enjoy the breeze

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

i wrote Legend 12 at 3:59 AM for you.

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.