Ruairi | Water | Freyja, Heris, Henriik

“The stripper I ordered was immeasurably more handsome than you, so why are you dressed like him?”

Freyja’s voice was more grating now than Ru recalled it being previously. He didn’t bother slowing his stride, only making a point to turn and lower his head more than necessary despite her heels to express just how much he looked down on her. If they were perfect strangers, objectively he would have appreciated the view of her. The thought repulsed him, and the brief internal disgust he harbored with that rippled onto his features. Though if Freyja wanted to take that expression as him finding her utterly appalling, he wouldn’t intervene with that conclusion. “I suppose we just both shop at Whores “R” Us,” he paused, nodded to her dress, “you must be proud of your membership there too.”

The decline in his pace was nearly immeasurable as Freyja began talking again, though his gaze did fix forward with the slightest of tension forming in his jaw.

“What do you have again? What’s going for you?”

Ruairi replied with a glare sharper than warranted. Earnestly, he thought his status outside of the academy just might offer him some protection. Though he steadfastly refused to rely on his namesake in any manner. The prospect of getting onto the radar of the administration to the point of their intervention to begin with was concerning to him. If he ever got knee-deep in a sea of trouble here, he could only imagine the satisfaction his parents would feast on to have him need them to clean up his mess. Surely they would encourage him to grovel and beg at their feet, if only to instill enough humiliation for him to avoid any future acts that threatened to shame himself, or more importantly, them. That was the best-case scenario, anyway.

The jabs that followed on Ru’s part during their less-than-pleasant stroll to the grand hall were more throwaway comebacks than cutting remarks. It was too easy to fall back into the routine of tossing insults back and forth. A mutual hush fell between them as Freyja’s ear pressed to the door in sync with Ru’s brow raising in a quizzical manner as he watched her. If she was the one with all the immunity she boasted about, he fully intended on letting her stand alone on the front lines of whatever disruption she was subjecting them both to. It felt fair enough.

Refraining from making a biting comment about her attention-grabbing entrance, Ru only followed a short distance and halted at her side. His blue eyes didn’t spare any face in the room from being observed, Freyja’s included. There was absolutely nothing he needed to say as Freyja began sounding off, and he made sure to carefully conceal how impressed he was with her bold stronghold. From the men in the room, his attention was held hostage by Freyja as his gaze fixated on her for the most part. Of course Freyja was fiery, it was in her nature, though if she was concerned to any degree about repercussions for this stunt, he couldn’t tell.

Ru cast away his stare as the other beings in the room began to vacate. Averting his gaze to an unfixed point on the ceiling, his head tilted down again to be met with Freyja’s focus on him.

“Shall we, darling?”

“This was a lot of effort on your part just to play seven minutes in heaven while they wait outside,” Ru commented, placing his hand over his heart in mock endearment with a smug gleam in his eyes as he began walking towards the stage. “I sincerely hope your stripper can appreciate how much of a romantic you are at heart.”

<///////////>

The speech was something Ruairi was confident enough in that he didn’t feel the need to labor over any other practice runs. At worst, he figured he could improvise a little should he feel lost during the actual thing. Maybe he would throw in spontaneous improvisation for the sole amusement of throwing Freyja off just enough to make it entertaining. That was a thought that almost brought a smile to his face.

“I must admit, it could have used a woman’s touch.”

“So could the fossils you chased off earlier,” Ru remarked, his hands casually sliding into his pockets. The decorations looked good enough to him from his brief observation. Whether he settled on that opinion because it opposed Freyja’s or just because he could honestly care less about it was something he couldn’t deduce. Needless to say, Ru muttered a demand of why she was pulling him off to the side, though the intensity of her eye contact silenced him as he tried to gauge what sparked such sudden seriousness in her features.

“I need to ask you something. How did you get that scar on your back?”

The stoicism that hardened on his face only expressed a grave unamusement with her question. Ru was not entirely sure how to read her expression, or why she was asking something that was a sure ticket way to getting very deeply beneath his skin. Before he could give a harsh scoff and give her the cutting and exact answer, he was alarmed to find the answer wasn’t so readily available for him to use.

“When you remember that day, how did we get there, so far from here? Were we the only ones there when it happened?”

Ru stared at Freyja like she was speaking another language. The answers to the questions she was trying to pull from him were unobtainable, lost and blurred and it was a feeling he was not comfortable with in the slightest. If he weren’t so focused on sifting through his own head and coming up empty-handed, he would have just barked at Freyja for asking a barrage of stupid and sudden questions. The scar was her fault, it was a fact in his head with no evidence he could manifest in his memory to corroborate it with. How did facts of the past exist without clear memory? It would be so much easier for him to believe this was some kind of sick mind game she was playing just to see him internally squirm, yet it just didn’t make sense. How could he mistake the concern and insistence of her expression as malicious when it looked so genuine? The blanks he was drawing he could not blame her for even if he wanted nothing more than to do so.

Henriik’s voice hardly registered to Ru, but the slap, albeit not as stinging as he’s received in the past, re-centered him. Whatever slip of alarm displayed on his face vanished, and was replaced by a mixture of more things than he wanted to show, which ultimately pissed him off.

“You’re a fucking asshole and a disgrace, I cannot believe they would force me to do anything with you, god forbid it be something that requires charisma and a miniscule quantity of wit!”

Bewildered and irritated at how quickly things were changing in the one-sided conversation, and unsure of the facial cues he was receiving from her amid this entire excruciatingly uncomfortable moment, he lightly shook his head, though no words followed as he made a point to shoulder-check her as he silently walked away. As if she hadn’t made a mess enough of his head, the maddening frustration he felt now was overwhelming.

<//////////>

A cold shower had been enough to stunt the cyclone of thoughts that plagued him. Granted he drew out his endurance of the freezing water for nearly an hour just to kill both time and his thoughts, it was still only a temporary fix. Where Floki had gone was a mystery, and maybe just this once Ru was mildly disappointed he had none of his roommate’s theatrics to preoccupy him. Nevertheless, he had ample time to dress for the occasion. Garbing his figure in a white collared dress shirt underneath a black velvet embossed suit jacket, he stuck with black slacks and an equally dark pair of polished dress shoes. The tailored fit was the embrace he needed to feel put together. Ru also wasn’t shy about admiring his own appearance in the mirror as his hands absent-mindedly fitted himself with a navy blue tie, and ran a few passes of a comb through his hair.

Whatever sense of content he had felt was fleeting once he had gone out of his way to spend his remaining time with Heris. She was beautiful in her own right as he lounged around, watching her make the final touches of her appearance. He briefly wondered what Freyja would decide on wearing, then harshly chided himself. Again, he found himself only plastering on the facade of an engaged boyfriend with Heris to avoid being alone with himself and his head today. At most he was grateful that he was a great pretender - it came easy to maintain false interest in women’s lives, and jokes, and to be charming to get what he wanted. Today it felt like more of a chore and he was more acutely aware of how little Heris actually meant to him. Ru felt no guilt, or shame in leading her on with his act. This was how he assumed all relationships were to a degree though. Deep down love was just a weighted obligation in his eyes, and he would never understand why someone would subject themselves to wanting something so suffocating.

Ru was also beginning to get irritated with her asking his opinion on what she chose in terms of color coordinating her accessories with her dress, as if what he thought would impact what he already knew she had decided on. When Heris had declared she was ready he eagerly stood and let a hushed “thank God” fall from his lips as he linked his arm with hers and set the pace towards their destination of the grand hall. Everyone he passed was easily looked over and about as interesting to him as his own date was, which was next to nothing despite the posture and satisfied demeanor he adopted that would suggest otherwise.

And then there was Freyja whom his blue eyes tethered to. The epitome of what men wanted and what women wanted to be. Her emerald dress looked particularly selected to compliment her eyes, and while he knew she never needed makeup and curled hair to make other women in her proximity feel small, he could only infer from the faces near her how insecure most girls were with their choices in dressage, and fixing strands of their hair that made absolutely no difference to their image. She made Henriik appear almost invisible, or maybe Ru just didn’t care to acknowledge much of Henriik’s existence at all to begin with.

A tug from Heris as they shifted direction encouraged his gaze to briefly flicker to her, and just as suddenly he remembered that he was still angry at Freyja for slapping him during a bizarre moment he had yet to fully grasp the gravity of. However, it didn’t feel as if that moment was ready to let go of him now that he had allowed it back into his head. Ru desperately wished to ignore his compulsion to shake out of Freyja why she asked the questions she did, and more importantly, whether his mental blanks were mutual and maybe she had just been looking to share the sentiment of absent memory. Both hate and want was thrown around in every glance he spared her as he wrestled with his own turmoil, and if Heris wasn’t so firmly intertwined with him, he might have given into his impulse to speak with Freyja.

Freyja | Fire | Arah, Henriik, Heris, Ru, others

All eyes were on Freyja as she walked into the grand hall with her boyfriend on her arm rather than the other way around. Regardless of who was the trophy in their relationship, events like this always reminded Freyja of the false pretenses their relationship was built on and the fact that she had only stayed here for one purpose. The headmaster had kept her here to play one role: Henriik’s girlfriend.

Although she didn’t mind all of the attention that came with the territory, it seemed like that attention validated the widely-held belief that she was only as good as her connection to Henriik. She didn’t have a family, a place of origin, or a home. If her value decreased in the eyes of Henriik or of his family, she didn’t even know what she would do. She’d end up on the street somewhere, perhaps, better off dead. She hadn’t even been to the actual realms where others lived, she’d been stuck in this timeless bubble for as far as her memory could take her. This is the only life she had ever known.

Despite the importance of her role, sometimes she felt she would have rather been dead. Hearing her name in others’ conversations was thoroughly exhausting to keep up with when others were speaking it in order to actually gain her attention for a fleeting moment or two. Unsurprisingly, some of the grimier faculty members were quick to steal a moment of her time after the events of the afternoon, and she did her best to accommodate them without letting something condemning travel from her mind to her lips, where it could manifest and be used against her at a later date.

Finally the pair were able to move past the shapeless void of people crowding at the front of the hall and made their way to their seats. It wasn’t that she hadn’t felt Ruairi’s gaze on her prior to that moment, but she held it for seconds, moments, smirking as she took her seat. It was no surprise that they had created two separate tables for the guests of honor, and both of them remained largely unfilled, placed strategically to keep the pair as far from each other as possible while still creating some image of symbolic unity. Freyja felt like they were on two separate islands, floating farther and farther from each other as the night went on. It wasn’t like she didn’t understand why they felt the need to separate the pair, even if they placed them at separate tables with their backs to one another they would have found a way to get under each other’s skin in some grandiose display of power. They always found a way.

This time was no exception to that rule. When Ru lifted his fork with his right hand, she lifted hers with her left hand. She studied him, her expression remaining unassuming for the majority of the time. She wanted it to be a mind game, she wanted him to wonder if it was purely coincidence or if she was actually trying to fuck up his mind. When he took a sip of his water, she drank a clear liquid that was definitely not water that she had brought in as contraband, knowing they wouldn’t be serving alcohol at a formal event and that the students wouldn’t be breaking theirs out until the after parties later on in the evening. It didn’t seem to matter now, anyway, since he seemed to keep drinking his as a coping behavior and she kept copying him to see how long it would take to get a reaction out of him. Before they’d sat down, they’d been dancing around each other in the social setting, catching each other’s eyes from across the room or forcing some behavior in order to catch the attention of the other. At this point, she had fully monopolized not only his attention but his mind, she was convinced, and his date seemed just as unenthused as hers. She could have sworn she heard a sigh of relief from Henriik as she left the table, one she didn’t even think to take personally. She already had her sights set on beating Ru up the stairs, intent on making him look like a fool while she began the speech without him. They were equal distances from the stage and she was in heels, but she could still try, couldn’t she?

As one may have expected, the speech started off as strangely as it finished. She was sure her expensive perfume wasn’t strong enough to mask the smell of booze, and the foggier her mind went, the stronger of a hold the ghost of Ru’s touch had on her. All he’d done was bump her shoulder when he’d left in the afternoon, but it was enough physical contact to hold a small piece of her mind hostage. She had been dating Henriik a long time, and they only touched one another in public, more or less. He was indifferent to where she was, what she was doing, or what she wanted, more or less. Ironically, he made her feel more invisible than she made him look.

As they wrapped up a pattern of dialogue that vaguely resembled what they had practiced earlier in the day and primarily took on a form of passive aggression that was masked by layers of forced smiles and backhanded compliments, the pair exited the stage, and both returned to their seats. Being at the exact other end of the set of tables, Freyja resumed her state of being, now primarily sizing up Heris and rolling her eyes any time the young woman did anything as minimal as glance in the blond’s direction. She wondered if Ru believed what she had said the other night about her happiness. She wasn’t even sure she believed it. If it had been there, it was short-lived. The woman was a hindrance to her, an annoyance, and someone that she desired to get rid of.

“Does she seem suspicious to you?”

“Who?”

Freyja nodded in the girl’s direction, then studied her boyfriend’s expression. He stiffened, disinterested, and shrugged. “I don’t know why she would be.”

The rest of the event went off without a hitch, primarily because she and Ru had been the main event, and the only remaining activity was to hear the events of that year’s trials. For some reason Freyja could absolutely not fathom, they had brought the insecurities challenge back. She might have noticed the way Henriik blanched if she hadn’t been busy making subtle breaches in etiquette that were causing Heris to look displeased with Ru. They’d picked back up the copying game, except now it was him that was copying, and his date was actually paying attention to what he was doing unlike hers. She grinned gleefully when Heris finally made some biting remark to him, not even caring about the subject of that remark. For all she cared, it could have been irrelevant to this, as long as she was the reason it happened to begin with.

After what felt like an eternity, the entire student body was released from the dinner and the majority immediately made their way to the outdoor classrooms for the party. Because the classrooms were basically in-ground amphitheatres, they were a frequent party spot for when students desired to host pool parties. Freyja had heard rumors that someone had filled the place with water while they were delivering the speech. This was odd considering that Ru had been with her the entire time and it was too large to fill without heaps of magic. She could have accused Heris, but she could have sworn she was an earth element. Besides that, she definitely couldn’t prove that the young woman hadn’t been on Ru’s arm the entire time since she had only been avoiding him and playing little eye contact games with him and no one else until they’d all taken their seats. Still, it was a bit peculiar, and it made her feel a bit on edge to be missing the event. It was the only one she didn’t go to, partially because she didn’t feel like it and partially because the water would have been fatal to her. The last time she went near an open body of water was when she’d been drowned as a child. By whom, she could no longer recall. She thought it was Ru, but she distinctly remembered at least four other figures around them. Everything felt fuzzy to her as far as that was concerned.

Unfortunately for the fire element, most of her requests for her friends to provide her with alcohol from the party were promptly denied on account of the vast amounts she had already consumed during the dinner. She’d taken a bottle of wine off of one of the new students on her walk back to her dorm, but that was all she could manage to find. She was already feeling really sorry for herself, and that clearly wasn’t going to be enough to sustain an entire night of drinking alone in her room. The fuzzier her thoughts got, the more a single statement resounded in her head. Her words from hours earlier: what do you have going for you?

Even though Ru had understood the words in their intention, they really ate at Freyja. The first thing she thought of as she answered her own question in her mind in that moment was that he had a family. He had a place to call home. Maybe it wasn’t perfect, but he knew who he was. She had nothing. She had no right to ask him something like that when, if the question turned on her, she couldn’t give a good answer. What would her legacy be? What could she do in their world to be remembered?

“You know, I really don’t think adding more alcohol to this situation is going to do anything that the alcohol you’ve already consumed hasn’t done already.”

This statement was enough to get Freyja out of her thoughts, back into the real world from a grade A pity party that was not anything like the one she was missing. “And?” She took a swig from the bottle as she swayed clumsily in front her mirror, grimacing as she swallowed.

“You don’t even like wine,” Arah confronted indignantly, “and if you don’t tell me what’s going on with you-”

“-You’ll do what, exactly?” Even with a pained expression in her eyes, they glistened with confidence. Arah choked on her own words.

Freyja returned to studying herself in the mirror, clearly having some sort of early life crisis that seemed more to Arah like a drama-filled, cinematic moment. “Exactly.” Was she going crazy, or was Freyja pretending to hit rock bottom just to see what it felt like?

“Freyja,” the girl finally responded, “what is happening with you? You’re acting like a crazy person.”

Tears welled up in her eyes, but she had mastered the art of containing them before they fell. She maintained a fixed expression on her face the entire time. Her eyes were the only thing that threatened to betray her. “Did you and Henriik break up? Did Ru say something?”

She shook her head, clearly putting the majority of her effort into controlling her voice and her face. “I love you, Arah, but I really can’t talk about it right now. You couldn’t possibly understand.”

…

After an hour or two, night had fallen and Arah had gone to sleep, leaving Freyja alone with herself and her wine once more. She wasn’t exactly angry at Freyja, but she definitely seemed hurt that she wasn’t opening up to her. So what? It wasn’t like Freyja was normally a good sharer, let alone drunk and emotional about things that she couldn’t control. She didn’t have a family, she didn’t have a home, and she would be expected to either pair with Henriik or end things with him and move somewhere else in a matter of months. She was as good as dead either way, and not a damn thing could be done to change it either way. She was in her pajamas now, makeup gone and hair only showing traces of what it had been for the event. She was laying on her back on the floor, head focused up toward the charred wall as she concentrated on the few memories she did have, only aided in her process by the occasional swig of alcohol. She was coming down to the bottom of the bottle when a knock sounded on the door, and although she was on guard for reasons she could not explain, she opened the door to a crack in order to see through, surprised to see Ruairi at her door. His blond curls were messy again, like he’d been running his hand through them constantly. His eyes gave off a confusing level of emotion that she struggled to discern in a compromised state. In all actuality, the only thing that came to mind was that she would have liked to run her own hands through his hair in that moment. It seemed soft. And fluffy.

Having a reputation to upkeep that went far beyond the simple obstacle of inebriation, Freyja watched him with big, calm eyes, not necessarily confrontational in her body language as much as her voice. In clothing that was more modest and casual than he had seen her wear in years and such a gentle expression, she almost seemed childish. Her voice was raspy from choking back tears for several hours, but it held the grit, neutrality, and unchecked confidence of the woman who had become his bitter rival.

“Arah’s asleep,” she stated flatly, “come back in the morning.” Swaying to some internal rhythm that seemed supernatural in the thick, tense silence of the dimly-lit room, Freyja stood behind the gap in the door with the mostly empty bottle in the hand that wasn’t holding the door open. If the door hadn’t been between their two bodies, her lack of coordination would have, more likely than not, managed to send her crashing straight into him.

Ruairi | Water | Freyja, Heris

In the moments following being seated and establishing himself at his own table, Ruairi’s attention was in limbo with dissecting Freyja’s mannerisms that were too similar to his own to be comfortable with, and making throwaway conversation with his date. It was more straining than he needed at the moment to discern Freyja’s goal, or lack thereof. Nursing his water came as a tool to physically ground his attention to his own table, and whatever conversation he was only semi-involved in with Heris. Decidedly, considering his initiation of throwing glances towards her earlier and his ploys of charismatic attention grabs by using Heris as a doting instrument to his own game, Freyja was returning the favor in a manner he wasn’t fond of. Especially as his date was apparently not the oblivious bimbo he was more accustomed to having at his side.

It took a surreal level of maturity on Ru’s part to not slow his gait up the stairs to trip Freyja just before she reached the top of the platform. In all honesty, it would have made him feel level for the slap, and yet it would be counter-intuitive in getting answers from her at a more convenient time. The surprise his gaze briefly reflected in a glance towards her from the waft of alcohol that subtly clung to her evolved to smug satisfaction as the opportunity for covert vengeance amid their speech. Altering small pieces of what they had rehearsed and going improv with passive aggression just to observe her adapt was more pleasant than he could outwardly convey beside her.

With the speech done and over, and Ru satisfied with the outcome not blowing up in his face in any way, he resumed his place at his table with Heris, only now deciding to beat Freyja in the game of copycat by mimicking her mannerisms. The only brief cease-fire he displayed was to briefly listen in on the announcement of the trials. A mutual blanket of discomfort on varying levels settled over not only Ru, but from his observations, most of the room. He wasn’t fond of being forced to face things that were purposefully locked away in various compartments in his head. Especially with his newly emergent feelings of doubt and unease he’s been battling all day.

“Are you being intentionally dense by pretending I can’t see what you’re doing?” It was not a remark Ru had anticipated from Heris, though the blond did trade his gaze’s attention from Freyja to her with a thin smile.

“I find it a little ironic you’re suggesting I’m the one being dense, when you’re making no sense, because I’m not doing anything,” Ru’s smile was laced with pity as he took her hand, “but if it makes you feel better, I’ll stop doing whatever it is that upset you, because I care about you.” The reassurance sounded genuine on his part, although he was testing the waters of gaslighting for his own benefit, which in past flings, came with little resistance. However, judging from his date’s expression, what he said didn’t exactly land the way it was supposed to.

</////////////>

It only took a couple hours of a party and putting actual effort into making amends with Heris by offering undivided attention to feel spent. The party was rather similar to every other one he’s attended here, and yet this one was just unbearably dull. Shifting the blame onto being too present with his girlfriend and having too little alcohol to make any of it worth it was much easier than admitting he was bored without feuding with Freyja like they typically did at parties. It hardly helped that the one time he was willing to go out of his way to speak with Freyja about earlier, she wasn’t in the same place as him.

When the opportunity arose for Ru to bow out, he did so hastily. The most logical step for him to take would be to go directly to Freyja’s room, and he almost didn’t recognize himself for making such a decision to follow through with. Swallowing his pride in seeking her out, the walk to her dorm was shorter than he appreciated, leaving him little time to fully focus on what he would be articulating to her without looking stupid and giving her more ammo in her arsenal against him.

A brief moment passed while he stood at the door before he raised his fist to give a few raps on the door, both hands retreating to the pockets of his slacks. While he was debating whether this would really get him anywhere or not, he had already walked all of the way here, and whether Freyja was sleeping or not mattered little to him and his quest. She opened the door and he was almost surprised to see the transformation in appearance she had taken on. It was more than strange for him to see her so… calm? Docile? It reminded him of their time in the Sanctum to an uncomfortable degree, and he forcibly flicked his gaze lower only to catch sight of the bottle in her hand with her sway.

“Arah’s asleep, come back in the morning.”

“Tomorrow morning doesn’t work for me,” Ru replied in a more hushed tone that communicated how serious and insistent he was.“This is important, and I’m too unbearably sober to let it go.” The blond briefly leaned back as he glanced down the hall, listening and watching for signs of life, and when none presented itself, he looked back to her. Ru didn’t want to be seen at her door, and he certainly didn’t want anyone to eavesdrop on a conversation that was so personal to him.

“I’ll be quiet,” He said, giving little room for argument as he took it upon himself to push the door open enough for his figure to slide into the room, while keeping an eye on Freyja’s instability to avoid any kind of unnecessary contact with her. It was becoming more apparent with every second he observed her how intoxicated she was, and he was unsure of whether he was grateful or dismayed there was a slight chance this would all be a blur to her come the morning.

“You asked how I got the scar on my back, and the answer is you,” he said in a mindful whisper, his hand leaving his pocket just to tensely comb through his hair. While naturally, he might have paced, there was a sleeping body in this room that he actually cared not to wake. “But I don’t remember you doing it, exactly. I have this fact that I’ve never really questioned, because it makes no sense to really question something you know to be absolute truth. And now I’m not so sure what to think now that I’m actually thinking too much about it.” With a light shake of his head, a sigh, and an aversion of his frustrated gaze to the floor, he recollected himself.

“What do you remember? Because I need to know. And for the love of all things worth having, don’t fuck with me on this one thing I’m asking from you,” it was a blow to his pride to even utter the next word as he leaned back against her wall and lifted his gaze back to hers. “Please.” This was just weighing on both his conscious and subconscious mind too greatly to ignore. As for why he couldn’t remember, he didn’t know, but it brought him comfort to think he could live the memory vicariously through Freyja. Maybe then it would be clearer to him, because it unnerved him to the core to not know the source of such a large staple of truth in his life, and despite how much he hated letting that show to Freyja, it did.

However, he also felt on level ground at seeing her drunk, and seemingly unable to conceal her emotions from him. It was easier to see what appeared to be concern in the way she looked at him, and that was an expression he found difficult to accept from her. Maybe it was just pity. Right now though, the most important thing Ru allowed himself to focus on was getting the answer from her that would settle his mind enough for him to not be consumed by not knowing.

Freyja | Fire | Ru

“Tomorrow morning doesn’t work for me. This is important, and I’m too unbearably sober to let it go.”

Freyja was most of the way through the words I guess ‘I’ll wake her up then’ when he offered some vow of keeping a hushed tone, pushing past her with energy that indicated restlessness rather than a direct challenge to the boundary she had set. She knew there was a likely chance that he knew Arah well enough to know that she went to bed when it was still light outside and that he hadn’t shown up to their room in the middle of the night during one of the largest parties of the year just to check in on his friendship with the most stable, consistent person in the world. Still, his directness surprised her as much as the way he carried himself. Maybe it was the alcohol, but it felt like his blue eyes were cutting through her like a knife. His face was stoic, but she could tell that he’d probably spent the night pacing and running his hands through his hair rather than getting trashed and making out with his resentful girlfriend. Hell, knowing him as well as she did, Freyja was surprised that he wasn’t pacing the room at that moment. His body language was so tense that she wasn’t entirely sure there was a muscle he wasn’t clenching.

Normally she would have had a comeback of some kind, or some desire to speak out of turn in order to exercise control over the situation. The events of the day had made her sleepy, and she honestly preferred to sit back and see how he could ruin his own self next. She wasn’t exactly running out of ideas, but it was always nice to have a bit of extra inspiration. He wasn’t horrible to look at. You know, if wildly immature rich boys who lack competence in every single possible area are something you’re into.

“You asked how I got the scar on my back, and the answer is you, but I don’t remember you doing it, exactly. I have this fact that I’ve never really questioned, because it makes no sense to really question something you know to be absolute truth. And now I’m not so sure what to think now that I’m actually thinking too much about it.”

He was so frantic he was almost convincing. He almost made her believe that he was questioning some other alternative, that the “truth” he’d stuck by for literal years of their life–the “truth” he’d placed higher than their friendship–was no longer the hill he was willing to die on. He shook his head and sighed, clearly defeated by their conversation from earlier in the day. What a big baby he was. The only person allowed to have a pity party or an existential crisis was her, and she’d already had hers for the day. Maybe he should have come back in the morning, when the number of dramatic breakdowns had reset to zero.

His gaze returned to hers, and their eyes connected in a softer manner. She studied him from across the small room, trying to make out the intricacies of his vibrant irises in the dim lighting. The color of his eyes had become something of a fixation for the simple, cavewoman brain she was trying to function on. Maybe she stared for a little too long, for when her pale green gaze shifted from zooming in on his irises to generally glancing over the entirety of his countenance, she noticed that his eyebrow was raised and he was watching her, expectantly.

“What do you remember? Because I need to know. And for the love of all things worth having, don’t fuck with me on this one thing I’m asking from you.” She naturally defaulted to her position of power-hungry tyrant, prepared to tell him she would not comply without the utterance of the magic word when, to her complete and utter bewilderment, he said it all on his own.

“Please.” His words were breathy and soft, and it was difficult for her to take it as something he was doing for Arah rather than something that the influence of her presence was doing to him.

Almost tempted to comply, Freyja responded, “well, it’s better if I show you.” Slowly and with uneven, uncalculated movements, she covered the little ground between them until she was directly in front of him, her body inches from his. She studied his eyes, nearly getting stuck there again. In this state, it was almost too easy to get stuck in the intricacies of his features, the little flecks of teal in the darker hues of his eyes, the way a few stray curls fell to his forehead, framing his furrowed brow.

With an ever-shifting expression, Freyja softly grabbed for Ru’s hands, nearly missing them with such awful hand-eye coordination. What she lacked in grace, she made up for in gentleness. Her touch was surprisingly tender yet held no obvious clues that this was anything other than what she’d explained it to be: a demonstration. Her face held no obvious clues that it was anything other than what she’d explained it to be either. In a delayed moment or two, she placed his hands on her body and released them, her gaze trailing up his forearms and back to his face. He wasn’t wet, and changing clothing clearly wasn’t as much of a priority for him as it was for her if the last two days was any indication. She was beginning to get the impression that he hadn’t even gone to the pool party at all, let alone hosted it.

“You had your hands on me like this, it’s the only way you could have pushed me from the edge of the water. But your hands, they… they felt different then. Not like yours, not like you.” Suddenly, the hairs on the back of her neck stood up as she considered the idea that it could have been someone else entirely. She knew in her mind it was him, but something inside of her said otherwise. She flicked her gaze away, face distraught. A different picture was shaping up in her mind, and she didn’t like it at all. There was only one way to find out for sure, although she knew he wouldn’t like it. After all, she was already terribly close, lips hovering over his own by simple lack of ability to conceptualize her own size. Her gaze flicked up to his hair, and before she knew it, her hands were in his hair, not falling to cup his face in her palms until his breath hitched and his chest constricted, a sudden reminder to the fire element of what she’d actually intended to do.

Slowly but with no sign of hesitation, Freyja put her lips on his, kissing him gently. She was really out of it, so she barely even registered who it was she’d put her lips on until she’d maneuvered herself closer to the scar on his back by placing gentle kisses on his jaw, then his neck, until finally she breathed in the scent of his cologne and hesitated briefly, as if the magnitude of her actions became clear for one millisecond before disappearing again into the black void of her absent conscience. The only thing that really mattered in that moment was that she had the vantage point she needed to recreate the scar on the other side of his back. He was like clay in her hands, more gentle and more willing than she’d expected him to be, even if she was moving fast and avoiding lingering for fear that he’d finally lash out and leave before she could prove her point. Her hands slipped under his shirt from the back where the scar was, and in one swift moment, she thought of Henriik, and that was enough emotion to trigger the magic to burn him.

Avoiding his face to keep herself from getting caught up in the emotion of the moment, she lifted his shirt up and held up a hand mirror to reflect on the floor-length mirror that resided in the opposite corner of their room. In fact, the burn she had just managed held entirely different qualities than the one he’d obtained as a child, and it went beyond the simple difference in healing stage. The shape, the texture, the appearance of the skin, none of it matched. “It couldn’t have been me,” she heaved a sigh of relief, then repeated it several more times. Each time she voiced the conviction that had led her to have the conversation with him initially, she grew farther away from relief and inched closer and closer to terror. “It couldn’t have been me. It couldn’t have been me. It couldn’t have been me.”

Suddenly overcome with the weight of that realization, Freyja fell back off of wobbly legs and landed on her bed, sitting in a way that distinctly spoke of the horrors of the situation. “I’m happy to recreate the remainder of the scene at a later date, but it clearly wasn’t me that burned you.”

As they both stood in awe, studying the discrepancies in Ru’s lower back in the mirror, another realization seemed to come into view as it washed over her big, placid stare. She flicked her eyes away from him, twisting a ringlet of hair around her finger idly. “There’s no way in hell you drowned me either,” she deadpanned, expression perfectly neutral despite the shift to disbelief in her tone. “When I kissed you, you kissed me back. When you thought I was going to take your clothes off, you were going to let me. It had to have been the others there, the adults who made us go there.”

Her eyes brightened briefly, studying him as if she saw him in a new light. She didn’t resist the urge to wipe her mouth on her sleeve as he had done less than a week prior after kissing her, if only in some misguided attempt to pin the underlying hurt he’d caused her with that action back on him in the same way. “God, you’re so pathetic,” she admitted, finally. “You couldn’t have possibly drowned me because you’re in love with me. It must have been the others.”

Then, more softly, “you do remember the others, don’t you?”

Ruairi | Water | Freyja

“Well, it’s better if I show you.”

Dread of the most potent strain had poisoned his veins as Ruairi heard those words, and stiffened as she clumsily closed the deliberate space he had kept between them. It was painful to remain still and to look into the green eyes that held his blue ones captive in her stare. Every beat of his heart only further encouraged the toxin of trepidation in his system to flood every part of him. There was little thought in his head right now in deciphering her face, but rather his frozen attention was on the eyes he looked into as if they were a veil he was waiting to pierce to see every thought in her head, to know every move she would make now and forever.

The warmth of her hands taking his own jolted him enough to be struck by how impossible this moment was and was furthermore becoming. Freyja’s touch was far softer than it had any right being. This was a demonstration of sorts that he did not understand, and it was tormenting. Things were happening faster than he could fully comprehend, even with a mind sharper than her own. The beating of his heart was rapid now and it hardly felt natural. Then she placed his hands on her. Beat. Beat.

“You had your hands on me like this, it’s the only way you could have pushed me from the edge of the water. But your hands, they… they felt different then. Not like yours, not like you.”

While he would have been more inclined to question her judgment with all things considered, Ru took in what she said and didn’t allow it to fester. Nothing could grow on his mind more than Freyja’s sheer proximity to him. Even if it should have, and he knew this kind of information would have alarmed him more than he had been earlier. However, he found Freyja to be the assassin of his focus. As if he could not feel closer to death with how hard his heart was slamming against his chest cavity… her hands went into his hair. Ru’s lungs were stripped entirely of oxygen, his chest constricted around his palpitating heart as a form of involuntary armor. As her hands glided down, the touch of her skin on his face made him want to scream. There was something excruciating about this sensation, and he wanted to tell her to stop, to shove her away. But he was frozen, and parts of him he didn’t have the mental capacity to acknowledge were at war.

The agony of her lips making contact with his own was blinding. If it weren’t for the battle between his head, heart, and other parts of himself that dared to be in turmoil over Freyja’s touch, his eyes would have fallen closed. There were no words in languages both new and old to convey the severity, the unfathomable intensity, of what he felt as he dared to reciprocate the brief moment. Every nerve in his body was awake as her lips feathered his jaw, his neck. Denying the impulse to clench his hands in order to stop himself from doing anything that would jeopardize the dignity that had already been ruined by even allowing this moment to come to pass, his toes curled in his shoes.

While he had been aware of Freyja lifting his shirt, the usual instinct to safeguard himself from her had been blurred, almost abandoned if it weren’t for the dull throb of his scar that existed from the second her hands had taken his.

Searing pain enveloped the skin of his back that her hand had been touching, and all too suddenly he bit his tongue following a shuddering wince to keep himself silent. Everything came crashing down on his psyche just as quickly as it had been built up, and no level of affinity with water could have possibly prepared him for how to survive drowning in his own mind. As a metallic taste in his mouth became the pinnacle to allow him to recenter himself, it took a nauseating level of focus to not allow his emotions to implode the water of the plants in the room to douse Freyja and everything around them. And if it were possible, he would have washed away what had just transpired in its entirety.

While his gaze shifted to the mirror, and he was rather startled to see how vastly different the form of her burn and his scar were in comparison, the seething hatred he felt towards her was bubbling.

“It couldn’t have been me.”

Freyja said it like he should have believed it coming from her. While it was concerningly apparent that something far more mentally crippling was at play, his blue gaze had made a drastically cold turn. Would she appreciate just how much self-control he was demonstrating if he gave her a taste of what it felt like to have the water molecules in her lungs begin to boil? She deserved to burn, and if it had been anyone else, the danger of his barely contained rage would have been very real.

As she repeated her mantra that brought neither of them closer to comfort, Ru forced his gaze to focus on both of the marks on his back now. The echo of her touch lingered over the fresh burn, and yet both craters of imperfection marking his body ached. He hated looking at his scar. It was an insecurity with many layers of pain both physical and beyond. And now the misery that was his scar had found its company beside it.

“I’m happy to recreate the remainder of the scene at a later date, but it clearly wasn’t me that burned you.”

“I would be just as eager to demonstrate how it feels to be properly drowned by my own hands,” Ruairi replied in a cutting tone, lowering his shirt to conceal the spectacle that had become his back. Before he could even begin to recover from his emotional whiplash, his eyes shifted to her seated figure.

“There’s no way in hell you drowned me either. When I kissed you, you kissed me back. When you thought I was going to take your clothes off, you were going to let me. It had to have been the others there, the adults who made us go there.”

Ru scowled and pocketed his hands as they clenched and pressed against his legs. If it weren’t for the final sentence referring to adults who had been present in a memory he didn’t have, he would have delivered a cold quip. The only break in his otherwise enraged expression was when she wiped her mouth, and it was a painfully familiar action.

“God, you’re so pathetic.”

Ruairi refused to let her know just how spiritually deep he felt those words.

“You couldn’t have possibly drowned me because you’re in love with me. It must have been the others.”

A harsh scoff came too quickly in response, followed by a single sharp shake of his head. “The only thing capable of loving you is Henriik, and even then, I’m not entirely convinced that the reason he keeps you on his arm is to be anything other than a trophy.” The blond quietly spewed his venom. It wasn’t the worst thing he could have said, and Ru was rather confident that within a few seconds, he would have a plethora of cutting material to choose from to let loose on her.

“You do remember the others, don’t you?”

Despite his anger, the lack of recognition with her question on his face was sufficient enough to answer it. His intrigue for the night had only burned him in too literal of a sense for the night. Curiosity killed the cat in this run, and there was no satisfaction recovered that could bring it back. If anything, he was left with so many more questions than he had bargained for when coming here.

“I remember I have someone who makes me happy that’s waiting for me,” Ru replied, shifting his feet towards the door. “And thank you, for giving me a sample of how insatiable everything about you is. Give my condolences to your boyfriend, will you?” With a sharp, thin-lipped smile he took his exit from the room, closing it quietly despite his demeanor reflecting how badly he had desired to slam it behind him.

Everything that happened with Freyja in that room played on loop in his head, and there was no amount of alcohol stashed in this academy that could ever erase memories that had been branded into his psyche. Her hands. Her lips. Her words. Her mark on his back. She should have finished the job, but as Ru understood, absolute torture was not complete if there was any hope of relief. And from his thoughts? There was no permanent relief to be had. Revelations and rage aside, physically Heris had become a source of self-medication to ease his isolation with his thoughts, and he desperately wanted to replace Freyja’s touch with someone else’s.

Miss Freyja Eloquijm | Fire | Arah, Floki, Henriik, Heris, Ru

“Maybe if I just fucked him, I could get it out of my system and move on.” The red-haired girl was standing in front of the mirror with her academy uniform on, watching Arah through the mirror as she sat on her bed and tended to a few of her plants. Freyja made a face, continuing. “On second thought, he’d like it too much and he’d probably chase me forever. No hope of getting rid of him then. And he’s blond. Just when you think you’ve hit rock bottom, you consider fucking a blond guy.”

Arah, clearly humored by this what-if situation, looked up at the fire element. This wasn’t the first time this conversation was coming up, but at least it felt normal. Freyja, in a startlingly sober state, had woken up and offered one of her best almost-apologies to date. She tried to fill Arah in on the details she felt she could without compromising her to the more sinister influences that were affecting her behavior for fear that something would happen to her if she did. Then, she tried her damndest to keep up some semblance of normalcy in order to keep things peaceful between them. Arah’s plants had been dying when they were at odds, something that happened often if her inner turmoil became too great. Frankly, Freyja didn’t like the look of that on an emotional or aesthetic level, and she would have been lying if she said that wasn’t one of the main motivators in reconciling from whatever argument they did or did not have.

“Or, and stop me if this sounds crazy, you could befriend him and-”

“Stop,” Freyja scoffed, a very amused smile on her lips. She rolled her eyes dramatically. “Are you okay? You do sound crazy.”

Arah shook her head, back to the activity that was consuming the time she was trying to kill while she waited for her roommate. “Are you ready yet? We’re going to be late.”

———————————

Making their way across the grounds toward the outdoor classrooms, neither Freyja nor Arah was surprised to see that the lower level competitions had gotten off to a later start due to whatever remnants of the party had kept the authorities from forming the course as quickly as they had intended. In fact, all they had really cleaned up was what spanned the set of trial courses, not the strangely irresponsible amount of clothing, liquor, and other items that people had left behind. It seemed highly likely to Freyja that most of the students had stayed until the first administration members came to form the courses, and they had forced them to either flee or be caught. That never would have happened to her, she mused, she would have simply stood up to them and argued.

As the pair arrived to their area, Arah was unsurprised to see Freyja ignore Ru completely despite walking right past him. Instead, she went up to Henriik, who seemed rather disinterested in the public display of affection the fire element forced onto him. Such was life at the academy, and it actually felt relieving to Arah to see things seemed to be back to normal. Their normal, at least. The earth element, unlike her roommate, strided over to Ru and smiled at him. She would have been lying if she said she didn’t have the slightest crush on him, too, although hers had basically been imprinted on her from her society from an early age. She’d been sent to the academy to try to make him fall in love with her so that the earth elements had more representation in their government, but she quickly decided that being friends with him was even better than whatever the lower governments had planned for her.

“Freyja said you might need help healing something, I heard you guys got into a fight after the speech.”

After some coaxing, Arah was able to get Ruairi far enough away from Freyja and the other students that he was willing to show her the wound that had resulted from their ‘argument,’ and she couldn’t conceal her surprise when she saw where it was on his body. As she put her hand over the wound to heal it, she couldn’t help asking questions, which she told herself she’d asked to distract him and not for her own curiosity.

“Weren’t you wearing a suit? How in the hell did she manage to burn you here of all places, with all the clothing you had on?” When he looked ready to lie, she added, “I’d assume she burned you through your clothes, but the look of this wound says it was straight contact.”

A few scenarios played in her mind, mainly having to do with the last few excuses she’d made for herself and her absence. Maybe what she’d said the other day about what she was doing on Henriik’s bed wasn’t as far from the truth as she thought. She didn’t feel bad about acknowledging the way everything between Ru and Heris seemed so forced, she was his friend. It seemed no different to her than what Freyja was doing with Henriik, although her relationship gave her a sense of security that was tangible. Although she hadn’t really asked Ru about Heris, there was only one type of security Arah assumed she could give to him, and he wouldn’t have admitted it even if they were alone.

“I’d heal the other one too, but as you know, I’ve tried and I can’t. It’s almost like it’s spelled or something, so odd. Anyway, where’s Heris today? I haven’t seen her yet.”

———————————

As soon as the pair returned and Heris arrived, the authorities gave the rules of the competition to the five students. It was fairly late in the afternoon at this point, given that the group with the most advanced magic was the last to compete. Of course, Freyja had no issue getting distracted by her pure, unfiltered desire to disprove Ru’s words from the night prior about Henriik. The actual words were difficult to bring to mind–like many of the details of the evening–but the sentiment remained. The only thing that was branded into her memory was his body, and how close she’d been to it. He, as he had for as long as she’d known him, reacted to her touch in a way that no one else did. As she touched Henriik, she felt his body for signs of his heartbeat, feeling nothing out of the ordinary. She went so far as to check his pulse at the neck and the wrist before he finally got tired of her antics. At that point, she put his hands on her body in an exact replication of what she remembered from the night prior, and he stiffened, pushing her off of him.

“What the hell, Freyja?”

She studied him. It didn’t feel the same way that she remembered from the memory, but it may as well have with the look in his eyes. There was something there. He had been there that day.

Lying to save herself from bigger problems, she bit her tongue and mustered up the resilience to say something in a falsely sweet tone. “I just like the way your body feels, that’s all.”

———————————

Finally, the trials began, and Freyja was selected to go first. It was clearly stated that there would be no interference between students unless they wanted to be eliminated instantly, at which point she felt relieved to be going first. That didn’t give her an opportunity to ruin Ru’s run if she was forced to stand by idly and watch it, although she knew it would be more difficult to keep herself from cheating on Arah’s run for the earth element’s benefit. She had no ability to wield fire, none of them did, really. Henriik had been trying to wield it for years, and he always failed. The only one with the slightest ability to utilize fire was Ru, surprisingly, and even he couldn’t manage more than a party trick.

Beginning her run in the trial, she moved at a fairly quick pace, doing her best to identify each of the challenges as they came up. The first challenge was a maze of fire with the flames erupting and changing direction every so often. Although she didn’t need to in order to survive, Freyja quickly bent the flames away from her, which she assumed was the purpose of the challenge. Having some difficulty navigating the maze, she finally arrived at the end to find a series of torches. She started to generate flames, thinking of the image of Heris and Ru together to bring about the fire needed to fill the torches. She filled them all at once, but they were immediately extinguished. She tried again, and they didn’t light. Steam erupted from where the flames should have been, and she knew that the person on her mind and the person who was keeping her from succeeding were one in the same. Whatever she’d initially planned on as far as keeping the peace and leaving before she could ruin his challenge was in the past.

Knowing it would be too difficult to get through the rest of the challenges if she exerted so much energy on her own element, she gave up and continued, only to find that the third fire challenge went as horribly as the second. Without deliberating, she moved onto the air challenges, beginning with summoning air to get herself up to the platform where the other two challenges awaited her. She was able to lift herself the six feet required to step onto the platform, but she noticed that the air she’d formed was being sucked downward by air. She stumbled and fell back to the ground, shooting a flame back toward the starting area with the intention of sending a very clear message to Ru to back off. That seemed to have bought her enough time to get up to the top of the platform, where she saw a massive gap between sections. She knew it required an air current to move across successfully, and though she was weary of doing so after having just fallen, she went toward it. Wielding air was fairly easy for Freyja, considering her closeness with Henriik and the proximity of the two types of magic. Some of the principles applied to fire magic, so it wasn’t difficult to get herself across. She knew she would get some points deducted for the smoke, which was clearly not pure air, but she didn’t really mind. She couldn’t wield the pure element like her boyfriend could.

As she reached the other end of the platform, now quite high in the air, she began to feel the tug of the water beneath her again. With pockets of air completely gone, she felt herself drop several feet, air current gone, simply hanging onto the edge of the platform. Her grip was slipping. After barely pulling herself up from what would have resulted in serious injury, Freyja managed to get to the third section. Air currents were moving wind at an unlivable intensity, and it was her job to keep them off long enough to survive the wind tunnel. She knew that if Ru put water into the wind, it would surely kill her. Not wanting to take the opportunity after the events of the evening prior, she summoned flame, cutting right through the wind and sucking the oxygen out of the very obstacle. A horn sounded, and she knew she’d been disqualified for utilizing an element out of turn. It wasn’t like she wasn’t going to be disqualified anyway for ruining Ru’s run, so why wait?

It was odd to Freyja, she reflected, that she cared so little about the challenges this year. Normally she would have cared so much about her image, about achievement, about besting Ru. Now it seemed that she would have rather cut out the achievement and image aspects and moved distinctly toward ruining his life, and his life only. And, with Henriik’s reaction to the same movement she’d used on the water element the night prior, she distinctly wanted to ruin his life by proving him wrong about everything.

When she returned to the start of the competition, she was unsurprised to see Ru and Heris bickering. She assumed that Heris was making the argument that he’d broken the rules to ruin her life instead of breaking them to help his own girlfriend win. It wouldn’t have been the first time those words have been uttered to either one of them. Almost every year, the pair of them were disqualified from this particular competition. It had started right after Ru had tried to drown her. He lashed out at her at these trials, and the rest had been history. The next year she got him back, and they’d continued on this path ever since. For years, now.

Striding directly up to the authoritative figure, she said, “given that my run was tampered with by the only water element in this competition, is it really fair that I’m the one being disqualified?”

“Miss Eloquijm, you were disqualified because you used elemental magic out of turn. You clearly used fire in an air challenge.”

“Will I get to go again?” It was a throwaway question, one that had purpose. If she simply asked about Ru, what good would that do?

“Absolutely not.”

“I would hardly think it fair for him,” she pointed directly at the blond, “to get to continue in this challenge when we all clearly know it was him. Will he get to go?”

Ruairi | Water | Floki, Freyja, Arah, Heris

One glass. Two. Three. Four. Five.

Floki’s focus had fixated on the astounding amount of water Ruairi was consuming in between telling him about all of the drama that had conspired so quickly over such a short amount of time. While he lay on his stomach on his bed, kicking his feet with his head propped on the tops of his hands, the mongrel couldn’t help but be entertained by the frequent pauses his roommate made just to drink more water. How much could one person even consume? Apparently, as Floki has witnessed, Ru’s diet was comprised of mostly water on a regular basis, but Floki was too observant to think that this much was ordinary. It seemed to be complete overkill for the trial Ru said he was prepping for. While Floki had every inclination to believe his roommate was out for revenge on Freyja after what he’s been told, he couldn’t be completely sure that was the entirety of what compelled him to consume… nine glasses of water now.

This was Floki’s grand flaw. Possessing the fervent desire to know everyone from the inside out. What made people tick. What they thought about. Where they disappeared to inside of their own minds. What they thought of the world, of themselves. It was a sick obsession. It stemmed from having spent his entire youth trying to understand a person who was helplessly misunderstood for the sake of saving them. The only person Floki has ever not cared to put effort into knowing is himself - who is Floki? Many things, he was certain he was many things but he simply could not divulge into his existence’s definition. It had no weight of importance, and not because he was grossly self-loathing or too meager to care for himself, but rather he found the world beyond his existence and everyone in it fascinatingly brilliant! No one could ever understand the kinds of things that perplex him, and he was perfectly fine with that.

“You’re tired,” Floki commented, bluntly calling out the lack of effort Ru was putting into fixing his appearance to the level he usually did. He settled for messy and untamed curls, settled to speak in a tone that was lacking the passion the words he was saying called for.

“Yeah, tired of her bullshit,” Ruairi quipped, shaking his head. As if the act alone would shake Freyja, and everything else on his mind, entirely from his head. “Anyway, good luck.” The blond offered in a manner more genuine than he meant to express.

“Luck is for talentless bastards,” Floki chuckled, “I’m much more capable than you think, I assure you.” Sealing his confidence with a wink, Ru rolled his eyes in return, albeit amused.

<////////////>

“Freyja said you might need help healing something, I heard you guys got into a fight after the speech.”

Ruairi had attempted to ignore Arah’s impending approach, yet buckled beneath her smile. It was impossible for him to not acknowledge her, and he ensured only Arah herself knew just how much of a soft spot he had for her. While he didn’t know what it was like to grow up with a sibling, he held only what could be described as a more sibling-like affection for Arah.

“Something like that,” Ru replied. Assuming Freyja was at all capable of retaining a shred of details from last night considering her inebriation, he was sure that Arah had already been given an earful. “But I’m fine, really.” He lied.

A few gentle probes were really all that was needed on Arah’s part to get him to agree to accept her help. However, it was more so the lingering ache of the fresh burn that pushed his decision. Only when he felt isolated enough with her did he lift his shirt for Arah, settling his gaze on the ground as he did so.

“Weren’t you wearing a suit? How in the hell did she manage to burn you here of all places, with all the clothing you had on? I’d assume she burned you through your clothes, but the look of this wound says it was straight contact.”

“Can you just focus on healing it?” The blond asked, though not sharply. He could have weaved an intricate fabrication to get her to drop it, but in this moment of absolute discomfort, he preferred to exchange very little conversation.

“I’d heal the other one too, but as you know, I’ve tried and I can’t. It’s almost like it’s spelled or something, so odd. Anyway, where’s Heris today? I haven’t seen her yet.”

Lowering his shirt and turning his gaze back to her, he briefly considered what she said. Spelled. “An interesting theory,” he mumbled, before circling back around to her intrigue of Heris’ whereabouts, and shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine,” he said, though he didn’t exactly care where his girlfriend was at the moment. “I appreciate you, as always.” He added, offering the earth element a smile before excusing himself from her.

<////////////////>

Extinguishing Freyja’s flames was child’s play for Ruairi. He hadn’t labored his morning hydrating for his own sake though, he just knew he needed the energy to manifest water in a fiery environment where it was otherwise going to evaporate during Freyja’s fire challenges. While he split his focus to make a throwaway conversation with Heris, it was still easy enough to trip Freyja up as she began the first air challenge. This was something he badly wanted: the very last laugh in their pursuit of sabotaging each other for this particular challenge.

It wasn’t until flames scorched the area in front of him that a wicked smile set to the highest caliber upturned at his lips, though he attempted to conceal it and pass it off as a reaction to some remark Heris made. He was more encouraged than before to keep up with his covert assault, and found gratification watching her cling to the ledge of the platform after his intervention. Despite his thirst for absolute vengeance, Ru was very well aware that pure water in the wind of the third section of the air challenge would have hurt Freyja further than what he was aiming for, so his mercy came in the form of turning water particles to ice, just to make it a cutting experience. To his dismay, she bypassed his ploy by summoning flames, but he supposed there was satisfaction in her being eliminated.

Despite the several rolls of his eyes with Heris’ initiation of a small-scale argument, Ru put a semblance of effort into assuring her by saying things he didn’t earnestly mean. Such as telling her that he didn’t need to help her when he was so confident in her ability to win all by herself, which he assumed would make her feel better and resolve their quarrel. Which did not seem to be the case.

“I would hardly think it fair for him to get to continue in this challenge when we all clearly know it was him. Will he get to go?”

Ru’s engagement with his and Heris’ bickering fest ceased as Freyja pointed at him. With his focus solely on the fire element, he gave her a shitty little smile before turning his attention to the supervisor of the challenge. “What isn’t fair is being subjected to accusation and the unbearable pitch of a loser’s whine,” Ru said, though the being of authority of the matter hardly looked amused.

“Anyway, in the interest of sparing myself and everyone here the tantrum Miss Eloquijm is guaranteed to throw after I complete a successful run of the course, I’ll be opting for a voluntary elimination.” Giving a mock bow of humility, he shot Freyja a wink and basked in the glory of denying Freyja the opportunity to interfere with his own turn in the challenge.

With Arah being called upon next, Ru had initially just intended to watch as a supportive friend on the sidelines. Only it became rather apparent to him that her journey through the fire challenge was not going well completely by her own ability. Briefly casting a glance at Freyja, he knew with absolute certainty that the fire element was aiding their mutual friend. And two could play at that game.

Arah naturally excelled in her own realm of earthly abilities, though Ru took it upon himself to help nourish the things she was growing by supplying water. Earth magic made more sense than the fire and air elements did to him, and while he had a decent grasp on growth and formation, healing was a sore point in his ability with earth magic. Arah’s air challenge came with an elemental tug of war as his own insertions of magic to aid her clashed with whatever Freyja was doing, and it was not the flawless display he was trying to create for Arah. Shooting Freyja a pointed, accusatory glare, Ru’s attempt to overshadow Freyja’s magic made for a rather turbulent success for Arah.

As Ru was beginning to observe as Arah descended the sections for the air challenge, the first portion of the water challenge involved summoning jets of water out of fountain holes to act as stepping stones to get down to the second portion of the challenge. While it was a rather basic use of water magic, and something Ru could do in his sleep, he carefully intervened by strengthening some jets of water when they began to falter under Arah’s control. Following the earth elements aided triumph of the first challenge, now she was met with a small pool churning with violent waters. It was Ru’s understanding based on what he could see that the second and third challenges were combined: get control of the water, stay atop of the water, and use that control to deliver yourself to the opposite side of the pool.

Watching Arah begin her attempt to settle the waters enough to manifest the ability to step onto the water and stay atop, it was already becoming painfully obvious to Ru how little she could balance her surface tension and buoyancy while redirecting the chaos of the water into the surge of a controlled wave needed to move her forward. He figured a novice could stumble across the top of the rough waters and make it to the other side in a barely acquired success… but what kind of friend would he be to let Arah get away with a mediocre win?

With Heris in his ear and beginning to revisit the origin of what had begun their argument earlier, Ruairi got carried away with what was supposed to be a subtle but stable wave for Arah, and instead evolved into the water in the pool being collected into a wave fit for a tsunami as it surged Arah forward. Barely pulling back his magic in time as she reached the edge of the pool, he ensured she made it back on solid ground relatively safely before he entirely extinguished his pull over the water.

“Mr. Craiel,” the sharp tone was something Ru expected as he simultaneously released an agitated sigh. “And Miss Eloquijm, you are both banned from any further spectating due to your gross displays of interference. You’re hereby-”

“Awarded to fuck off elsewhere? Understood,” Ru interrupted, throwing a two-finger salute, and deciding to take his leave before he could see any trace of Arah’s disappointment. Though not before he stopped to give Heris a brief kiss and assure her that she would do well all on her own. A part of his brisk flee was to avoid allowing Freyja the opportunity to trail him and begin a heated fight over their interference with Arah’s trial. After last night, however, quite frankly today was not a good day for him to be anywhere near the fire element. He hadn’t even really allowed himself to settle his anger and resentment towards her after what transpired in her room, nor had he found any peace of mind over the memory surrounding his scar and Freyja’s attempted drowning. It was all a mess for him, and he was hell-bent on making life equally messy for Freyja over the coming days.

Freyja | Fire | all

After being promptly excused from the competition without the opportunity to converse with Arah, Freyja made her way back to the dorm to begin preparations for the next day. She knew it would be the survival challenge, an event which was not only academically rigorous but physically demanding. Students would be drafted into teams of four and forced to work together with only their magic to keep them alive. Since the simulation moved at three times the speed of a normal day at the academy, it also made performing basic spells as exhausting as if they were holding them for three times as long.

On the bright side, Freyja didn’t mind moving around at three times the speed. It took some getting used to in the beginning, but she had been at the academy for so long that she’d been in this particular simulation enough to adjust fairly quickly, much more quickly than the majority of students who crashed into trees or utilized their magic too much and got too exhausted to continue. She’d made that mistake more than once, although she was almost always a member of the winning team regardless. Having the ability to create a fire was one of the best tools she had because it typically meant that she could survive long enough in the arctic biome to maintain her warmth while others froze to death trying to get to her. It was the move she’d made in the last three competitions, and she’d emerged victorious. However, each competition presented a different challenge, and it was important to her that she prepared as best she could. She knew she would be absolutely exhausted headed into the insecurities trial, and she wanted to minimize that as much as possible for as long as possible.

Finally arriving to the great hall for dinner, Freyja caught up to the other students she recognized. She saw Arah from quite a distance away, and she also eyed Ru trying to make his way toward her. She wasn’t sure if he saw her or not, but she took it as a personal challenge to get there first. All she really managed to do in the massive crowd was get there at the same time as him, frustratingly enough for her. She was tired from the lack of sleep she’d gotten the night prior, and his antics that morning had been no help. She wanted to get away from him for a little while to build up her strength so she could ravage him and his entire team in the morning. It wasn’t worth it to be so exhausted by him now, when she could be literally anywhere else, doing anything else. She’d been thinking about him so much in the last few days it made her sick. She just needed to get him out of her head for a little while.

“Thanks for believing in me, Mom and Dad.” Arah eyed the pair of them in a way that spoke of her distance from them. In her head, Freyja was internally dreading the fact that she’d be arriving back to a room full of dying plants. She had half a mind to burn them all, but it wouldn’t really help the aesthetic of the room any more, unless she was going for the charred aesthetic they’d already tried on one wall. Once again, this moment was a stark reminder of what resulted from Freyja and Ru working together in anything. All they could manage to do was destroy everything around them.

Freyja studied Ru in a vindictive manner, bright green eyes narrowed as if the swarm of people around them didn’t exist. She crossed her arms, holding up the food line as she made her point. “I’ll wait for your father to apologize since he’s the reason we got caught.”

After listening to the pair bicker for more than a moment, Arah finally commented, “maybe you were right with what you said earlier, Freyja. Maybe if the two of you just gave in and had sex with each other, you would get it out of your systems and be more tolerable for the rest of the academy.” Having already gotten her food, Arah walked off, leaving the two of them to sit in the discomfort. She didn’t really seem all that mad, just fed up with the pair’s antics.

Ladling a mystery liquid into the bowl on her tray, Freyja looked Ru directly in the eye. “You know what, maybe I was onto something. Do you take appointments? I’m available from 3:00 until 3:01, that should be enough time.” Blowing him a kiss as she strided off, the fire element went to go eat beside Arah in Henriik’s unexplained absence.

———————————

After a fairly uneventful night on the campus, Freyja arrived early the next morning to the outdoor classrooms. They had made one of the classrooms into a portal that led into the simulation, and it wasn’t long before everyone else had arrived to study the spectacle that was the bright purple ball of light. The rules were read off in an official manner, the same as they always were. The students weren’t supposed to survive by any means other than magic, any injuries that occurred in the simulation would not transfer back to the real world, and so on. Finally, teams were announced.

Freyja’s team was announced first, and she was fairly displeased, though not entirely. She’d managed to get on the same team with Ruairi’s roommate, someone she’d spent little time with but enough to know that he was capable of manipulating sound. He wouldn’t be as useless as she initially thought, considering that he could hear and locate any opponents she wanted. She could go directly for whoever she wanted this year, and she wanted Heris. She wanted Heris badly. Especially considering the fact that Arah had informed her that she had won the first trial. In contrast, the other two new students she had on her team were absolutely useless. The blonde, Liara, was able to manipulate time, but she could only go a few seconds either way, and she could only bring herself. The brunet, Thorne, had a variety of talents, but they were all useless. His magic was a subspecies of siphon magic, which had been extinct for centuries. In its purest form, at least. All he could do was draw the knowledge from books, and she was already tired of him by the time he’d given his tenth piece of trivia.

With Thorne annoying Freyja, it was difficult for her to listen to the remainder of the teams. She knew Henriik and Arah had landed themselves on a team with the blonde girl Ru had pulled onto his lap at the party where they’d kissed the first time this week. They’d also managed a tall, brooding figure who seemed to be familiar to the blonde. On the other hand, Ru and Heris were on a team together, but Freyja had failed to pay attention to who they were with because Floki’s attention was still on the blonde, and it was far more interesting to watch Floki twitch nervously like an overstimulated puppy at the sight of the girl’s presence than to notice what team members she would inevitably cast off from the water element’s team. She already knew who her first target was, and that was all she really cared to know.

Finally, after an excruciating drafting process, all of the teams began to enter the simulation. They each had a fifteen second head start once they arrived in the simulation, which was actually the five it took to get each team in from the academy. They were each distributed to different biomes within the simulation, although many biomes held at least two teams who had been sent off to various ends of that area. Freyja’s team, to her amusement, had arrived in the arctic biome that she typically fought to get to. Before Thorne could list off his next few facts, Freyja burned him until he disappeared. Liara, surprised, tried to escape, but Freyja burned her too. Then, with a perfectly casual expression on her face, she turned to Floki, the silhouette of their two fallen teammates still imprinted in the snow.

“You, you’re useful. We didn’t need them, but we need each other. I’ll keep you at a livable temperature if you bring me to Heris. I want to get rid of Heris.”

———————————

Freyja and Floki started across the frozen terrain, struggling through the ice and snow in an attempt for Freyja to preserve her magic. That didn’t stop her from complaining about it for nearly as much time as Floki spent prodding her with questions about everything. He asked about the competition, about the limits of her powers, about Heris, and no sense of loyalty seemed to stop him from asking about her relationship with Ru, about Ru himself, and about other matters that Freyja could have cared less about. She wasn’t much for talking unless it benefitted her in some way, so she was pleased when he turned the conversation to mindless ramblings about Heris and Ru and the odd nature of their relationship. That was something she could listen to all day long.

As the sun continued to rise over the horizon, they came in contact with one team full of stupid new students who lacked the skill or the instinct to survive for very long. Floki created a blast of sound loud enough to injure them and send the four of them out of the competition, and he also diverted the attention of another team that was headed straight for them. As he manipulated the sound of their voices, it became apparent that they were on their way to the arctic biome to find Freyja based on the rumors that had spread through the younger classes. She was a legend in her own right, and especially as it applied to this particular trial. No one could withstand the elements like she could.

Growing increasingly grateful for her decision to spare Floki in this competition yet increasingly agitated by the questions that had resurfaced the second she’d given him an ounce of attention, Freyja decided to say something that would shut him up properly.

“You like the blonde girl Ru was with at the party. I saw you looking at her during the team announcements.”

———————————

After crossing the entirety of the forest biome and heading toward the desert, Freyja and Floki had eliminated another three teams through their own wit and skill. Primarily, they’d backed them into traps others had set through Freyja’s ability to read the landscape and Floki’s ability to divert their attention. It had taken so little magic, and it was so amusing for both of them. Freyja almost didn’t despise him by the time they reached the sandy landscape that seemed to stretch for miles. She felt rather dehydrated and her body ached from hours of traveling, but nothing would have kept her from getting Heris out of the competition. She actually had no desire to win, none at all, but the way she wanted to go out was to take Heris with her.

After questioning Floki about how much longer it would be, they walked in circles for what felt like another hour until they finally came upon the prairie biome. Freyja left the desert with an appreciation for why she’d never tried to navigate it before, and why she never would again unless she had someone as useful as Floki to do the navigating for her. The land here was flat, and there was not so much as a river to utilize as a distraction. However, there were some larger and smaller rocks that Henriik had clearly manifested with Arah’s help. She assumed they’d made rocks rain down on their competition at some point in the past, perhaps recently. When Floki told her to get down, the pair hid behind a big boulder and waited silently. They could hear people approaching, and it didn’t seem to be any doing of Floki’s. She could make out the voices of Heris and Ru on one end, and Henriik and Arah on the other. One group must have been hiding behind another of the rocks Arah and Henriik had strewn across the flat landscape, it was the only way they could have been so close and not actively destroying each other.

Finally, Freyja heard some level of insistence in Arah’s voice. It sounded as if she was fighting with Henriik. She peeked out from behind the rock to see Henriik push Arah out into the open where Heris easily utilized wind magic to pick up a sharp rock and slice it across Arah’s side. She yelped in pain, falling to the ground.

At this point, both Henriik and Heris were targets for Freyja to eliminate. She didn’t know what she had seen, exactly, but she knew that the pair were working together for some reason. It didn’t make sense considering the fact that they were on separate teams, but she could get to the bottom of it later on. At this point, she wanted to eliminate the pair, then get to Arah. She’d deal with Ru later.

As she stepped out into the open, she saw Ru standing beside Heris, Henriik on the opposite end of the set of rocks, and Arah in the center, lying down. She stared straight into Ru’s eyes for a split second, communicating with him silently. When she felt that she had agreed to an unspoken truce between them, she tipped her head to one side to tell him to get out of the way. To her surprise, he complied, and she summoned a massive flame that was directed at Heris. When she unleashed it on the girl, her face sobered as she felt the flame being sucked into Heris’ body. She had never felt anything like it before, and she looked to Ru for confirmation that it had occurred, only to find that he was now battling Henriik. Heris, catching on to Freyja’s realization, seemed to stiffen, releasing her hold on the fire element’s magic after just a second. She seemed to allow herself to be burned, simply succumbing to the girl’s force. Nothing about that felt right to her, but she didn’t have time to question it. Turning herself and her magic toward Henriik, she studied him briefly. He was fairly evenly matched against the water element, but neither seemed to have taken any injury. They’d both expire quickly from exhaustion at this point in the competition, and she needed Ru’s magic to clean Arah’s wound if there was any hope of expiring. Not to mention, she was severely dehydrated from journeying through the desertscape, and he was the only source of water in the entire competition.

“Can’t take any chances,” she said flippantly, burning her boyfriend until only the singed imprint of his body remained on the grass. She pointed to Ru. “Arah’s wound needs cleaning or she won’t make it. We owe her this.”

Ruairi | Water | Almost All

“Thanks for believing in me, Mom and Dad.”

“That’s what family is for?” Ru replied awkwardly with a mild expression of guilt. Not one he usually wore with Freyja in proximity, but he couldn’t allow his entire world to revolve around her unbearable presence all of the time. To a large margin, he did shift most of the blame for the intervention in Arah’s challenge onto himself. Not that he would admit it, but it was an internal guilt he would live with. Good intentions never truly seemed to carry him very far and it was quite a devastating thing to experience what he considered “doing good”, as going terribly wrong.

“I’ll wait for your father to apologize since he’s the reason we got caught.”

“You started it,” Ru threw back, sticking to his childish base for an argument that was certain to further ensue. Allowing himself to become entangled in a squabble with Freyja to deflect from his own emotions toward the entire situation, his mouth almost immediately clamped shut as his entire spectrum of focus shifted back to Arah.

“Maybe you were right with what you said earlier, Freyja. Maybe if the two of you just gave in and had sex with each other, you would get it out of your systems and be more tolerable for the rest of the academy.”

Both surprise and puzzlement reigned over Ru’s features, daring a glance at Freyja as if to confirm from her reaction whether she had actually said that. The uncomfortable blanket that wrapped around them as Arah walked off confirmed it.

“You know what, maybe I was onto something. Do you take appointments? I’m available from 3:00 until 3:01, that should be enough time.”

It wasn’t the words that got to him, rather the action of Freyja blowing a kiss in his direction was what offended his every atom. While it was far from the first time she’d chosen to defer the action onto him, today he found it far more insulting than usual, and completely loathed it in its entirety. “Is one minute your record lasting time?” He mocked, though not exactly projecting his voice in her direction as she walked off as he irritably collected his own portion of food.

<///////////////>

“Arah is off limits.”

Heris was incapable of not expressing her irritation with Ru’s firm demand. It was the only person he was willing to go out of his way to spare. Everyone else was fair game. Taking it upon himself to be the team leader of his own squad, the water element struggled only a considerable amount where they were starting the challenge in the high elevations of the forest biome that possessed mountains throned above most of the land in the contained region. It was an environment he figured someone like Henriik would flourish in considering his affinity to air, but Ru would much sooner suffocate than entertain the idea of any form of alliance in any situation with him.

Once they reached ground level, and Ru relished in the feeling of his sinuses not feeling like they were going to implode, he resorted to his usual strategy of using the people on his team as pawns to figure out where the other teams were, and what they were capable of so he had a moment to calculate countermeasures, or abandon who he used as a decoy altogether. Which this year he was much more willing to do considering he’d slept with the other female teammate he had… last year? Jozie, a painfully novice wielder of animancy. It was amusing for tricks, but relatively useless to him, and her bitter presence convinced him she would have taken the opportunity to turn on him if he didn’t use her first.

He had no remorse in feeding her to the wolves of the first team they came across, to which he worked much better with Heris than he initially believed he could. She was good with her magic, and probably the most capable teammate he’s ever really had that came to mind. Admittedly the most vicious, as well. As for Devon, a newer attendee to the academy, and someone worthy of Ru depleting his entire source of hydration from his body in response to the moron giving away their team’s position with a sneeze. The audacity.

“Aren’t you thankful we don’t have to resort to drinking our own urine from dehydration with me around?” Ru had attempted to joke, and didn’t understand how it fell upon such deaf ears with Heris. Either she was too consumed with winning to care, upset with him over something he had yet to consider, or both. Fighting with Heris was an entirely different breed of arguing than it was with Freyja, and not in a way any better than how he and the fire element engaged. Although, between the two of them eliminating the occasional threat and trekking through the biomes at a slow yet consistent pace, he fell victim to boredom and amused himself by sparking a fight.

After an eternity of travel and exhausting a lot of his magic for his and Heris’ benefit, as well as dry drowning several victims from a distance, they only stopped in the prairie biome because Ru insisted they go around the rock formation to try and launch an assault from behind whatever stronghold was formed. Heris’ strong opposition created a large source of vexation within the blond, before his gaze began to shift, only taking a matter of seconds passing as he processed Arah being in their line of sight.

“Don’t-” Ru had only gotten the word out a second too late, not that his protest would have made a difference. Watching Arah fall sent a ripple of rage to course through his veins. “What the fuck was my rule?” He asked heatedly, catching the movement of red hair before his eyes tethered to Freyja’s. For a second, he could have sworn he saw his reflection of rage over their downed friend in her stare. At the very least, through their rivalry, he was grateful they had ascended to being able to speak through stares and subtle gestures. Complying with her faint motion for him to move, he backed off from Heris to avoid being in any target range of fire. Henriik had taken advantage of the moment of distraction, and Ru narrowly seized the opportunity of using his own grasp of wind magic to divert the shower of rocks sent in his direction. However, he hardly had time to revolver and counter before being flung backward like a ragdoll against a different rocky formation.

Going for his approach to dry-drown Henriik by filling his lungs with water while regaining his standing stance, the air around Ru became non-existent and it infuriated him to no end that Henriik couldn’t just roll over and be an easy target for him to eliminate. Just when Ru was prepping himself to draw a more costly source of his magic to pull off a high-pressure jet of water to push Henriik back, the blond was more than surprised to see the air element reduced to a singed imprint. While his lungs were blessed with the luxury to inhale oxygen again, he coughed a few times, and only then did he become very uncomfortably aware of the sharp throb in his ribs.

“Arah’s wound needs cleaning or she won’t make it. We owe her this.”

There were very few times Ru recalled ever completely agreeing with Freyja, and this was a rare addition to those moments few and far between. Repressing the instinct to wince or limp as he approached Arah, he reminded himself that the injury was all in his head. It didn’t transfer to him outside of this trial, so he just needed to rely on his own willpower. If it wasn’t endurance that was the greatest thing measured with this trial, Ru considered that the administration otherwise just found it entertaining to see how quickly peers turn on one another for their own gain and victory.

“I’m sorry about this,” Ru said, kneeling to help Arah prop herself up against a rock formation. “And for yesterday, for whatever it’s worth,” the blond added, briefly assessing the deep slice along her side that had also cut through her clothing. Conjuring the water from his reserves to begin rinsing the wound out, Ru tapered his magic off after a minute. Mostly because he was running out of water to spare, and partially because from what he could see, his efforts wouldn’t be enough to prolong her sustainability in the challenge. The wound was deep, and rinsing it would only get her so far.

“Unless you can pull off healing her, my magic can only limp her along for so long,” Ru said, staring up at Freyja with an expression of mild degradation considering how little he thought of her healing capabilities.

“I’ve heard laughter is the best medicine,” Floki chimed in, unscathed and wistfully unconcerned with anything that had transpired. It seemed the smarter route to not intervene with the little magic duel between the stronger elements, however, it made for an entertaining spectacle from the sidelines.

“Not helping,” Ru replied, although he was almost impressed with Floki having even made it this far into the challenge. Standing up and allowing Freyja the opportunity to attempt to heal Arah without him in the vicinity, the boys stepped aside to speak amongst themselves. “Having fun?”

“More than I thought I would,” Floki grinned. “Freyja and I have more in common than I thought - if you consider what we have in common being you as a primary discussion point, of course.”

A twitch in Ru’s brow was the first indication of how deeply struck he was by a sudden spike of irritation. “Is that so?” He asked slowly, deliberately.

“I was pleased to learn I’m not the only observant of your relationship with Heris that finds it, delicately put, strange. And that is a very large label coming from me, my friend.” The pair continued in a synchronized walk just out of the girls’ sight, just where Ruairi was herding his traitorous roommate. Floki continued relaying the turns the conversations between him and Freyja had taken, and it was impossible for Ru to discern whether Floki’s fatal flaw was talking, or if he was deliberately trying to get under his skin.

“Are you familiar with the definition of betrayal?” Ru asked, abruptly cutting Floki’s rambles off and being met with wide green eyes, completely puzzled. “It’s alright,” Ru assured, stopping in place, “I’ll demonstrate.” In the seconds that followed, all of the moisture in Floki’s being had been entirely evaporated by Ruairi’s doing. It was a surprising feat considering his focus was beginning to be torn asunder by his struggle to win the game of mind over matter with his throbbing ribs. Fatigue had chipped away at the anger he had just been internally lit ablaze by, but who wouldn’t be consumed with rage over having someone considered to be a friend carelessly spewing private things that were supposed to remain between them?

Walking back to the place he had left both Arah and Freyja, the one that his attention settled on was the fire element. She had every advantage in displacing him and seizing her victory over him right now. That’s what he expected, following yesterday’s events. “I had no choice but to silence the songbird,” he said upon getting closer, referring to Floki. There was a falter in his step, a wince in his stride, though he pretended like it hadn’t happened. If she noticed, he hoped she wouldn’t torture him with a drawn-out elimination by her hands.

While he didn’t know how many, if any, teams or individuals were still out there among the other biomes, at the moment he cared very little. The most lethal person in this challenge to him was a few feet from him anyway. Taking a seat atop a rock to keep a short distance between himself and the girls, his blue gaze briefly swept across the flatlands of the prairie.

Naturally, an arm had subtly coiled itself around his aching side, and he was furthermore reminded of how uncomfortable this pain was when Freyja bluntly noted her observation of him being injured. He was waiting for a cutting remark, a jab at how this was perfect karma before she burned him. Instead, she offered up healing him. Ru laughed, despite the regret of how the action affected his injury. It was surely a joke, a poor one at that. However, after a period of conversing, he fell silent as he considered that she was very serious.

“Just because Arah makes it look easy, doesn’t mean you can actually pull it off,” Ru said, lacking any kind of faith in Freyja's ability, although he took a glance at Arah, and she almost seemed better off than when he had walked away. An argument broke out between them that stemmed from Ru’s complete lack of trust in Freyja and her healing abilities. Was she only being so persistent out of spite to prove him wrong? To relish in getting him to lower his guard again so she could burn him? Both seemed likely from his perspective.

Slapping her hand away with sharp enough force he had hoped would be enough to get her to relent, instead, her hand returned to grip his wrist, and he stilled as an uncomfortable heat blossomed through her touch. She threatened to burn him. He dared her to do so. Though he didn’t make another attempt to physically lash out at her, and instead lifted his shirt to prove that even if she could heal on a small scale, the discoloration along his left ribcage was beyond her help. “It’s not a paper cut, which is probably the only thing you could fix,” he said, lowering his shirt.

An interlude of silence on his part passed before he exercised his voice again. “If I asked you to tell me about who else had been there that day,” he began, his expression being transparent in what day he was referring to, “would you? Or would you rather discuss it with my roommate first, and have him fill me in at a later time?” The blond said, not shying away from communicating just how much he was irked by the discussions that took place between her and Floki. Of course, Ru wanted to know the entire scope of the truth that day, but he couldn’t just let his upset go easily.

Knowing the topic of their relationship when they were children was brought up only hurt him to a degree his current physical pain could not compete with. While he didn't know the details yet of what specifically was discussed regarding that time period, he briefly reflected on his youth. He had been a rather direct, and very intense friend-maker around when he had first come to the academy. It was the first time he had been around other children, and he had based his entire perspective of friendship with other children on fictional stories he had read to himself. He had introduced himself to every kid he first met the exact same way, always. “Hi, my name is Ruairi Craiel. My favorite color is blue, and I’m a very good swimmer. Do you want to be my best friend?” The concept of a ‘best friend’ had exhilarated him to no end back then. It offered the possibility of a connection with someone that he had been otherwise starved of - to have someone to trust, to have someone who wanted to spend time with him, and to have someone in his life he could depend on forever, and ever. Looking back, he wished someone would have told him there was a reason why the kind of relationship he had sought was only ever something he read about in children’s fantasy stories. It’s just not real.

Freyja | Fire | Arah, Floki, Henriik, Ruairi

“I’m sorry about this. And for yesterday, for whatever it’s worth.”

Studying his expression with a distracted gaze, Freyja paused briefly to ensure it wasn’t a trap before adding to his apology.

“I’m sorry his fake girlfriend is a raging psychopath too. I would never let someone’s body get between you and me and our friendship. Are you in pain?”

Even if it was an imagined scenario, the amount of blood that was gushing out of Arah was concerning. She’d bled initially, but now that a moment had passed and they had taken it upon themselves to move her, it was clearly leaving her body at an unsurvivable rate.

“Unless you can pull off healing her, my magic can only limp her along for so long.”

“That’s so helpful,” she murmured, still studying her friend’s wound with a fading sense of determination. Then, in a more serious manner, she admitted, “I can’t. I’ll be damned if I don’t try, but it’s really deep. It’s a fatal wound. Only people trained in healing can pull off fixing something like this with just magic.”

As Floki began to speak something completely unhelpful into an already tense conversation, both Freyja and Ru recited a flat, “not helping,” and Freyja’s gaze turned slightly upward to meet the matching blue-eyed gaze of the water element. Sometimes, it was almost as if they had a more difficult time being enemies than being carbon copies of one another. Before anyone could comment on it in any way other than a curious stare, Ru seemed to read Freyja’s thoughts yet again, taking Floki away from the tension in what she knew was some sort of walk to his simulated death. She almost felt pity for him, all things considered. He never would have survived without her, but he had definitely made Freyja’s job much simpler than it would have been in any other case. The only thing she wished was that he could have learned to have been less annoying at any point prior to whatever it was that Ru was planning on doing to him now. In any case, he probably deserved it. Not that she was taking the water element’s side, of course. Why would she do that with her sole purpose in life being to obliterate any semblance of happiness he may or may not have had?

After a while of bickering, Arah’s continuous and gradually weakening pleas for Freyja to end the simulation for her more quickly finally ceased. Despite Freyja’s very blatant, very stubborn refusal to do so, the fire element held Arah in her arms as she passed back out of the simulation. In the silence, all Freyja could think about was that she was glad that it wasn’t real. She loved Arah, and she had to distract her mind with a million things to keep herself from feeling the full weight of that sentiment. Yet, she couldn’t shake the feeling that this year was the end of everything she had known. It was just beginning, but it wouldn’t last for very long. Soon, she would be forced to confront a different life, a lonely life locked away with Henriik somewhere. She didn’t want him, but she needed him. She had been told that fact her entire life, and she had been consistently reminded of what would occur if she tried to live in another realm. Still, she would be without Arah. She said she would come to visit, but Freyja knew better. Ru would be gone too, and she was convinced he would never come back. Perhaps he would–a small smile graced her lips as she thought of this–if only to attempt to best her in five or ten years. He’d bring some trophy wife he didn’t love, or maybe he would just flirt with the students. Maybe he wouldn’t come back at all. She didn’t know what to think, really.

As if he’d heard her thoughts, the blond appeared–alone–from behind some rocks a short distance away. She noticed the way he clutched his side when he walked, lacking his typical arrogant swagger as he returned to the place where Freyja sat beside the imprint of the earth element on the ground, which was now fading.

“Were your ears ringing?” She said this just to get in his head, where she wanted to be permanently. She had to settle for the look of confusion on his face. Then, more solemnly, she added, “she’s gone. She asked me to let her go.”

Now alone in an awkward, tense silence that seemed no better than when the comic relief and the mediator had been in the space between them, Freyja studied him as he sat on a rock some ways away from her. “Did the songbird injure you while you were silencing him?”

Already up and a bit uneasy from her last moment with Arah, Freyja didn’t feel like being alone. Before she knew what she was saying, she matter-of-factly, in her true, know-it-all form, was already reaching for his shirt as she uttered, “let me help.”

“Just because Arah makes it look easy, doesn’t mean you can actually pull it off.” He pushed her hand away as she went to lift up his shirt, undoubtedly an effect of the last time she’d gone to lift his shirt up. Summoning the image in her mind, she took his wrist and threatened him with enough heat to prove her point. She didn’t intend to burn him, although it took a significant amount of self-control to get to this conclusion.

“How about you let me worry about what I can and cannot do–and more importantly, what I will or will not do for you–and just-” To her surprise, he lifted his shirt on his own, “-yeah, that’s what I thought.”

Her touch was gentle as she used her free hand to trace the shape of the bruise on his ribcage. She forced her eyes to linger on it for longer than she felt was necessary in an attempt to keep her eyes from wandering back into his. She would have needed a lot more than alcohol to have a weirdly intimate moment with him that didn’t have an ulterior motive of proving her right. Both went silent as she tried to summon a type of healing magic that typically took both her and Arah to successfully complete. If she failed, maybe she’d get lucky and burn him, and that wouldn’t be so bad either.

As if to distract himself from whatever it was that Freyja was trying to do for him, he spoke again. His words came from out of left field, and she paused momentarily to make sure she was understanding him correctly.

“If I asked you to tell me about who else had been there that day, would you? Or would you rather discuss it with my roommate first, and have him fill me in at a later time?”

Her eyes flicked up to his face briefly, then immediately back down to the botched job she was performing on his wound. “God, would you stop moving?” Then, more like the Freyja he knew so well, she smirked. “Is this you asking?”

Rather drained from exhausting her resources on trying to heal two annoyingly imperfect test dummies as well as the slightly over dramatic display of her magic when eliminating Heris, Freyja finally slumped back against the wall beside him, arms crossed. It was getting dark, and it would be cold soon. She didn’t know if she could keep a fire going for long enough to keep them alive, but she certainly didn’t have enough to kill him. It was better to keep the truce going, she had a better chance of outlasting him that way.

Finally coming into an honest silence, Freyja replied, “I don’t know. There were at least four adults, and maybe a child. It’s really hazy. I want to go see it, I feel like if I were to go there it would make the memory clearer for me.” She slumped down into the grass, hugging herself to keep from shivering. It was a starless sky, murky and black. Just like every other night sky she had ever seen.

As they sat in a comfortable silence, Freyja’s mind wandered back to that time in their lives. She thought about how forcefully friendly Ruairi had been at that time, so young and so opposite of the person he had grown into. He introduced himself by his full name, his favorite color, and his swimming ability. What more could a child have wanted, right? At that time, she knew no one. She had nothing. She was just a terrorist who was treated as such with minimal exposure to the outside. She didn’t know what she had done, but she knew that she was terrible. Inherently evil. Someone that no one could get close to, or they would feel the consequences. Yet, when he introduced himself, she’d responded simply. She expected him to run and hide from her because of what the adults made her believe she was. She felt foreign under his gaze. I’m Freyja. I don’t have a favorite color, and swimming would kill me. But, I’ll be your best friend if you’ll have me. Why aren’t you afraid of me? Everyone is.

She glanced up at him in the dark, only seeing the reflection of his pale irises. He seemed deep in thought too, or perhaps just in pain. She wasn’t sure if her attempt at healing him had done anything but make the skin look normal on the outside. It got too dark to experiment further. In something softer than a whisper, she asked, “was I really the first person to call you Ru?”

After a while, the pair struggled to stay warm, and the sounds of screaming had faded hours prior. If anyone else was still in the simulation, they were a far ways away from where the pair had managed to land. Studying the land where she’d burned Heris hours prior, she thought to tell the man beside her what she had come to know, even if it ruined the truce between them.

“Your girlfriend is a siphon,” she stated plainly. “And if I’m right, she’s far too old to be a student. She’s up to something.”

And before he could respond, the simulation shut down, rocketing the pair of them back to the normal sights and sounds of the academy.

———————————

From the time the pair arrived back, everything felt a bit odd. For one, there shouldn’t have been two winners. They claimed a fault in the system, but it seemed wrong. Heris was nowhere to be found, and neither were any of the administration members. Henriik informed them of what happened, and that they’d been counted as co-winners of the event. It seemed wrong, but the expression on Ru’s face was more irking than a mutual win. She wanted to ask him about it, press him until he broke. He truly didn’t seem to know, which ruined any previous suspicions she had regarding him being in on it. Still, he’d been with her for almost a week, and he didn’t even know what her magic abilities were? She knew the limitations of his inside and out, and they were sworn enemies. What did that say about him?

In an attempt to push that aside, Freyja agreed when Henriik asked her to spend time with him that evening, although it was no distraction. He was acting odd too, and refused to tell her what was wrong. After bickering in a way that was certainly not as fun or rewarding as what she typically did with the water element, she left him and returned to her room to rest.

The next morning, the activities resumed as usual. The insecurities trial was going in stages, with each group given an assigned time. They’d been given their pairing for the challenge at breakfast, and she had been faced with a constant discomfort since that moment. There was no way in hell she wanted to do the insecurities challenge with Floki Bielke.

On one hand, she was amused to see what a clown like him was afraid of. It couldn’t have been more than spiders or the dark, although she was more afraid to be wrong than to be right about that. This challenge was just as much about being a good partner as it was to face one’s own fear, and nothing within her made her feel inspired to be strong for him of all people. She hated this event, because the other person always brought her time down. How hard could it be for someone to brave something they’re afraid of?

“Morning,” she greeted flatly, disinterested in any small talk. She studied Floki diligently. Putting her hands on his shoulders and narrowing her sharp gaze on him, she said, “here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to face your fear, quickly, so I can beat everyone in this corrupt hellhole. Got it?”

As they lined up to enter the door that would open the portal into their combined simulation, Freyja glanced around. She didn’t see anyone she noticed, although she knew Arah was already in hers. She’d gotten one of the first slots with a first year that did not seem promising. They had made plans to meet up after she finished hers, and Freyja had even made a bet with her that she would get out more quickly than the earth element despite the significant time gap between the pair’s runs.

Before she knew it, the pair stepped into the simulation, arriving in a dark, shapeless void.

“Honestly, this doesn’t scare me at all. So, if you wouldn’t mind telling me what exactly your greatest fear is?” As he responded with something about the dark, mazes, and things of the sort, a student from a year prior came to mind. She’d been paired with an older student who was deathly afraid of being trapped in a maze. And Freyja was stuck with her, in pure daylight, and without the ability to locate something based on sound. This was a piece of cake, and it meant that she wasn’t forced to confront her own fear. If they relied on their magic at all, they were immediately disqualified. But Floki didn’t have to know that she knew that.

“This is simple,” she responded, wielding a great blast of fire that came on with such intensity that it made the student beside her jump back. “You work with sound. Surely you can locate the end of the maze?”

To her surprise, they weren’t immediately whisked out of the simulation as she and Ru had been the night prior. She had a lot of concerns about that, and it only strengthened her need to leave to find out the truth. It was almost as if the trials hadn’t even mattered to her since she woke up on the floor beside Ru in the Sanctum that first morning. She tried not to think about what that might have meant, and that perhaps waking up beside him was stirring her subconscious in a way that was forcing her to change her entire value system, which rode on the simple act of ruining his life in every way possible. Was that really how she felt?

Dragging the younger student through the maze, the pair arrived in an impressively fast speed. “Surely this isn’t your greatest fear, is it? There’s not even anything chasing us, or any sense of impending doom, really.” As they stepped through the last section of the maze, the smell of burning flesh immediately overtook her senses. Her face fell.

In the scene in front of them, everything was blurred by the smoke, and perhaps her own memory. She could breathe fine, but Floki was coughing because of the lack of oxygen. As the rest of the scene came into vision, a few burning houses fell into piles of rubble. The ground was all charred for as far as she could see. In the center of it all stood a small, thin girl, the only thing that did not seem tainted by the fire, explosion, or whatever had occurred. She appeared afraid, and the more she took in of the scene, the more frantic she got. Freyja’s eyes immediately rushed past her and fell on a few bodies of people who were already dead or dying. They were all burning, dead or alive.

“No, no, no, no,” Freyja pleaded, falling to her knees. She put her hands over her head, her body paling. She was frozen in place by her own accord, a carbon copy of the younger version who sat in the rubble, a few feet away. She closed her eyes and covered her face with them, rocking in a fetal position. She was shaking terribly and tears spilled messily from her cheeks. They burned, but she couldn’t resist them. She simply sat there on the ground, rocking and murmuring things to herself like “this isn’t real” and “this can’t be happening.”

At some great length of time later, Freyja felt herself back on the cold stone floor of the academy hall, although she’d blacked out quite quickly at the overwhelming nature of reliving a version of what had happened to her as a child. Tears streamed down her face in great magnitude, and she was certain there was no part of her face that had not been bathed in them. They didn’t burn anymore, which either meant that she had stopped feeling them, or that Arah had given her something at some point. She remembered crying, vomiting, passing out, and screaming, all at various points in the blur of time she could hardly recall. Even though Floki had managed to somehow either withdraw them or get her out of there in one piece, she felt no different than she had hours prior when she first experienced it. She was sitting on the floor of the hall, students crowded around her, and still, all she could do was hug herself and rock back and forth in the fetal position. Of the students with her, she recognized Arah as one, but failed to retain that information. It felt like her brain, her body, and her spirit had all given up on her, so much so that she barely registered the moment that her eyes connected with Ru’s as he walked past, nor the unreadable expression on his face. None of it seemed to matter to her in that moment, not even their rivalry or the moment of weakness where she'd been entirely exposed for him to see.