Sometimes the chance of a lifetime comes
And you reach out to take it
But before you know it, you're on the ground
And then you've just forsaken it

It was now or never, take it or leave it
And the chance just passed you by
But the worst part is that they saw it
And they don't care that you tried

What do you do when they are counting on you?
What do you do when they pray
That you stand up and fight and give hope anew
And end up saving the day?
What do you do when you slip and you fall
And miss that chance by an inch?
How do you stand up and face up to them
When they turn their backs and leave?

You could have done it; moment was there
But a voice in your head said otherwise
You tripped, you fell, you plummeted down
Taking with you all their pride

You were the key; but where was the lock?
Right ahead of you, but you missed;
Then they take you and crush you in pieces
Until you're just a broken promise

What do you do after they counted on you?
After their prayers went unheard
After you fought and tried and damned it all
And left their questions unanswered?
Will you forget? Will you start over again
Be strong and begin anew?
Or will you remember the day you fell apart
The day they turned on you?


They will make you remember, make you regret
It was you; not them; you started the end
And they throw out the memory again and again


I want to forget; not to remember
Leave me alone and
Let go

What do you do when they try to remind you?
Remind you of the day you fell
Do you fall to your knees and cry or get up again and try

To tell them that everyone has those days
Everyone has those times
Everyone makes their mistakes
You will have yours; this is mine

I will remember
So don't you ever
Tell me that I don't care enough;
I will remember
That you cared more
About the game than about the love.

You're not listening.

Demetrius sat on the porch, watching his three older apprentices play on the grassland. It had started out as a friendly game of Tag; but, as expected, Virgil had provoked Alexander, and the game had been elevated to a fight.

Tobias sat beside Demetrius, his hands in his lap. He had been here for three months already. He watched his seniors in silence, his blue-green eyes wide and attentive. He was small and his feet dangled a good meter off the ground. He never played with his seniors. It was not that he did not like them; he simply did not understand the concept of play. Over the past three months, he had been taught to fight to defend himself. He had not been taught to fight for fun (what was “fun”, anyway? No one had explained the idea to him yet). His seniors actually seemed to enjoy hitting each other.

He turned to Demetrius. The master was almost twice as tall as he was, and the strongest person he had ever seen—but he had come to realize that Demetrius never meant anyone any harm.

Upon sensing the small boy’s gaze, Demetrius turned to look at him. “Yes, Tobias?”

Tobias pointed at his seniors. Alexander had just given Virgil a good whack on the head.

“He’ll be fine,” Demetrius assured him. “They’re just playing.”

Tobias looked at him.

“Oh,” he said finally, understanding the question. “That’s their way of having fun, I suppose. They enjoy these little fights, but they never mean each other harm. They hit hard, of course,” he admitted, just as Virgil lashed out with a flying kick, “but they don’t do serious hurt to each other. They’re friends, after all.”

Tobias nodded, the new word echoing in his head.

“They’re your friends, too,” Demetrius said to him. “You can play with them any time you like.”

Tobias did not move from his place on the porch. Somehow, hitting his seniors to play didn’t seem quite right. He wasn’t sure what “friends” were just yet, but if his seniors were anything to go by, he knew he was not going to like the games they were familiar with.

Demetrius watched him, his grey eyes serious. He had come to realize that, despite where he had come from and how he had been treated, Tobias knew how to love, even if the boy himself was not conscious of it. He never hurt anyone, or for that matter, anything. He never killed ants or beetles or shot stones at birds, which was what a lot of boys liked to do. He was always willing to help around the house (the “motives” behind each one had to be explained to him—he had not understood the concept of washing dishes), and always listened to his seniors’ instructions. He he was a born fighter. But Demetrius was almost convinced that Tobias would never be a threat to anyone.

Then again, he thought wryly, Tobias would go through the test. Things would change for him.

Tobias was examining a ladybug that had found its way on the porch. As Demetrius watched, the ten-year-old boy stretched out a finger and let the ladybug climb onto it. Any other boy his age would have found interest in crushing the little insect.

Humans are created in funny ways. Demetrius looked at the talented young fighter and it occurred to him that Tobias’s head was made for battle—but that his heart was made for peace.

To O’Conner, cats and dogs made no difference. They were both four-legged creatures with long curly things sticking out of their behinds, and they made sounds that were not understandable. He had noticed, however, that their styles of self-defence differed. Cats had sharp things sticking out of their front legs that could tear through skin and flesh; dogs sank their teeth into them. He had learnt this the hard way.

“Why did you kill it?” Leon sighed, bending down beside the body of the small cat that had left O’Conner with a long gash on his arm. “You couldn’t have just whacked it on the head and called that sufficient payback?”

“No,” O’Conner said, trying to shake blood off his arm.

“You killed the dog, too, a couple of weeks ago,” Leon said, lifting the cat up. “I’m going to bury this.”

O’Conner cast him a strange look, as if to ask why, but then he turned away and pulled his jacket on so that his sleeve could soak up the blood.

“Ed,” Leon called vaguely, looking around for a good burial spot.

Edward slipped off his perch on a rock and went to O’Conner. He took O’Conner’s arm and rolled his sleeve up to tend to the gash. The Setters had learnt that O’Conner seldom let anyone come near him unless his hand was hovering casually over the hilt of his sword—casually, but nevertheless readily. The only one who could go near him was Edward. When Edward was around him, O’Conner seemed to change—literally. Something that unnerved the Setters greatly, even the older ones like Leon and Niles, was that the color of O’Conner’s eyes did not remain constant. When he was around the Setters, or when he was fighting, his eyes would be a harsh, dark brown, the bright, feverish glint a sharp contrast to his irises. When he was with Edward, however, his eyes would change. They would turn, slowly and gradually, from brown to a light sort of baby blue. Even his stance would be different around Edward. Normally tense and alert, around Edward he would be calm, relaxed, wandering freely around and reaching out with his hands to touch and examine everything around him in a curious, almost childish manner. Once, they had even seen him do the “penguin thing”, as Arlen had called it: O’Conner had stood before a particularly tall tree, staring at it in awe, and while he was doing so, he had shifted from one foot to another, his hands playing with themselves behind his back. It was something they had only seen in children. O’Conner, ruthless and deadly as he was, could turn from a fighter to a child. It was almost as though O’Conner had different personalities; he switched characters according to the people around him. This did nothing for his reputation amongst the Setters. Most of them were now set on the idea that O’Conner was either strange beyond all imagination, or crazy.

Arlen, sitting on another rock and swinging his legs, watched with mild interest as Edward tended to O’Conner. “You nut, O’Conner,” he remarked. “You had to go and poke a stray cat. Didn’t you have something better to do?”

There was something else the Setters had learnt about O’Conner—that, when his eyes were brown, they always belonged to a hunter, not the seventeen-year-old boy he was supposed to be. O’Conner shot Arlen a dangerous glance.

“Well, sorry,” Arlen said, raising his hands in surrender when he realized that O’Conner’s eyes had remained a harsh, cold brown.

O’Conner turned away from him.

The Setters had known each other for a little more than two months now. Arlen and Raven had met first; later they’d met Leon by chance, and Leon had happened to know Niles. They had found O’Conner together. Edward had been the last to join the group. Niles was the oldest of the group, a man in his mid-twenties; Edward seemed to be the youngest. They roamed about freely, visiting villages as they passed, and when they seemed to be in the middle of nowhere, they trained. The dynamics of the group had also surfaced. Arlen and Leon were a "package deal"; they went everywhere together and did everything together. Ironically, they spent every waking moment together arguing and bickering, and even though Leon always won in the end, Arlen never seemed to give up. They even argued during meals, which usually resulted in a serious fight involving cutlery. Raven always watched with interest, and when Arlen saw that he was losing hope, he would ask her for help; Edward would watch in silence and smile; Niles would watch mildly without comment. O’Conner did not seem particularly interested in their public speaking competitions, but he never told them to shut up.

The other Setters had come to treat O’Conner with respect as much as they did with fear. They did not doubt his ability; even before their attack on the Breakers, they had already seen enough to believe, without hesitation, that he was the ultimate Setter. It had taken them all, even Arlen, who normally made casual conversation with the most convenient person around, quite a while to converse with him without resting their hands on their own weapons (some of them still did). As time had passed, however, they had come to realize that O’Conner was often too busy being fascinated by the things around him to bother sticking a sword into one of his own acquaintances. It was as if he had never been outdoors, or to a village before. He never asked questions, always tried to figure things out alone. He never smiled—the only time they had seen him smile had been during the attack, and that hadn’t exactly counted as a smile—but his hands always roamed the objects of interest with a sort of quiet eagerness and his eyes would shift to that disarming baby blue.

He puzzled every one of the Setters, even Niles, who could normally read people like books. He had suggested the attack on the Breakers and had done the most damage, notably nonchalantly so, but any trace of cold sadism was countered by his childish fascination for the most trivial of things. True, he was violent, and destroyed everything that he deemed a threat to himself (including cats and dogs), but the wiser few of the Setters were beginning to wonder if it was because he was simply a killer, or because he was afraid of these things and did not know how else to deal with them. The split personality problem he seemed to have only made their doubts worse.

“Well, he’s buried,” Leon said finally, emerging from the bushes and dusting his hands off. “The next time you see a cat or a dog or any other animal, O’Conner, please don’t go near them, for both your safety and theirs.”

“That thing attacked me first,” O’Conner retorted. “I had a good reason to kill it.”

Leon sighed. “That’s the point. You don’t go around poking stray cats and dogs. You provoked him.”

“All I did was to touch it,” O’Conner snapped, his eyes, clearly brown, flashing, his hand suddenly hovering by the hilt of his sword. “What kind of imbecilic animal—”

“I’m hungry,” Arlen interrupted cheerfully, jumping off his rock. “Let’s get some lunch.”

It was ten o’clock in the morning, but Leon shot him a grateful look before turning away to fetch his knapsack. O’Conner’s hand left his hilt. He seemed to think for a long moment, and then slipped off his own rock, but his eyes were still dangerously sharp and bright. Edward gently touched his elbow. O’Conner’s fingers curled instinctively around an invisible hilt at the contact. Then Edward saw the transformation: O’Conner began to relax, and he began to move in a curiously dreamy sort of way, wandering around and gazing at everything and reaching out to everything with much interest. There it was: a deadly fighter morphing into a harmless child. Edward (only Edward) had gotten used to this and it no longer disturbed him. He smiled as he watched the ultimate Setter observe a tree. Soon, he knew, his eyes would change their color.

“There’s a village down there,” Arlen said ahead of Edward, as he jumped bouncily from one rock to another. “Wanna check it out?”

“We haven’t been to a village for ages,” Leon remarked. “I miss civilization.”

Niles looked at him, his clear eyes bright and penetrating. “I thought you hated company,” he said mildly.

“I do not,” Leon snapped. “Arlen is an exception.”

“Hey!”

“Watch where you’re going,” Raven said tonelessly, as Arlen slipped and fell off a rock with a yelp.

As Arlen and Leon began to bicker and Niles and Raven looked on, Edward paused to look for O’Conner, who had fallen behind. His eyes found the ultimate Setter and he motioned for him to catch up, but then he realized O’Conner was not looking at him, and he smiled.

O’Conner had found a butterfly.

You know how it was a good week last week? You should always enjoy your good weeks. Because after that, everything gets (insert swear word here) up.

I spend two hours trying to get a good grip on a technique that's BOUND to come in handy for tomorrow's competition, and then we spar and then it all goes down the drain. Sure, it comes in handy SOMETIMES, but when your accuracy level is somewhere around 20% it doesn't really help that much. So, great. I'm screwed for tomorrow. And when I go down, I'm not the only one who goes down. I have to drag someone else down with me because I'm not good enough. What happened to the carefree days of singles when I could just screw up on my own?

I spend time and effort keeping the team together, and it's great. Yeah, we're NYTT now. We're all rah-rah. That's not just my effort, it's everyone else's, so wonderful job. Woo-hoo. But then all we need is a little bit more craziness and then I turn into a human punchbag that has KICK ME written on my forehead. I never said you couldn't joke around and have fun--who said Jennifer doesn't like having fun?--but there's a narrow line between joking and bullying. I'm standing there alone and the entire junior population flies at me. My height, my this, my that, everything. For one, I am a senior. Even though we never really bothered with the whole senior-junior thing, there is a bottom line. For another, I ASSUME I am some kind of friend. When you gang up against a friend and make fun of her nonstop, I suppose you feel good about it, until someone else does the same to you.

And then I'm the one yelling at people to pick the balls up because it's OUR room, not Jennifer's room. You want me to set an example? I freaking set an example. Who out there says Jennifer doesn't pick up balls? But if an example is set you're supposed to FOLLOW it, in case you don't know what an example means. You don't crowd around her and bully the living daylights out of her and pick up maybe about ten balls and then leave every other odd ball on the floor for her to pick up. You know she will. And she does. She could always leave it. Everyone's leaving and not caring, so why should she care? Because she is the captain--no, a member of the team who uses the room--and she KNOWS she should pick up the balls after training, even though no one else does. She could always dismiss it as a freaking waste of time, which is what everyone else thinks, but when everyone's gone and the lights are off she's still there, putting balls into the baskets and then packing up her own things alone, which are still strewn everywhere. And she's thinking, everyone's gone out the door, but what about me? Stuck here in a dark room with no one else waiting outside with the lights off and the aircons down because everyone's forgotten about me. Jennifer doesn't matter. She's an example. Because that's what you call her when everyone else is packing their stuff and watching her do the rest of the work, isn't it? "Jennifer's the captain. She should set an example." You can say that, but please, be truthful and add the climax. "That we don't follow."

I'm glad my captaincy ends when the Nationals are over. There are times when I feel proud of myself as a captain, and there are times when I sit down and wonder what the hell I've been doing. I don't ask for ultimate respect. Respect has to be gained. But I think I've done a considerable number of things to have a minimum level of respect. Even with a normal person, you respect her and you don't gang up against her to tell her how short she is in front of coaches and teachers and other juniors. I laugh and play around with you, but that's because people are watching. One day, when you push me far enough over the edge,

I will give you hell.

My sympathy goes out to all the other captains out there who don't have the guts or the heart to yell at their juniors because they're just having their fun, after all. To all the captains who don't have the heart to tell their juniors they're having fun at the expense of someone else. Or am I the only one who's that weak? Am I the only one who invites people to kick my ass?

"Hey Jennifer the awesome captain!"

If I were that awesome, none of the above would ever have happened.

I am a lazy blogger. (:

I'm going to miss the past few days. It was great fun--running in the mornings with juniors, having breakfast, fooling around until we went over to the BS for training. It's a good feeling when everyone's either running or sitting around watching. You get really tired afterward and you're all hot and perspiring but that's the even better part of it: you get fit while having fun. (: I feel fit now! Although my past three lunches have been rather, uh, unhealthy, so I guess it balances out, so I haven't gotten any fitter after all. D: Yesterday Si Min and I caught sight of the juniors on the track on our way to the library. They were playing 老鹰捉小鸡 and (as usual) yelling and laughing at the top of their voices. It was then that it occurred to me how three days alone as a team (everyone else was at camp) can bring us a little closer, even if by only a little. Watching them play with each other--Secondary 1s and 2s alike--made me smile and think about how even teenagers can be kids sometimes.

Then again, while it can't be denied that NYTT has definitely gotten a little more bonded this year (alright, a LOT more bonded!), there are still cliques and groups. Si Min and I have each other, but it just occurred to me that if one of us isn't there, the other has nowhere to go. The Secondary 1s and 2s are one big happy family; Mingzhen and her gang are fine together; but the two of us are alone. It's not like we don't get along with anyone else--we're fine with the C Div and with the other Secondary 3s and 4s. But we can't consider ourselves part of the group. It's either because we're older or because we just don't spend enough time with them. If Si Min doesn't come for training one day, what will happen to me? When I go over to HC next year, what will happen to her?

I've been slacking off for the past few days. There isn't much homework (it's camp week!) to begin with. I've started on Legend again! (: After a block that lasted almost months, I'm getting, uh, inspired again. I hope it turns out okay. I still have no idea how to final fight is going to turn out. I'm the makeitupaswegoalong kind of person (at least, when I'm writing), so I'll think about that when I come to that. (: I'm SO HAPPY I've gotten past L13. I was stuck on that for ages. Glad it's over.

Kekkaishi 251 is out. I don't believe it! So hard to understand what's happening now ><>

I'm not going to talk about Graces. Everyone's talking about Graces. Why should my experience at Graces be any different? Everyone looked great (well, 99% of us looked great), we all had fun, that's all there is to it. Next topic!

Wow. My life is actually kind of boring.

Time to find stuff to do, I guess. Some Scholars' Cup reading, Macbeth, probably R and R (LA SIA is SCREWED)...

When you hit Secondary 4, you don't feel stressed out anymore. You're totally immune to it.

Cheers! :D