One of us is the chosen one and I’m kind of hoping it’s you, not me.

 
Timeline/World: Through the Looking Glass – Atheria 2nd Generation
Characters: Siana Storm
Race: Angel
Age: 74, physically about 28
Current residence: Atheria City, Eresiel
Final Word Count: 778 words
 

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I can’t claim to have grown up with my brother. When he was still far too young for my liking—but what did I know, I was all of two years older than him—our parents sent him off to a particular school that was meant to help him learn to control himself and his gift. It’s not something I ever questioned of them. He’d always been the distant kind, even from that young age, and we rarely ever played together.

I know my origin story is different from anyone else’s, so is his and maybe that’s why we’re as different as we might ever be. We do talk a bit now but we’re still not very close, I don’t know that we’ll ever be.

Age aside, there is one memory I have of our childhood that still sits with me but has been leaving me with more questions than anything else. Most of the time, when I give that memory a bit of thought, I feel like it must have been a dream more than a memory. Aeolus was something like six when they sent him off and I’m pretty sure that he never acted in the way this memory tells me he did.

It’s such a strange thing, really. It was just a few weeks before he got packed up to go. It was a sort of weird school a distance off, and I don’t think I even ever really saw him come home during the summers. They’d get calls about how he was doing, I know they went to see him every so often but until he was done with it all, he became a bit of a ghost in my life.

Most of the time, the memory itself doesn’t bother me so much, it does crop up every now and then and it does make me wonder a little. It leaves me scratching my head and wondering just how much of it might be real and how much of it might be my mind just playing the odd trick on me for some unknown reason. I never thought to ask him about that memory, I figured it wasn’t all that necessary and it wasn’t as though we were close, either, when he came back.

I was eight when he got swept away, he was just six. In the memory that feels more like a dream, he’s standing in my doorway and he’s giving me this deadpan look on his face—which wasn’t all that uncommon even then—and he tells me that one of us is the chosen one and he’s honestly hoping it’s me, and not him, but that he knows better.

The thing is, even at that age, even if I was still young, I felt like I knew him enough that this kind of behaviour was really out there, even for him. He would have never backed out of being the chosen one for anything, even if that really had been a thing which I’m fairly sure it isn’t. Though, with the way his gifts so happen to work, I suppose that he might very well be. I don’t know. It’s one of those things that I never really stopped to think about. I’d been fetched from one realm and had near to no blood from my parents in me, he’d been fetched out of the other realm altogether and he was the same. We were as opposite as we could be and there was already something about him that screamed control in some way. These are things that are really hard to put into words, especially considering how long ago it all was.

The more this memory remains with me, the more I think I must have made it up. That or it was a hidden side of him that only cropped up briefly at that moment, never to be seen again. I don’t know if I can say that the school he went to, changed him. He was in better control of his gift and all, but he’d always been reserved and a bit of a jerk, so I don’t know that I can claim the school changed him.

In a way, I guess I’ll never really know what to make of everything, in the end. He is as he is, school was decades ago, he came back, he did what he thought was necessary during the dark years too and the rest is sort of history, right? Right. He’s still family, I’ll never turn my back on him but that still doesn’t mean that we spend a whole lot of time together. It’s just one of those things.

Rain, smooth jazz, and the sound of my fireplace? This is true relaxation.

 
Timeline/World: Through the Looking Glass – Atheria 3rd Generation
Characters: Agathe Taylor
Race: Human – Meta – Water
Age: 37, physically about 20
Current residence: Atheria City, Eresiel
Final Word Count: 789 words
 

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I’m not sure when I discovered jazz as being an interesting type of music to listen to. It’s not the type of music I’ll blare loud and at all hours of the day. Honestly, I don’t even play it all that often, but I do every so often in the evenings when the mood calls for it. A little rain, some smooth jazz, the little fireplace in the cooler evenings and, you know what, I’ll be set for some time to come. There’s something just absolutely relaxing about that kind of scene.

I’m sure that someone who might know me would like to claim that my affinity with rainy evenings—far more than rainy days but give me rain during the evenings and nights—comes from my hydrokinesis but I hated this gift for a long time, especially when mom was dead set on making sure I knew how to control it.

Now, well, now I make some use of it as might be necessary but, for the most part, I tend not to. I don’t need to use my gift to move things, I don’t need it to water the plants that might need it—that’s the lazy way out if you ask me—and while there possibly could be some use elsewhere that I might not be thinking of right now, I think that’s the point. If I can’t think of a reason to use my gift, it’s more than reason enough not to use it.

Clean up after getting filthy while working in the garden? Sure. That makes it easier, and I don’t have to worry about tracking dirt—or water—in the house. I think that’s about the only time I make use of my gift. That and cleaning up spots I can’t reach, I guess. It’s a fairly rare occurrence that I do, and it suits me fine in the end.

Really, though. One of the ways I can picture a perfectly relaxing evening really does require quiet, smooth jazz, rain and the crackling of the fireplace, these only happen during two seasons because there’s no way in ever that we’ll use the indoor fireplace when summer time has come around. I’m sure someone out there will state that there are evenings that are chilly enough in the summer that using an indoor fireplace is perfectly respectable, but I beg to differ. In the summer, I’ll stick with using a light blanket if I really need to.

One of those things I’ve realized, though, is that I’m very picky with the kind of jazz that I listen to. My library of jazz music is limited enough that there is possibly, at most, two hours’ worth of playing before it starts back in on itself and I keep it on a shuffle pattern so even then, I can never really tell which song I’ve listened to more than once. Most of them have enough of a similar feel to them that it’s not jarring when the song changes and just, if I find new songs, I’ll give them a try, if I get tired of a particular one, I’ll drop it out.

Those rainy evenings really are the only times I’ll have that music playing anyway so it’s not like I’ll really get sick of listening to it any time soon. It’s not as though we get a fire going on every single raining evening when it’s cool enough. I think that would just take the magical feeling out of it if it happened too often. At least, the rain, jazz and fireplace thing. I admit that most fall evenings when it gets cold enough, I’m happy to have the fireplace going, even if it takes a little work to keep it going.

The house itself doesn’t really need it for warmth, even in the dead of winter, the fireplace isn’t so much used for warmth as it is for the coziness factor—for me, in any case—but I wouldn’t trade it out for anything else. That little crackling thing the logs do when they’re burning, it adds to the feeling of relaxation that comes from the whole scene.

I’d like to think I’m not a very complicated person. I don’t have very complicated wants or desires. I like to keep things simple and when we do deviate from the simpler things, I do so with him because that’s how everything should be. His presence is what makes everything ten times better. So sure, rain, jazz, the fireplace, those do lead to a relaxing evening but when he’s with me and I can settle close and comfortable? That turns the evening into something just so much better.