Short Fanficlet: [RO] Alena - The Girl who Loved to Love
Oh, I forgot to post this rushed short story which explains my last entry. It's a different context, this time. ^_^ It might be a fanfic, but you don't need to know the game to understand the story. Enjoy~
The Girl Who Loved To Love
A Ragnarok Fanficlet
Alena was a girl who loved to love. In fact, she fell in love so often that she could hardly keep herself from keeping just one boyfriend at a time. Her relationships were fast and furious, sparked into beginning and dying out as quickly as a flaming piece of fluff. It was the only way she would have it: out-of-breath and passionate. She couldn't stand to wait for the careful ways of the mundane.
She went through boyfriends quickly, to the shock of the various villages she trained at, and she believed that she loved each one up until the point her heart calmed. That was when it was time to move on: when her soul ceased to tremble. Alena had tried to explain this a few times to the ones who would try to keep her:
"What is love to me when it doesn't move me?"
No one ever had an adequate answer to that.
Some people gossiped about how she was a heartless man-eater because of how fast she disposed of her boyfriends. They said that to be involved with Alena would be to lose your soul to her. It was funny; she came off sounding so magically wicked that she would attract even more fellows than before. It was especially amusing because, in truth, she would never consider someone whose soul was weak enough to be taken.
"But why?" A wide-eyed merchant had asked her, still on his knees in a whole-hearted expression of his feelings. "You take nothing from me. I'm the one who gives to you."
Alena removed the wreath of flowers from her hair and knelt in front of him. Putting the sweet-smelling crown into his reluctant hands, she answered, "I love it, but I won't destroy you for it."
Those she did date were dynamic and strong enough to stand their own against her. She remembered the connections she'd felt, how she believed with each man that the feathery bliss they had together would last. When it didn't, Alena simply shrugged and moved readily on, always parting on such good terms with ex-boyfriends that they constantly sought to help her in hopes of winning her back.
Of course, no one could win her back. After all, she had never loved them in the first place.
"Oh, but I did love them." Alena protested when she was told otherwise by a childhood friend, Alynne. It was rare they saw each other in their teenage years, but when they did get together, there was always much stories and insights to share.
"No, you didn't." Alynne stated frankly while she produced various headgear for Alena to try on. "You're mistaking infatuation for love. It's like mixing up a rocker with a metaller - they look the same, but they aren't. One is fast but weak. The other is slower but considerably more powerful."
"Mmm," Alena murmured vaguely as she picked through the items in Alynne's cart.
Alynne shook her head in resignation, but couldn't resist one last word: "Sooner or later, your heart will learn to tell the two apart, just as your eyes did."
She was right, as Alynne was always right in the end. Alena did eventually learn the difference between tepid infatuation and sincere love. Dating so many men, it was only a matter of probability that she would find one she would not tire of. Someone she, in all honesty, would care for above herself.
How fitting it was that this one time she truly loved someone, she couldn't keep him. Alena hadn't suspected at first, thinking of Jacob as just another magician worth befriending. After their first few chats in the shady afternoon, it soon became her habit to seek him out, he being one of those oddities that wasn't easily accessible, like all the others had been. But Alena hadn't cared about that. She hadn't even cared about what it looked like to others, how she was reeling in yet another poor lad to be fried in the fire and eaten.
Those rumors were wrong. It was she who was being consumed.
"There were many I loved before you," Alena murmured to Jacob once as he drifted to sleep on the grass beside her. "But you are the first I love."
Jacob hadn't heard her confession, of course, but the copper-topped mage obviously felt the same. She'd learned the truth that way; Jacob couldn't love her and deceive her at the same time.
"I've lived for only my family for so long," The mage had begun while they sat with their backs to their usual tree, late in the dimming afternoon. "That I didn't think it was possible for my life to be otherwise. When I was a child, I knew I had no future and so I traded it for one in which I could help my family rise."
Alena had nodded, knowing well his overriding responsibilities that she couldn't relate to, yet could recognize as being the very essence of him.
"You think you know this, but there is a part I haven't told you." He said. She nodded again, patiently, although privately, Alena could care less about what he hadn't told her. Jacob could keep secrets or reveal skeletons; in either case she would not waver in what she felt, she was certain. After their conversation that night, he wouldn't be certain of her at all.
"There is a part I haven't told you: that I meant it literally when I said I traded my future for another. My family didn't have the money to support me in my studies of the magical arts, but they sent me nevertheless. The debt would've caught up with us, of course, but I was their hope and they gave me everything they could. I couldn't disappoint them."
His tone grew stronger when it should have grown softer, and that was how Alena sensed that there was something amiss. "I had a friend during those times, a daughter of a higher middle-class family. At the time, I thought I loved her enough to marry her, and it was arranged so that her family would provide to make me into a man who could take care of her. Her family loved me, you see, and when I promised them, they knew I would keep my word."
Alena understood what was meant instantly. She leaned away from him and took her hand out of his hair to twist at her own. The hair adornments she wore clinked against each other, like wind chimes.
"You must keep your word, of course." she said calmly, as a friend would to another.
"I must, but I cannot. I will not." Jacob reached and gently grasped her forearms with his thin fingers. Somehow, it was more intimate than holding her hand. "I didn't know what I was giving up, Alena. I can make it up to them some other way, to my family and her family who both depend on me, but I cannot make it up to myself. Or to you."
"What is it you're saying?" She knew it already, and she wanted nothing more than to take him up in selfish joy and kiss him. Her arms strained even then, but she couldn't lift them; she could only pull them from him so her hands were safely in her lap again.
"I'm saying that I sacrificed my life for my family, but I've found something so valuable that I could sacrifice even them for it." His blue eyes, dark as the evening falling upon them, focused into the distance where the sun had set. "It's not who I am, I know, to leave my duties unfinished. But Alena, you know that I would do no such thing if I didn't truly mean it. You must believe me when I say that I love you."
Alena believed him - yes, she could not doubt now what she knew to be truth - but said what she should have said to every other man but him: "What do I care if you love me, when I don't love you?"
He blinked, paused, paled in the sooty dusk. "You can't mean that-"
Alena didn't - she didn't! - but she could not call up the sweet platitudes she'd used dozens of times before, nor the gentle manner she was known for. She could speak no other words than, "Surely you've heard the rumors about me? That I love no one? That I use men? Don't tell me you didn't believe it?"
"I- I heard," He was at a loss, she saw, breaking just around the edges where it wasn't visible. "But I didn't- would never believe- I know you do love-"
Though she wanted to apologize, to cry even from the tendrils of pain lacing through her, she laughed instead. It was a gentle, twinkling laugh, hinting at genuine amusement. "I'm sorry." She said, smiling now with her lips, with her eyes. "But you're such an innocent."
He was wounded but he stood, wiry frame erect and steady, and gaped at her through his glasses. He took them off and polished them on his cream-colored robe, put them back on, looked at her again.
"I may be innocent, Alena, but I can perceive more than you think."
And maybe he could, but Alena would never admit it. She discarded him, like all the others, and took on another boyfriend when it looked like he wouldn't move on because she hadn't. It was simple to keep Jacob away then, because once he was no longer hers, he was outside the shields of her influence and alone among those who adored her but had envied him.
Two weeks later, a few days before her unit was to be dispatched to a new territory, she came upon Jacob again. She had been walking arm-in-arm with her second boyfriend since their break-up, when they were interrupted by a loud scuffle behind them. Being directed as a swordswoman to keep the peace in local areas, Alena unsheathed her haedonggum and doubled-back to scare away the two hoodlums accosting a civilian. They ran and her boyfriend went after them. She was about to follow when she caught a glimpse of soft yellow under the civilian's cloak. A mage. Jacob.
He was bruised, his fair skin mottled with ugly, purple blotches. The mage uniform he wore was dirtied with mud and what looked like fresh footprints. Already, the signs of exhaustion were showing on his small face, deadening his eyes with weariness. His glasses were no where in sight, most likely lost or shattered.
"What's happened to you?" Alena couldn't help but ask in her shock.
"So you've decided not to ignore me." Jacob said tiredly. "Your boys won't ignore me either."
"They would leave you alone if you would go back to the academy."
"I can do no such thing. My family will find me, they'll bring me back. I won't go until I've talked to you again."
Alena lifted her chin so she could pointedly look down on him. "You've talked to me. You can move on now."
Jacob wasn't intimidated into standing. He stayed exactly where he was in the middle of the sidewalk, in that same cross-legged position he'd taken after being rescued. "This isn't what I call talking."
"There isn't anything more to talk about. What I told you before still stands. Nothing has changed since then, except that now you're hiding from the people who depend on you, all for a foolish illusion."
She walked to him and pulled the boy roughly to his feet. Stepping back, she looked him over so critically that he was sure to be self-conscious. Her eyes darted from his mussed copper-red hair, to the symbol of his discolored mages' uniform, to his spell book that lay in tatters on the ground, next to his fragmented staff. Alena flipped the neglected book up with the blade of her haedonggum, caught it, and then thrust the enchanted object into Jacob's hands, where it glowed faintly.
There was a small leaf on his shoulder. Alena stepped closer to brush it away, speaking in a quietly gentle tone as she did, "And this is what you've become:"
Alena left Jacob dazed in his downward spiral. As soon as she got to a Kafra lady, she sent off a private message to his family, informing them of his location and "illness". Afterwards, she didn't run across him again. She heard from her contacts, who continued to send messages to her as she moved from station to station, that he had returned to his studies. He made fast progress with his display of exemplary talent and graduated early to become a mystical sage. Alena had cried the day she heard the news; in happiness or sadness, she didn’t know.
But she was a girl who loved to love. She was never one to regret. Maybe she was less idealistic about the men she dated now, but that made it no less fun, no less useful. And if some asked about that delicate, gold-coated leaf she wore among the trinkets in her hair, she would simply tuck it back into obscurity and claim she paid a high price for it: a piece of her heart and the last bits of her honor.
End.
---
Author's Notes:
Well, this ficlet took me a while to finish, as all things I write take a while to do. Which is why I don't write much. ^^; I know it could stand an overhaul in terms of narration and sequencing, but it says what I want it to about Alena's love life and I'm tired of trying to fix it. Alena, by the way, is a game character I play on a popular online game here in the Philippines, Ragnarok. My story, though, hardly hints at Ragnarok because, uhm, I'm not good at using game elements in stories, ^^;
I know I left the story kind of open to interpretation about Alena's motives. Do share your thoughts, I'm really interested. It's fun!
NaNoWriMo! And I have written not a thing! I decided to do Riven, my YYH fanfic, as my "novel" for this month but alas, I haven't got the discipline yet. I'm more worried right now about my papers due in three days. Eek! Speaking of which, I go now...
The Girl Who Loved To Love
A Ragnarok Fanficlet
Alena was a girl who loved to love. In fact, she fell in love so often that she could hardly keep herself from keeping just one boyfriend at a time. Her relationships were fast and furious, sparked into beginning and dying out as quickly as a flaming piece of fluff. It was the only way she would have it: out-of-breath and passionate. She couldn't stand to wait for the careful ways of the mundane.
She went through boyfriends quickly, to the shock of the various villages she trained at, and she believed that she loved each one up until the point her heart calmed. That was when it was time to move on: when her soul ceased to tremble. Alena had tried to explain this a few times to the ones who would try to keep her:
"What is love to me when it doesn't move me?"
No one ever had an adequate answer to that.
Some people gossiped about how she was a heartless man-eater because of how fast she disposed of her boyfriends. They said that to be involved with Alena would be to lose your soul to her. It was funny; she came off sounding so magically wicked that she would attract even more fellows than before. It was especially amusing because, in truth, she would never consider someone whose soul was weak enough to be taken.
"But why?" A wide-eyed merchant had asked her, still on his knees in a whole-hearted expression of his feelings. "You take nothing from me. I'm the one who gives to you."
Alena removed the wreath of flowers from her hair and knelt in front of him. Putting the sweet-smelling crown into his reluctant hands, she answered, "I love it, but I won't destroy you for it."
Those she did date were dynamic and strong enough to stand their own against her. She remembered the connections she'd felt, how she believed with each man that the feathery bliss they had together would last. When it didn't, Alena simply shrugged and moved readily on, always parting on such good terms with ex-boyfriends that they constantly sought to help her in hopes of winning her back.
Of course, no one could win her back. After all, she had never loved them in the first place.
"Oh, but I did love them." Alena protested when she was told otherwise by a childhood friend, Alynne. It was rare they saw each other in their teenage years, but when they did get together, there was always much stories and insights to share.
"No, you didn't." Alynne stated frankly while she produced various headgear for Alena to try on. "You're mistaking infatuation for love. It's like mixing up a rocker with a metaller - they look the same, but they aren't. One is fast but weak. The other is slower but considerably more powerful."
"Mmm," Alena murmured vaguely as she picked through the items in Alynne's cart.
Alynne shook her head in resignation, but couldn't resist one last word: "Sooner or later, your heart will learn to tell the two apart, just as your eyes did."
She was right, as Alynne was always right in the end. Alena did eventually learn the difference between tepid infatuation and sincere love. Dating so many men, it was only a matter of probability that she would find one she would not tire of. Someone she, in all honesty, would care for above herself.
How fitting it was that this one time she truly loved someone, she couldn't keep him. Alena hadn't suspected at first, thinking of Jacob as just another magician worth befriending. After their first few chats in the shady afternoon, it soon became her habit to seek him out, he being one of those oddities that wasn't easily accessible, like all the others had been. But Alena hadn't cared about that. She hadn't even cared about what it looked like to others, how she was reeling in yet another poor lad to be fried in the fire and eaten.
Those rumors were wrong. It was she who was being consumed.
"There were many I loved before you," Alena murmured to Jacob once as he drifted to sleep on the grass beside her. "But you are the first I love."
Jacob hadn't heard her confession, of course, but the copper-topped mage obviously felt the same. She'd learned the truth that way; Jacob couldn't love her and deceive her at the same time.
"I've lived for only my family for so long," The mage had begun while they sat with their backs to their usual tree, late in the dimming afternoon. "That I didn't think it was possible for my life to be otherwise. When I was a child, I knew I had no future and so I traded it for one in which I could help my family rise."
Alena had nodded, knowing well his overriding responsibilities that she couldn't relate to, yet could recognize as being the very essence of him.
"You think you know this, but there is a part I haven't told you." He said. She nodded again, patiently, although privately, Alena could care less about what he hadn't told her. Jacob could keep secrets or reveal skeletons; in either case she would not waver in what she felt, she was certain. After their conversation that night, he wouldn't be certain of her at all.
"There is a part I haven't told you: that I meant it literally when I said I traded my future for another. My family didn't have the money to support me in my studies of the magical arts, but they sent me nevertheless. The debt would've caught up with us, of course, but I was their hope and they gave me everything they could. I couldn't disappoint them."
His tone grew stronger when it should have grown softer, and that was how Alena sensed that there was something amiss. "I had a friend during those times, a daughter of a higher middle-class family. At the time, I thought I loved her enough to marry her, and it was arranged so that her family would provide to make me into a man who could take care of her. Her family loved me, you see, and when I promised them, they knew I would keep my word."
Alena understood what was meant instantly. She leaned away from him and took her hand out of his hair to twist at her own. The hair adornments she wore clinked against each other, like wind chimes.
"You must keep your word, of course." she said calmly, as a friend would to another.
"I must, but I cannot. I will not." Jacob reached and gently grasped her forearms with his thin fingers. Somehow, it was more intimate than holding her hand. "I didn't know what I was giving up, Alena. I can make it up to them some other way, to my family and her family who both depend on me, but I cannot make it up to myself. Or to you."
"What is it you're saying?" She knew it already, and she wanted nothing more than to take him up in selfish joy and kiss him. Her arms strained even then, but she couldn't lift them; she could only pull them from him so her hands were safely in her lap again.
"I'm saying that I sacrificed my life for my family, but I've found something so valuable that I could sacrifice even them for it." His blue eyes, dark as the evening falling upon them, focused into the distance where the sun had set. "It's not who I am, I know, to leave my duties unfinished. But Alena, you know that I would do no such thing if I didn't truly mean it. You must believe me when I say that I love you."
Alena believed him - yes, she could not doubt now what she knew to be truth - but said what she should have said to every other man but him: "What do I care if you love me, when I don't love you?"
He blinked, paused, paled in the sooty dusk. "You can't mean that-"
Alena didn't - she didn't! - but she could not call up the sweet platitudes she'd used dozens of times before, nor the gentle manner she was known for. She could speak no other words than, "Surely you've heard the rumors about me? That I love no one? That I use men? Don't tell me you didn't believe it?"
"I- I heard," He was at a loss, she saw, breaking just around the edges where it wasn't visible. "But I didn't- would never believe- I know you do love-"
Though she wanted to apologize, to cry even from the tendrils of pain lacing through her, she laughed instead. It was a gentle, twinkling laugh, hinting at genuine amusement. "I'm sorry." She said, smiling now with her lips, with her eyes. "But you're such an innocent."
He was wounded but he stood, wiry frame erect and steady, and gaped at her through his glasses. He took them off and polished them on his cream-colored robe, put them back on, looked at her again.
"I may be innocent, Alena, but I can perceive more than you think."
And maybe he could, but Alena would never admit it. She discarded him, like all the others, and took on another boyfriend when it looked like he wouldn't move on because she hadn't. It was simple to keep Jacob away then, because once he was no longer hers, he was outside the shields of her influence and alone among those who adored her but had envied him.
Two weeks later, a few days before her unit was to be dispatched to a new territory, she came upon Jacob again. She had been walking arm-in-arm with her second boyfriend since their break-up, when they were interrupted by a loud scuffle behind them. Being directed as a swordswoman to keep the peace in local areas, Alena unsheathed her haedonggum and doubled-back to scare away the two hoodlums accosting a civilian. They ran and her boyfriend went after them. She was about to follow when she caught a glimpse of soft yellow under the civilian's cloak. A mage. Jacob.
He was bruised, his fair skin mottled with ugly, purple blotches. The mage uniform he wore was dirtied with mud and what looked like fresh footprints. Already, the signs of exhaustion were showing on his small face, deadening his eyes with weariness. His glasses were no where in sight, most likely lost or shattered.
"What's happened to you?" Alena couldn't help but ask in her shock.
"So you've decided not to ignore me." Jacob said tiredly. "Your boys won't ignore me either."
"They would leave you alone if you would go back to the academy."
"I can do no such thing. My family will find me, they'll bring me back. I won't go until I've talked to you again."
Alena lifted her chin so she could pointedly look down on him. "You've talked to me. You can move on now."
Jacob wasn't intimidated into standing. He stayed exactly where he was in the middle of the sidewalk, in that same cross-legged position he'd taken after being rescued. "This isn't what I call talking."
"There isn't anything more to talk about. What I told you before still stands. Nothing has changed since then, except that now you're hiding from the people who depend on you, all for a foolish illusion."
She walked to him and pulled the boy roughly to his feet. Stepping back, she looked him over so critically that he was sure to be self-conscious. Her eyes darted from his mussed copper-red hair, to the symbol of his discolored mages' uniform, to his spell book that lay in tatters on the ground, next to his fragmented staff. Alena flipped the neglected book up with the blade of her haedonggum, caught it, and then thrust the enchanted object into Jacob's hands, where it glowed faintly.
There was a small leaf on his shoulder. Alena stepped closer to brush it away, speaking in a quietly gentle tone as she did, "And this is what you've become:"
Alena left Jacob dazed in his downward spiral. As soon as she got to a Kafra lady, she sent off a private message to his family, informing them of his location and "illness". Afterwards, she didn't run across him again. She heard from her contacts, who continued to send messages to her as she moved from station to station, that he had returned to his studies. He made fast progress with his display of exemplary talent and graduated early to become a mystical sage. Alena had cried the day she heard the news; in happiness or sadness, she didn’t know.
But she was a girl who loved to love. She was never one to regret. Maybe she was less idealistic about the men she dated now, but that made it no less fun, no less useful. And if some asked about that delicate, gold-coated leaf she wore among the trinkets in her hair, she would simply tuck it back into obscurity and claim she paid a high price for it: a piece of her heart and the last bits of her honor.
End.
---
Author's Notes:
Well, this ficlet took me a while to finish, as all things I write take a while to do. Which is why I don't write much. ^^; I know it could stand an overhaul in terms of narration and sequencing, but it says what I want it to about Alena's love life and I'm tired of trying to fix it. Alena, by the way, is a game character I play on a popular online game here in the Philippines, Ragnarok. My story, though, hardly hints at Ragnarok because, uhm, I'm not good at using game elements in stories, ^^;
I know I left the story kind of open to interpretation about Alena's motives. Do share your thoughts, I'm really interested. It's fun!
NaNoWriMo! And I have written not a thing! I decided to do Riven, my YYH fanfic, as my "novel" for this month but alas, I haven't got the discipline yet. I'm more worried right now about my papers due in three days. Eek! Speaking of which, I go now...