed to keep in shape- not that she wasn't, since she was thin and was maybe just a little underweight- but for fear of being sent back to her master and having to deal with his guaranteed(aka: Suicidal) training regiment, and she pulled herself to her feet, muscles twitching and trembling slightly as she strode clumsily towards the door of the large onyx castle, a few indentifiable- well, they were at this angle at least- objects fluttering around the pointed tops. Now standing in front of the door and feeling oddly short- well, she couldn't deny it, she was short but taller than Edward Elric's 99 inches of shortness [2] which she felt was an acomplishment in itself, but she felt like a freaking midget next to the gate, for crying out loud!

"Um..." oh yeah, that's a great way to start a sentance, 'um.' how about we go with a less cliched starter for an akward or hesitant sentance, hmm? "Euh...." that's better! Now, chop chop, times a wastin'! "My name is Alexis....I was sent here by my master...?" her sentance, no matter how hard she tried not to, ended like a question, and she suddenly felt incredibly stupid, even stupider than she actually was. Wait a minute, she wasn't stupid! She was a young, very intelligent girl! Oh, who the hell was she trying to kid? Yes, she had probably killed about half of her brain cells when she was younger, before 'that' happened, and yes, she was a bit dense and spacy- okay, more than a bit, but that was beside the point. The point was, she still had intelligence!

Waiting for a few minutes, Alexis remembered something very important, that she never forgot. What was it? Oh yeah, she WAS NOT A PATIENT PERSON. And I say that in all capital letters, my dear friends, is because she was very impatient, and it was a bad habit of hers that she had picked up from her master, but who was she to point fingers and blame people? Oh yeah, that was right. She was. Thin onyx eyebrow twitching in irritation, she turned and was about to talk once more when....

"HOLY SWISS CHEESE WHAT THE HECK IS THAT?!" she bellowed, her voice so loud that I had to use capitals to portray it's volume as she stared at the now stretched out door that was vaguely reminiscent of a face. "Dude, invest in some plastic surgery buddy. It works wonders." she stated, face blank as she stared at it.

"Cross Examination....Scanning....scanning..." rumbled the door, and Alexis jerked back, nearly falling backwards as lasers shot from the door's eyes, scanning up and down her form and she twitched.

"The hell?" she muttered, her irritation growing as the lasers retreated and the door was silent for a moment, making her raise an eyebrow.

"INTRUDER! SHE IS IN LEAGUE WITH THE EARL OF MILLENIUM[3]!" it bellowed, and Alexis let out a short scream of surprise before she began to twitch dangerously, her form shaking with anger. Twitch....Twitch...Strike One.

"I AM NOT AN AKUMA! NOR AM I IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE EARL OF MILLENIUM!" she bellowed back at the top of her lungs, and now she noted that if she yelled much more, her lovely- okay, it wasn't lovely- voice would be gone, and then she would sound like a toad. She hated toads, since you got warts if you tried to pick them up, not to mention they were ugly. Hey, just like the door that was screaming at the top of it lungs- wait a minute, did doors even have lungs? I mean, this door wasn't even supposed to talk, for cryin' out loud, can't anything be normal around here? No, probably not, which only made Alexis twitch even more. Even though she wasn't exactly the picture of normal in more ways than one, she at least had some sense of when was a time to goof off and when was not. And this, my lovely friends, was NOT a time to goof off. Twitch twitch.....Strike two. Oh, two strikes in a row, not good! And Alexis was that much closer to completely blowing up, and possibly killing several people, including the infamous master of hers that has been mentioned in several paragraphs. Although, killing some people did sound really nice right now.....

'No, Alexis, the Black Order Headquarters is not to be used as a target for mass murders of people you don't know yet.' a metaphorical[4] angel said, appearing on her right shoulder. 'No, go ahead and do it!' cheered a dark angel, appearing on her left. Alexis stared at her left shoulder.

"Aren't you supposed to be the devil?" she asked it, and the angel shrugged, her dark hair spilling over her bare shoulders. 'I don't know, and I honestly don't care.' she answered, and Alexis nodded. Good enough for her. The good angel sighed, and shook her head. 'Oh, screw it. I'm leaving.' and with that said, she disappeared, leaving Alexis alone with her dark angel, of which she picked up and chucked through the perverbial window. Good, because that angel was getting really annoying. And pushy. And one of the many, many things that Alexis did not like, was pushy people. And cats. She didn't like cats. Or snakes, for that matter. Oops, we somehow managed to get off track once more. Man, I don't like it when that happens. Back to the subject of which is at hand.

Alexis turned away from the now screeching door, and she happened to look up, only to find a sillouette shadowed against the top of the castle, and she blinked. 'What the hell is that?' she thought, only to have her question seemingly answered as the person leapt from the castle and landed smoothly on the ground with an odd grace as the person straightened up. 'I'm confuzzled. Is that a boy....or is it a girl?' Her lower lip jutted out in a small pout, she was so confuzzled. Not confused, confuzzled. She thought it sounded cuter like that. The person in question, however, was less than pleased with her staring.

"What are you staring at?" growled the long haired, blue eyed person whom their gender had yet to be established, and Alexis's head tilted to the side in a cute fashion.

"Are you a girl or a boy?" she asked innocently- no wait. Of all the things Alexis is, being innocent is NOT one of them.This fact was proven by the semi-evil looking grin that spread across her face and her amethyst orbs glittered mischeviously as the boy....girl....whatever, twitched, and they reached for the sword strapped to their back and Alexis frowned. "It was just a question, so answer it." she said bluntly, and the person twitched again.

"I'm a boy. And why do you care, you're going to die anyway." the person now established as a male, said, and Alexis's head tilted once more, in the opposite direction than before as she looked him up and down, and she frowned once more.

"Are you sure? Because you look more like a girl to m-wah!" she cried, barely dodging the boy's sword, and she nimbly bounced back a few steps. "Hey! I'm just trying to state the-gah!" she narrowly avoided the lethal looking blade again, and she stumbled, quickly regaining her balance clumsily. "Would you stop-gah! Swinging that thing-erk! Around?!" she was basically dodging the practiced swings haphazardly, nearly falling backwards several times. Finding that talking to the angered swordsman(Though she still thought he was a girl) wasn't doing much for her and not wanting to die just yet- she had to find 'him' first before she could even think about dying, her purple orbs deepened and flashed as she let out a small snarl. "You're really pissing me off." Bringing her wrists towards her collarbone and crossing them as she closed her eyes, she concentrated. "Activate." she muttered, and two crescent blades appeared in her hands, linked to chains that were welded to the cuffs around her wrists. The black and white blades glinted ominously in the twilight, and the boy looked at her, his attacks halting for a moment.

"What are those?" he asked, pointing towards her weapons. She gave him a blank stare.

"Weapons, what else, dumbass?" she snapped, and the boy twitched and growled at her as she rolled her eyes. "Yeah yeah. Rawr. So freaking scary." She honestly wasn't in the mood to deal with people like him right now, or ever, for that matter. She turned away from the boy, ignoring his prescence as she faced the gate. "So, are you going to let me in or do I have to turn you into firewood?" as if to prove her point, she raised one of her blades threateningly, making the gate flinch back as best it could, being a hunk of wood and all. Then again, it wouldn't have been surprising if it could move. I mean, it was talking, wasn't it? That didn't exactly classify as 'normal' for a door.

"Let her in." said a new voice, eminating from a creature with black bat wings, and Alexis raised an eyebrow. What else hung around here that wasn't the definition of 'normal' ? Oh yeah, her included. The gate complied and swung open as the black haired girl sighed and rolled her eyes, muttering a sarcastic 'thank-you' under her breath before heading in.