FictionPress.com - let the words flow
| FictionPress.com - let the words flow |
|
| Home Just In Communities Forums Beta Readers Dictionary Search | Login Register Extras |
Title: Carved Hearts on Willow
Author: FireBringer
Summary: The tale of a man turned tree, who falls in love with a disturbingly ugly and yet beautiful girl, and the cocoa boy who carves a burning heart onto his bark.
No one seemed to realise this, or even think about his feelings. He supposed it was beyond their tiny mortal minds to even consider a man turned tree.
And so when the boy approached and bent towards one of the last spaces of bark with a penknife, the Willow had resigned himself to his fate. He could not feel pain, exactly, but the man who he used to be knew what it felt like, its spiky cursive burrowing a web of darkness into his heart. He remembered how it whispered bittersweet nothings into his ear and twisted the dagger deep inside.
The boy was tall and dark, black curly hair forming a frantic cloud around his face, skin a milky chocolate with eyes of black cocoa. His smile was quick and fleeting but with an intensity that matched his gaze. Elegant fingers curled around that knife, and the Willow found himself questioning why such graceful appendages associated themselves with a rusty metal that was so sharp and coarse.
He found out why soon enough. Hands just as smooth and long shot out to catch the boy’s, more clumsy, and odd with the uneven electric blue nails and pen smudges across the back of the palm. The boy the Willow had decided to call Storm turned, surprise lit in those liquid eyes, and this was the moment that the Willow first saw her.
Unnaturally large eyes of sea green, tilted precariously at the edges, were lined with jagged charcoal lashes and set in a pale face, set each side of a small and straight nose, leading down to plum-like lips that were that side of purple and seemed as if she were constantly freezing. Hair black as ink was cut haphazardly around her shoulders and fell in many smooth locks, that together suddenly became unruly. She was overall beautiful and ugly at the same time, a unique specimen that demanded you look at her and never away.
The Willow called her Ocean.
“What are you doing?” Storm asked, confusion lining his mouth. The Willow could not hear, for he was a tree now and trees did not have ears, but somehow he could see, and see very well. He saw minute detail and colours he wasn’t even sure existed, and he had come to love and hate such an environment. It was an exquisite way to see, and yet just looking at it caused him pain. And it was so loud. There wasn’t any other way to put it. Deafening to his eyes. And yes, he was aware of the lack of logicality of that. And yet he had ceased to care many years ago.
“You can’t carve into a tree.” Ocean replied, eyes horrified. “It’s…it’s barbaric.”
Storm sneered.
“Oh, behave,” he snorted. “It’s only a tree.”
“How would you like it if someone came up to you and decided to carve their name into your skin?” she demanded, and the Willow felt something akin to bafflement, but he was a tree, he didn’t have feelings, just memories of them, and the part of him that was still a man figured he should be confused right now. Storm seemed to agree.
“Jesus, you bloody freak,” he groaned. He looked angry. But also scared. “Just piss off and play with your voodoo dolls, alright? I’m busy.” Ocean tried to take Storm’s hand again, but the boy jerked back as if stung, face contorting into something vicious. “Freak,” he repeated, and Ocean seemed to deflate, just that little bit hurt. The Willow wondered to himself at the oddity of it on such striking features.
“He has feelings, too,” she insisted, despite the boy’s obvious abhorrence of her, and took a step towards him. “Let him be.”
And Storm did. True, he ran away hissing insults like the immature boy he was, but still. The Willow’s bark was left untouched, and he felt a vague relief. He was confused. He was a tree. He did not feel things as mortals did. Ocean turned her glorious eyes to him, shining in his complex vision, and smiled.
“You will find your way,” she said, quite simply, and then walked away, unruly hair tossed in the unforgiving wind. And for some reason quite unbeknownst to him, the Willow wished he could smile back.
He hadn’t always been a tree. It had been quite a while, but if the Willow remembered rightly, he had been a man of quite some status. A Magus to be more exact, and a powerful one at that. But, as always with young men, he got a little cocky and challenged an Atralamna, in the Common Language: Dark Blade. The woman had been amused and let him try, but she had quickly grown tired of his constant attempts at riddling her and had promptly turned him into a tree.
It wasn’t a nice story, and the Willow found it bored him, but nevertheless it popped into his mind every once in a while and demanded more than a single thought. He found it very irritating at this point, but consented, and spent a pleasant few years contemplating actions long gone.
Ocean returned with a gentle smile and held out a hand to him, placing those graceless fingers to his bark and brushing, ever so softly, before sitting by the side of him. She didn’t lean against him, backs digging into his bark uncomfortably, as others did, but as if he were a friend. The Willow found it quite disturbing and surprised himself by wishing for her sharp spine, and so normality. This was not the usual mode of practice.
Ocean slipped from her pocket a plastic bag of brown dried leaves – also known, the Willow would come to know, as tobacco – and a piece of paper, and then finally a small blue pen. She shot him a distracted smile, hardly even a quirk at those plum lips, and then began to write. She wrote with the urgency of someone about to die, and the uncertainty of the teenager, but the prose she wrote held the incoherency of a baby while the words themselves were those of the old, in pain, and the insane.
The Willow wondered.
Her green eyes became sightless and her hand became looser and looser on the pen, until eventually the words faded away and the plastic device dropped from her fingers. She did not move for a while. The Willow questioned if she’d become frozen in time, a twisted goddess of beauty, but then she blinked and looked down, skimming the words she’d written with something mocking tucked into the contours of her face. And then she laughed, brittle, and put a little of those brown leaves into a line of the paper, over the words, and rolled. Rolled it into a thin tube and licked the end until it stuck.
As she was lighting the tube and putting it to her lips, the Willow became aware of another presence. The boy. Storm. Dark skin seeming to swirl with indecision and liquid eyes spinning as they watched her, and yet his smile was something that told of strength and determination.
The Willow watched, fascinated, as the boy who had jumped away from the girl as if she were diseased ripped the tube from her lips and crushed it beneath one single foot. Ocean looked like she was being strangled.
“What…what did you do that for?” she asked, turning her face up to look at him like a child. Storm growled but didn’t answer, turning to leave again as suddenly as he had come. But Ocean appeared to have other ideas. Her eyes strayed to the tube, green leaves tumbled onto the grass and tube split, the smudged blue words peeking up at her. Her eyes widened. “Those were meant to burn,” she said, a horrified tilt to her head. “They needed to burn.”
Storm curled his lip at her, and the Willow felt like kicking him.
“You preach to me about carving something into that bloody tree’s bark because ‘it’ll hurt it’,” he snarled, pitching his voice ridiculously high to scorn her. “While slowly killing yourself in the process. You’re a fucking lunatic.”
Ocean looked dazed. “But…but they…they had to burn,” she insisted, trembling. Storm stared at her and then turned, kicking the Willow sharply in frustration before striding away, leaving Ocean behind to poke the pieces of paper and scuttle away. She chose to hide behind him and the Willow, invariably, protected her.
He lapped up the sunlight with joy and let the sun bask in the sky, shaking a leaf to fall and sit like a perfect hat on Ocean’s crown of black hair. She didn’t notice for a moment, too busy running her fingertips across his bark in an attempt to tickle him that, suffice to say, was not working as well as the girl obviously thought it would. The Willow remembered laughter, and the sweep of Goosebumps that would follow the trail of fingertips across his skin, but as a tree he had no voice and could not laugh. He wanted to, though, to make Ocean smile again. She seemed slightly less soft than usual. She’d become a little sharper, more jagged, flitting breath and heartbeat following the same road as that of all teenagers. Her hair was tamer, pulled back hastily, and the smudges of her hands had gone; only the barest of blue on her nails, a few still uneven.
The Willow had thought her different, but it appeared even she was affected by the insecurity of adolescence from time to time.
“You are a menace,” Ocean told him fondly, twirling the leaf in her fingers. “I suppose you’re very pleased with yourself now, aren’t you?”
The Willow wanted to tell her that he was, but only succeeded in shaking his branches slightly. By any account, she seemed to catch on to what he meant. She shook her head ruefully.
“I wish I could hear you,” she said softly. “I bet you have so many interesting things to say.”
“You’re talking to a tree,” Storm snapped, stepping by her side, a lightning presence. Ocean barely turned her head, but the Willow noticed how her eyes became a little strained.
“Your point?” she asked, very carefully placing the words in front of the boy. Storm rolled his eyes.
“It’s a tree. It can’t hear you,” he said, looking almost bored. The Willow wondered if they’d had this conversation before, and he felt suddenly offended that they’d talk without him near. These conversations were his and theirs alone. He would not allow them to share.
Ocean lifted her chin, just slightly, and appeared defiant.
“He replies,” she answered, tilting her head closer to the Willow’s trunk, hand brushing his bark as if wanting comfort. The Willow strived to give it her.
“Yeah, right,” Storm snorted. “It’s a tree. Try talking to real people for a change and maybe you wouldn’t be considered such a freak.”
Ocean’s eyes flashed.
“He’s better company than you could ever be!” she declared, seeming to swell and become fire, not the cool water of her usual countenance. The Willow felt shock. There was a pause as Storm stiffened, and then he nodded.
“Fine,” he hissed. “I’ll leave you to it, then, shall I?”
Both the Willow and Ocean watched as the tall boy stormed away, just like his namesake, and then Ocean slumped to the grass by his side and pulled out the bag of brown and paper and pen. The Willow was not sure he approved, and wondered at the small pain that dug deep inside his being. He retreated, not wanting to watch Ocean write away her sanity and suck away her life, filling it with fumes and slowly killing herself. The Willow did not like Storm, but he found he believed him over Ocean at this moment in time.
This Ocean was not the Ocean he liked.
The Willow watched as Storm stopped in front of him, casting quick glances around as if trying to catch sight of Ocean, and the Willow rustled his leaves in an attempt to tell him she was not here. Storm looked startled, and not just a little afraid. The Willow sighed and dropped a leaf, letting Storm’s eyes follow it to the small pile of burnt paper. She had been there already. Been and gone. And the Willow had, again, been unable to watch.
Storm scowled at the pile and crushed it violently.
“All right, tree, this is the deal,” he began, folding his arms defensively, eyes dark, dark, dark. “I don’t like you, you don’t like me. Fair enough. I’d like to chop you down and, if it would get her back, let her write on you to her heart’s content and burn you.” The Willow did not like the direction of this discussion. He rustled agitatedly, ignoring the way Storm jumped from foot to foot skittishly. “But the point is we both like her, and she’s not good right now.” The Willow paused. Listening. Storm sighed. “This is what I want to do.”
When Ocean returned, scars in her eyes, she found a small pottery bowl carved with rushes of words, quotes from distant places, and names that were too forgotten to remember. Next to that sat a pad of paper, multi-coloured, handmade, and a pack of old blue biros. The Willow watched as she paused, and he paused as well, and suddenly that pause felt an eternity. Please, he thought. Please, bury yourself in it, don’t burn.
And then she sighed and seemed to deflate and sank to the grass beside him and the pile of things and laughed softly at the last items, a hundred packs of matches, all with blue ends instead of red, and a bottle of electric blue nail varnish. Ocean looked at her fingernails, even and clean, and then placed shaking fingers against her inky hair, tied back tight, then felt the odd texture of makeup that coloured her face and so she wasn’t so beautifully pale, the oily feel on her lips that made them a little bit paler and redder, normal.
She looked normal and oh so boring and, the Willow thought, so not Ocean.
She laughed again, and the Willow was shocked to see tears running down her cheeks. He began to panic, but then she stood and yanked out the tie that held back that inky black hair and she rubbed furiously at her face until again she was pale and her lips were plums and she practically poured the bottle of nail varnish on herself in her attempt to cover her fingernails and half her fingers.
She found a pair of scissors hidden behind the bowl and, with a girly shriek of glee, she attacked her hair, letting it fall messily again into a ragged cut to her shoulders.
Of all the things he had seen, the Willow thought Ocean was the most beautiful of all.
She turned to him and smiled, putting an arm around his trunk and leaning her head against his bark. “Thank you,” she murmured.
You’re welcome, he replied, so glad, glad, glad that she was back, was again his Ocean. She ran her fingers down his side and grinned at him, and he felt a surge of affection that he’d never had to deal with before. It left him swaying.
Ocean left, taking the bowl and paper and pens and matches and nail varnish, and at some time Storm returned, smile quick and intense with eagerness as he saw that the presents were gone. He turned to the Willow.
“She came?” he asked, excitedly. Then, he rolled his eyes heavenward. “Good lord, I’m talking to a tree.” The Willow ignored him, and simply waited expectantly as Storm touched the last bare spot on his bark and smirked: “And now for the final part…”
Ocean did not like the Final Part. She called it barbaric and cried and tried to rub it away until the Willow had to rustle quite violently to get her to stop, because it hurt and he couldn’t stand her crying. He tried to explain how he and Storm had come up with a plan to get her to be Ocean again and how he had agreed to let Storm carve the small, simple heart onto the last of his hurt-free bark with the boy’s and girl’s initials in the middle, how he’d wanted her to be happy.
Storm dared to approach then, when she’d finally calmed down, eyes quick and bright and smile intense, dark skin swirling with secrets and promises. Ocean flew at him, fists flaying.
“How could you?!” she demanded. “It hurts him. How could you do something like that to him?”
Storm quickly became impatient, and the Willow watched helplessly as they fought, brutally, and then kissed, brutally. A mesh of pale and dark that was so beautiful and yet so violent at the same time. The Willow watched and drifted away, because they needed privacy and he…he needed to be a tree. A tree with emotions and thoughts and needs to communicate. He was quite the abomination.
Ocean did not say goodbye to him, and neither did Storm. Both fell into his memory and he again remembered how he’d thought Ocean so beautiful, forgetting the ugliness of her. After all the years of believing himself a tree without emotion, she’d wormed her way into his heart and insisted that he did have feelings, that he could hurt and love and laugh. And so he began to believe again. That he was a man within a tree, not just a tree. He’d been happy to finally reach that conclusion.
Ocean leaving him had never seemed an option.
But, then again, who wanted to be with a man turned into a tree? Because that was all he was now. A tree. A tree with no hope of turning into a man. A tree with broken dreams and hearts that were shattered across his tormented bark. Ocean, most of all, had probably never actually believed him a man. He was simply a quaint distraction for a child coming to adulthood who wanted to hold onto the dreams of a child. He remembered why she was ugly, now.
She was ugly because she was human.
And he was just a tree, with numerous love-heart wounds, and one that had been an ocean’s storm that burnt most of all.
I can't really explain what made me write this. It was VERY late last night when i should have been doing homework and this came out. Blame lack of sleep for the oddness.