Original Stories Fan Fiction / Realism Fan Fiction ❯ Aqua ❯ Realizations ( Chapter 7 )

Chapter Seven

Realizations

 

 

Aqua fell asleep sometime in the late night sitting by a window, listening as the rains steadily decreased in its intensity. Darain was on his thousandth lap around the house in his pacing from his boredom when he came upon her. First he tried to shake her awake, but when that didn't work, he sighed and picked her up in his arms. Trying to remember which one she had said was her room; he paused outside the doors of two of the three bedrooms.

 

He stared at both, then gave up and headed into the corner one. His guess paid off as he pushed the door open and saw a mattress in one corner and shelved sheets and blankets in another. Darain set her down on the mattress and walked over to get one of the crumpled up blankets and shook it out. Then he walked back over to her and tossed it over her.

 

Before he left her to sleep, he bent down and brushed a hand over her cheek. Something strange within him stirred slightly, but then it settled back down into the depths of his soul, out of his reach. Whatever it is, or was, is gone now, he thought, slightly unnerved now.

 

* * *

 

The next day he avoided Aqua, and only spoke to her when she brought food. Whatever had happened the previous night, he was determined to avoid a reoccurrence of it, meaning he avoided Aqua whenever he could.

 

As Aqua walked into the school in the early morning, the security guards grabbed her and hauled her down to the principals office. She yanked her arms from their grasp and lazily sat in the chair across from the principal, Mr. Kennedy. Mr. Kennedy rested his chin on his interlaced fingers and watched her with sea-blue eyes.

 

“We've been trying to locate you for the last day and a half, Miss Aqua,” he aid quietly. Aqua stared unblinkingly at the man across from her and asked, “So, why should I care?”

 

Mr. Kennedy rubbed his temples when he next spoke, “We have a message from the Social workers who brought you here-” He was cut off as Aqua stood and proceeded to the door. “-concerning your father,” he finished as she reached for the door handle. She froze, feeling her body go cold. Her father.

 

“What about the old man?” she asked, turning around to face the principle. Mr. Kennedy sighed and took his glasses off as he said, “Without your word against your father, he was released from prison and is now filing suit against the state for unlawful imprisonment. He's also petitioning to get custody of you back.”

 

Aqua was careful to conceal her emotions as she felt a sudden chill of fear. Her father was trying to get her back… There could be nothing worse than going back to the house that she had shared with her father after a year of silence. In the time that she had been at the co-ed boarding school, she had come to call it a place of safety, some place where she could be sure that her father would never find her, but now he was coming for her.

 

“How long will it take for him to win his cases?” she asked in a deader tone then usual. Perhaps the principle noticed this as he answered, “For the lawsuit, at least six months. To gain back custody of you, maybe a year if not less.”

 

Aqua spun on her heel and yanked the door open and walked silently out. She left the door wide open and made no move to shut it as she walked away from the office and to the kitchens to knick the usual early breakfast.

 

At dinner, she and Darain ate in a heavy silence that neither strove to break. Aqua tried to eat something, but felt too sick to try and swallow anything. Everything had taken on a bitter taste after being told that her father was petitioning for custody of her again. It was all so unfair that she wanted to curl up in a ball and hide from the rest of the world.

 

Darain could sense her despair, but didn't dare attempt to confront her. She was too complicated to even begin to attempt to figure out, he decided. He watched her pick at her food, but not eat anything, and began to feel worry gnaw at him. Picking up an orange, he held it out to her.

 

Aqua looked from the orange in Darain's hand to his face and back again. He's worried about me, she realized, but he doesn't want to voice anything, because he's afraid it might scare me off. She smiled slightly, but refused the orange. “I'm not hungry,” she said, shaking her head.

 

Darain scowled at her refusal to eat and took her hand in his and placed the orange into the flat of her palm and pulled back. He leaned against a tree and watched her confused look as she tried to figure out what to do with the orange. “Eat, then tell me what's wrong,” he said, deciding to forego his earlier assumptions and get her to talk.

 

Aqua stared at him a moment before she peeled the orange and ate it, section by section, wondering if it would really be alright to tell him. As she ate the last piece of the orange, she realized that maybe, just maybe, she did want to tell someone what was going on behind her mask of cold indifference, so, she said, “My father is trying to get custody of me again, in other words, he's trying to take me…back to house I shared with him little over a year ago.”

 

“Why?” Darain asked simply, though there were a thousand other questions he wanted to ask her.

 

“I…”

 

“You what?”

 

“I couldn't face what he had done to me my entire life…”

 

“What's that got to do with him taking…custody…of you again?” he asked, pausing to use the word that she had mentioned earlier.

 

“Because I couldn't face those years, they couldn't punish him without my word against him,” she despondently said. For the first time in her life, she was lowering her defenses and allowing another being to actually listen to her words and hear them for what they really meant.

 

“Why couldn't you face them?”

 

She looked down at the thin, intricate scars that covered her entire body and lifted her right arm so that it was eye level. “These are the marks he left on me every time he went into a rage. Connected to them are painful memories I have tried to bury and pretend never happened, but the scars remain, as do the memories,” she said in a depressed sort of way.

“You're avoiding my question: Why couldn't you face those memories?”

“I-I…” she began in a trembling voice. “I was…abused mentally… physically… and…” Her voice trailed off as she refused to admit the last one. Darain stared at her a moment, expecting her to go on, but instead, she got to her feet and made her way back to East High in a silent stupor.

 

* * *

 

For the next month and a half, neither mentioned the conversation that they had shared about Aqua's past. Instead, they talked of other things, and grew comfortable in each other's presence, until it became natural that they spent hours in the others presence that they talked freely of almost anything.

 

In that short time, Aqua had started bringing her daily assignments and teaching Darain what all the different meanings of words in her language meant. At first, Darain constantly asked her to repeat the meanings of various words, but after having Aqua carefully describe each word to him, he began to catch on quickly.

 

During classes, Aqua found that she was less likely to snap at her fellow peers and that she was calmer, but no more open than before. Her classmates sensed and saw her gradual change and some began to wonder if she was hiding something. Secretly, they began plotting to find out what it was, though their plans never got beyond the first stage, most of which involved following her and none were willing to follow her into Hangman's Forest, the supposedly cursed school forest.

 

Aqua was more than well aware of those who followed her, but decided to do nothing about it. If nothing else, they would learn to keep their distance from her due to their fear of Hangman's Forest. She knew she had nothing to fear from the other students, even if one of them had the guts to follow her into Hangman's Forest and somehow managed to glimpse Darain and told the other students of his existence, that no one would believe them if she denied it all and called that person crazy.

 

She found that every time Darain smiled at her knees got weak, and her stomach filled with butterflies. Having no prior experiences to draw off of for the meaning of these odd feelings, she merely shoved them aside and ignored them completely, preferring not to complicate things and enjoy Darain's company.

 

Deep down, though, she realized that Darain was slowly, but surely, changing her. He was managing to penetrate every defense she had carefully constructed over the years to shield herself from any pain or disappointment. Darain was forcing her to feel things that she had long since buried, and she found that, in a way, she was grateful.

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