Title: The Same Again

Reason: Written for Uniquely Pleasurable’s Heron Feather’s competition; check out the other entries here:

Other: Questions, comments, and everything else is of course appreciated. If you happen to find yourself with nothing to do for about five hours, IM me (Rusty99Arabian) with a topic of something like ‘So, I’m interested in how you portrayed unicorns…’ and I will happily talk about it until my fingers fall off or you leave.

---

I was five when they enrolled me. My sisters were excited, and therefore I was excited; it was a great honor to be here, they said, and so I was honored, because at that age I didn't know enough to have my own opinion. It was a trying day, with the sounds of rowdy teens and hollers of instructors flooding my ears, and I resisted the urge to hide and play with the little truck a cousin had sent me. All around me children were being led away from their families by orderly adults, and my mother and aunts and grandfather wept over my head before I went with the others. Some of the kids were scared but my uncle told me to be brave, and so I was.

I remember what I looked like that day only because I have a picture from it; my hair was mud brown, unlike the annoyingly long amber-red I’ve sported every year since, and I was at least a head taller than the slower aging humans around me. He is in the picture, by the corner, but his back is turned so I didn't notice him for years--no one did, really. He dressed strangely, he was white as a cloud, and he always had his head in a book.

That day, I went up to him and pushed him, because I was kind of a brat and didn't mind showing it. He did nothing but shrink away into a ball, without a sound of pain or protest, and the teachers swarmed over me immediately. Don't touch him. That isn't nice. Keep your hands to yourself, Szymon.

He recognized my name, because he gave a jump, and then he came over and kicked me in the shins. The teachers, perplexed, reprimanded him as well, and he walked off, but then I knew exactly who he was. The one my mother warned me about.

His name is Daiei, and he was my enemy, because everyone said so. It became our custom, kick, punch, bite, whenever we met.

Every day, always the same. He is my enemy, and that’s how it has to stay.

---

There is running. I can hear the footsteps behind me, echoing off of the bricks relentlessly, and I despair with the knowledge they will never give up. I know, know throughout my blood and bones, that if I were to just turn around and strike out, they would go away. Not a one of them is in this for money or duty. They do this to see my blood on the street.

Marcus doesn’t. He does it because he is honestly concerned, simply can’t understand why I never defended myself, and wants to cure me of the primal fear that keeps me from running missions with even the mere threat of violence. Today he shows this concern by lunging ahead of the others, catching me by my always-too-slow heels, and flinging me to the ground with a force that makes me bounce on the graveled cement. The others are there already, hauling me up: these are the lonely ones, the bitter ones, the ones no one cares about, and my heart aches in pity of them even as this fake form of mine gets driven through the blender. They can sense this pity, and they curse me as much as I curse myself for loving this world that causes me such pain.

They do this outside of the barrier and never think to question why I would venture outside of the gates so often when I know they’re waiting for me. I know they need this, and I know I deserve it, know that it is penance for everything I said to him today and the other days this week.

The blows have stopped already and it hasn’t even been five minutes, couldn’t have been, so that means it is either the police or the guards again. The police have a woman who watches for me now, asks questions with a sympathetic tone, and leans closer ever time we meet; I cringe with the mere thought that one day she will be emboldened enough to touch my bare skin. She is no virgin and her fingers would leave scars that would cause her distress and surely get her fired, and I would be put through the grill by my father, who would just as surely want to know what things I had gotten myself into on this terrible planet of hurt.

The blows may have stopped, but the sounds haven’t. I open my eyes to peer through the blood and turn my heart to stone, because of all people he is standing there. They are running away, so he was victorious, although I can see from the limpness of an arm and blood in his absurdly colored hair that he hadn’t prepared for iron knuckles. He was harmed, because of me, and so were they: just another long line of sins to add to my less-than-stellar record.

Szymon--a ridiculous name only marginally pronounceable in my native tongue--stalks over to my location on the ground, crouching over me with his topaz eyes flashing hate. “You unicorn bastard,” he hisses, but my enemy doesn’t strike out or touch me, and for that I am grateful. His tone and words hurt, but I deserve them as much as the beatings. “Why don’t you ever... never mind. Your stupid code of conduct.” He breaks off into swearing that makes me cringe back, but I say nothing. To defend is weakness. To attack is sin.

Behind us, on the other side of the wall, I can hear the bells of classes changing. The Force, they call it, an uppity mage’s school that recently caved into complaints of species segregation. It gave me a chance to redeem myself in front of my family, but also allowed for the likes of Szymon, a unicorn’s only and most hated enemy, to join as well. My father doesn’t know a pegasus walks the same halls as me, and I have never seen cause to give him yet another reason to cast me out of the herd.

The pegasus is turned away, doing something out of sight, and I force myself to sit up. He is trying to unknot a pack, one handed, cursing as he goes, and seeing his injuries adds to my pain, something he most likely knows and is trying to inflict.

Do not aid the enemy.

Do not fail to give aid to any individual in need.

I am spared from an agonizing decision by Szymon, who grabs the traitor hand already creeping towards his arm, his tanned skin contrasting sharply with my pallor. “Don’t even think about it, hornhead.” He jerks on the grip unexpectedly, and I tumble once more onto the ground. This I am allowed to fight against and I kick out, but this is not our first battle by any means and he is expecting that particular maneuver. He throws his weight across my legs, and I dig my fingers into his wrist, and he bites my shoulder and freezes, because we can both hear the sounds of shouts and whoops coming from the end of the alley.

We make our escape, somehow. I do my best to assure they follow me, and later that week, when Szymon and I pass in the halls, we say nothing. We are indebted to each other, and that is unacceptable.

Life goes on.

---

I can feel lips on my neck, and I have to take awhile to remember why that is. Ah, yes, I had gone drinking with a vampire, my buddy Asher, and had managed to drink the thought out of my head that alcohol does not actually affect him, which was most certainly not the case with me. The person kissing his or her way up my neck probably isn’t him, then, unless he has changed his sexual preferences, shrunken a few inches, and dyed his hair black... or was it black to begin with? I’m pretty sure Asher is a blonde. Asher... blonde.

I am so drunk.

The lips are against my ear now and my stomach churns. I hate anything touching my ears. The magazines and movies and girls I know all say that ears are a major turn-on, so maybe it’s because I’m a guy, or maybe, and this is a thought I hide beneath layers and layers of booze and denial, maybe because only girls have been the ones doing it.

I'm pretty certain that this one is a girl as well, because inch-long painted nails have wandered into my view as they attempt to remove my shirt, and far from being in the euphoric state that this is supposed to bring on, I feel more annoyed by the moment. When she moves down to my waist, I get my act together enough to push her off the bed--not maybe the nicest of motions, but I am furious now, and drunker than I ever have been.

"Get out of here," I manage, and she slaps me, an act that does more to wake me up than it hurts. She can't be drunk, or at least not as much as I am, because I can barely figure out which of her to look at, let alone which I could make physical contact with.

"This is my room," is her answer, and it seems to be true, because my walls are white and I don't have a picture of Asher stuck onto the wall with heart stickers. She probably wants to use me to get to him, so I don't feel too bad about pushing her off the bed. I do stumble to the door, and write a drunken, slanted mental note to myself for the creep who seems to have ditched me to stay away from girls with black hair and nails, before going down the hall.

After an agonizing walk to the window, I realize that this can't be my dorm, and that there isn't anyway to get all the way to the other side of campus in the state I've gotten myself into. All my friends live over in my building, so there also isn't anyone over here that I could crash with.... hell, the only person I even know in this spinning, blurry pile of bricks is him.

And that's enough to send me reeling that way, because even flat-out drunk I can make it to Daiei's room, having spent so much time there stringing up buckets, doorknob currents, and precarious jugs of water throughout the years. The last one makes me laugh, in a stuttering kind of way, until I remember the crickets he had put into my room in retaliation. I couldn't go to sleep for a week in there.

Yep, room 209, this is it. I sort of fall against the door, too out of it to knock, and try to remember to what end I was there. If he was me, then I would be promptly locked outside, but the kid can be somewhat sympathetic when he isn't being in a holier-than-thou grass-eater mood.

Realistically, he would probably kick me in the head before locking me out, but that would be sympathetic because it might make me unconscious.

He must have yanked the door open in a "what the f someone doing bothering me at this hour" way, with the asterisks because Daiei never would dream of doing something as terrible as swearing, but anyway, must have done that because I was now laying facedown on the floor in his room. I knowthat because what's in my mouth now is dirt, as the lovely accommodating school board let him transfigure his carpeting to whatever would make his blessed self feel most at home, and dirt seems to be the "feel good" substance of the day. My body gets sick of suffocating and rolls me over, so I get a close-up view of his too-bizarre golden eyes and pale lips as he checks me for a head injury. I doubt, even with Asher as a friend (because who isn't our resident vampire buddying up to?) that he has ever been drunk, and probably doesn't even know what alcohol is, so I may come away with more sympathy than I expected.

Like, maybe he would kick me in the groin before the head, because then he thinks this is another cruel joke I'm playing on him due to a just-now, too-late realization that this is going to look like the boy who cried fox or bear or whatever. As his expression slowly darkens, I feel pressed to explain it to him... as soon as I figure out which him to explain it to. The one on the right is prettiest, as loathsome of a thought that is.

The pretty one goes away before I can start, though. He's so thin that he keeps fading out completely, and the roaring in my head doesn't help. A part of me is fairly sure that I'm drugged, not just drunk, and some of this must have worn off on my looks because he actually does look concerned. This was a rather cheerful thought, because it means I can possibly stay.

"Prnxyl," I begin, and then panic for a bit before realizing he can't speak Pegazi and has no idea what I've said. "Daijei," I try again, and that is at least fairly close and a hell of a lot more pronounceable than his name actually is, "Don't... kick inna' head." That wasn't what I was going to say, but it at least conveys the important part of the issue.

"Why?" is all he replies, and I curse mentally because I was forgetting he was smart, and mentally because he'd break my fingers before the nuts n' noggin if I did start swearing.

Anyway, it means that I will actually have to think of a reasonable answer, which I can't. "Feel bad...ed," I conclude.

The kid does nothing but watch me suffer, except to reach up and fix the thin golden frames on his nose. "I'm sure we both would feel bad, yes," he says, and my heart sinks. I was going to be sleeping in the hallway, and I would wake up naked with my hand in a bucket of water. He picks me up, even though I have at least six inches on him and he can hide behind saplings, because unicorns are crazy strong and my bones are built for flying. Instead of throwing me out, however, he tosses me onto a nest of grass and exits, just walking out and closing the door behind him. The unicorn is most likely going to get the campus cops, but I don't care. The green stuff is soft, the room is too dark to be spinning, and there isn't any girl to bother me: in other words, as close to heaven as I'm going to get. I take a drunken moment to ponder why he picked grass for bedding, when leaves are so much better. It's a unicorn thing, I suppose.

Daiei comes back, no guards in sight, and sits on the edge of the nest... bed... thing. "You know I'm not--" he starts, and stops. "You can't..." This is amazingly funny to me, because he's usually rather eloquent and stuff when talking, and I start to laugh. That certainly helps him find his voice, and his eyes narrow.

"Who were you sleeping with?" He asks, and his voice is as icy as I've heard it get. I'm feeling less drunk than before, and the tone makes me feel ashamed, and, to some extent worried, because my reputation for the night is hinging on the goodwill that's letting me stay. I take a breath, and feel better--maybe these grasses have healing properties or something; plants aren't my strong suit.

"Nobody," I reply, because that's an easy question. The boy looks furious, and I give myself a once-over: bite marks on my shoulders and chest, spots of lipstick on the corners of my vision, no shirt, pants undone. I close my eyes and sink into the grass. "Wasn't my idea. Wouldn't take no for an answer."

His voice is down to a hiss now, and I can't for the life of me figure out why he's so upset, unless he's going to have to burn his now impure bed down. "Yes, right." I'm just as furious as I was before, now, because I've never lied to him, never lied to anyone, and now he isn't believing me just because. I yank off one of the black leather gloves he always dons and grab his hand before he can move, because a pegasus is always going to be faster than a unicorn.

"See? No burns." I glare at him triumphantly, but he has turned his face away, bottom lip caught between his teeth and exotic eyes squeezed shut. Unbelievable.

"What are you crying about?" He has lost me completely, even though I'm feeling relatively focused now; the drug, or whatever it was, seems to have warn off. I loosen my fingers from around his, just in case that's the cause of his tears, but the skin beneath them is the same pale as the rest of him--not that anyone ever sees the rest of him, so I have to go off of his neck and face, and those are the same color.

In this school, at our age, the number of virgins is approximately two: him, and, as annoyed as I am to state it, me. As a unicorn, he cannot touch anyone who isn't without ending up with a set of oozing red blisters, and so he dresses as carefully as an astronaut to prevent this. These clothes involve a lot of skin-tight black, and if he didn't run away when anyone tried to talk to him, he could have easily lowered the number of inexperienced people down to one. Realistically, I was fairly popular and my hall mates utterly moral-less, so I could have remedied this myself fairly quickly as well, but... I just never found a girl I was interested enough in, in addition to other reasons.

If you're wondering why I had to find a girl, you've never met my family: self-explanatory.

Daiei doesn't answer my question, choosing to sit and shake instead. We aren't exactly on terms where we'd offer the other support in situations like this--really, I've made him cry more than probably anyone else, although it's somewhat annoying to think of now. He hasn't taken his hand away, so I look at it while I'm waiting. Like the rest of himself, his hands are small, but his fingers are long, maybe the length of mine. His nails are short, I note with relief.

Then he moves his hand to touch my forehead and murmur a string of vowel-y words in unicorn and all I can see are the inside of my eyelids... and dreams.

When I wake, he is gone, and we're back to the same routine again.

---