Section Alpha (For want of a better name)

[♥]

Righty... This story doesn't have any sex in it. but it gets kinda gory at parts so a... Y? Yup, I guess Y suits. Anyhoo, the characters are Freya, Jesse, Valentine and Kesriel, all a group of adolescent friends. There's more charries later but that would spoil the plot. Anyhoo, it's fantasy, and it gets progressively deeper so don't give up on the first few chapters. ^_^

[♥]

PROLOGUE

The boy, or man as it was, was dangling his legs over the concrete pier. Sat flat on the ground, he overlooked the murky waters of the harbour beyond. The quay itself was relatively unoccupied, but for him and random groups of people strolling past. The occasional boat crawled by with a throaty chugging noise, chased with irritation at the heels by a sleek, buzzing, newer one. The sky was clouded grey, the sun barely able to struggle through the dark layer, leaving the place cold and in the natural gloom of midwinter. After a while, the man stood up, thick black boots landing with a thud as he turned. The wind was picking up, pushing into his back, blowing through his blonde hair, which was styled into a sort of wave in the middle, and toying with the sides of his jacket. Despite the cold, he had rolled the sleeves up, and left the front unzipped, but this was possibly so he avoided looking like an army officer; it, and his jeans, were both in camo, the shirt underneath his jacket being plain white. His features were feminine for a man of his age, which was perhaps towards the twenties, which, coupled with somewhat enigmatic hazel eyes, gave him a rather handsome demeanour and the aura of someone who, quite frankly, knew just how to use it. The way he walked suggested he had a destination, boots striking the stone in a swift pattern. Walking parallel to the harbour, he passed a dockyard of boats, bobbing happily in the calm water which was starting to get slightly choppy. He turned at seemingly random roads until he came short just before a tall building, fishing a key from one of the pockets of his jacket and stuffing it into the lock set into the red paint. Behind him, the clouds formed a rim of white along the horizon. They were just starting to take on a red pallor, and, as he pushed the door open and stepped inside, drops of wet began to from on the concrete behind him. Taking the stairs two at a time, he stopped at the second flight, using a different key on the same ring he had used to open the front door in order to get into this one. In this, it became obvious that the destination he had been heading for was in fact his flat, as the rain was starting to fall more heavily now and the sun seemed to be seeking refuge from it below the darkening horizon.
The blonde haired man stepped past the doorway, dropping the keys into a waiting bowl obviously designed for that exact purpose. The room itself was the kind of flat that well, served its purpose. The walls were white, the floors varying from oddly patterned carpet to the stereotypical black white check linoleum in the kitchen. Taking the first door facing inwards to the hall, he flopped down without ceremony onto an unmade bed, kicking off the black boots. The thud they made as they hit the ground was muffled by the flattened carpet. Springing off the bed with renewed vigour, the man, with a single, intentionally elongated step, went from what was evidently his bedroom and into what looked like the living room. Next to the door, a little pine table stood, a telephone stand missing the actual handset sitting atop it. He pressed a button. A distorted voice announced the time and date of the message, and the man, seeming to get bored just waiting for the automated woman to finish her line, slumped onto the chair next to the little table and grabbed a T.V remote, letting it sit idle in his hand for a second while he listened to the actual message. It was the voice of a young woman, about Jesse’s age. Soft, feminine. Thinly veiled panic.
“Jesse, its Freya. There’s a problem. We need you here as soon as you get this. Which, knowing you, will be too late…” There as the snap as the phone reunited with its receiver. The man now identified as Jesse frowned. “Damn.” He muttered to himself, striding back into his room and putting his feet back into their boots. Hooking the keys through his finger on the way past the bowl, he went back the way he came, opening the door outside and into the pouring rain. Taking a deep breath as if it would make him invulnerable to water, he leapt out into the sheet of falling drops. Between the clouds and setting sun, it was now almost entirely dark, and the street lights that normally fought back the dark were not lit; it was too early for them, as their timings did not fit the cloud induced twilight. Soaked to the skin in just the time it took to place his foot upon the floor, Jesse resigned to ignoring the water entirely and ambling his way to wherever ‘Freya’ was. That message had been two hours old, he pondered within the confines of his mind. If that was so, just how late was too late, and, more importantly…. What for?

[♥]

SOUNDS IN THE SLEEP


I do remember. That is, I remember nothing. But is to remember nothing to remember something after all, even if that something doesn’t exist?

Freya awoke. That same man again. Those thoughts drifting into the darkness of her dreams. Freya never dreamed, always her sleeping felt like a Void in space, hours passing, to her, in mere seconds. With no nightmares to haunt her, and no dreams to comfort her, this thoughtless sleep Freya had every night was both a boon and a bane. Though not always, for, though she told no-one, sometimes she would hear things. No sight to accompany the sounds, like listening through a locked door in the pitch black. Trapped, but listening, relying on the one sense left in order to preserve sanity. It started off as little sounds, crazy like dreams, mad, unstructured, yet they seemed, to her barely functioning mind, as logical and simple as everyday voices. Then they settled. This has all happened in the last year, before which she had always woken, sure only seconds had passed and found her alarm buzzing, urging her out of her empty chasm of time and thought she called sleep. This was the second time she had heard the sounds as actual, intelligible voices. The second time she remembered exactly what they were. After an absence of two or three months, no sounds in her sleep, nothing to stretch her gap in reality into something that felt more real, less daunting, the sounds had returned. Thoughts, she knew. She knew they were thoughts of someone, not speaking aloud, for they echoed, carried too much emotion; confusion, emptiness. Freya felt a lot of emptiness. A soul that felt like her dreams. She was convinced this person was real, yet, like the dream-sounds, she kept them secret for fear of being declared mad. At nineteen, Freya was in position to get herself committed to a mental asylum. Not exactly a fact to be proud of, yet she didn’t find it particularly embarrassing either. For, deep in her heart, she knew she was sharing thoughts with someone who was most certainly as real as the girl who overheard them. Looking up from her bed, Freya waited for her eyes to focus on the blood red display of her impatient little alarm clock. Five minutes to go. Oh joy. She allowed her head to fall back into the groove of her pillow. Seconds later, it seemed, the alarm sounded. Cursing silently, she thumped the top of the demanding little piece of machinery with its irritating, high pitched, wake up call, and contemplated whether to choose the infuriating little gadget or her mother… The alarm clock. No doubt about it. She could hit the alarm as hard as she liked, within reason. Literally falling out of bed with a loud thud, Freya stood up groggily and shuffled to her wardrobe. She glanced back at the alarm clock. She had a tendency to develop pity or inanimate objects, and felt a pang of guilt for abusing the contraption. Shaking it off, she noted the time – Ten in the morning, as late as she was allowed to get up due to so called laziness and an inability to sleep at night. Maybe when she was as old as she was allowed to sleep in ‘till, those rules would apply. Not nine years onwards. Freya, however, allowed herself a little rebellion in refusing to dress fully until lunch at earliest. With a tug on the hanger that held her fluffy white dressing gown, Freya slipped the garment over her pyjamas without tying the cord and looked in the mirror. Icy blue eyes met her own, just as usual, bedraggled, waist length brunette hair needing a sever brush, and features that everyone insisted were pretty, though Freya found passable though nothing to be particularly proud of. Freya liked that. Everything about her, she found, was just to her liking. Most would want to find more in themselves but Freya was happy with rebellious conformity to the abnormal, even if she had no clue how that made sense.
Tramping downstairs, Freya opened the fridge, withdrew a large carton of milk, took a gulp from the nozzle and poured herself a small glass. Replacing the container, she took her milk into the lounge through a door-less frame and promptly collapsed onto the sofa, drawing a bundled quilt up over herself and flicking through TV channels, taking the occasional large gulp from the glass held in her free hand. She started as there was a series of loud bangs coming from the door. It was times like these her refusal to dress until the afternoon proved to be quite the pain in the posterior. Standing up and placing both the glass and remote on the pine coffee table, she ensured her dressing gown was fully secure around her waist before unlocking the door and wrenching it open, wrestling with the rusty hinges for a second.
“Valentine! Bad time. It’s before noon, you should know I never dress before noon.” She laughed. The adolescent standing in the doorway replied.
“I know, I think everyone knows how stubbornly lazy you are. But anyway, the point was my phone crapped out and I was asking if Kess and I can come over later. Considering it’s just across the road I didn’t exactly hike down here through wind and rain.” he stood with his hands in his pocket, standing just back from the doorstep as if he didn’t belong. Freya cocked her head for a second.
“Well, my mum is on a weekend trip down to London sooo… I suppose you can.” She said with mock indecision. Valentine smiled somewhat weakly and said.
“We’ll be over about six then. Eat something before, trust me, we’re bringing the infamously ancient Drago family board games.” Freya pretended to be afraid then added.
“Alright, now shoo so I can get ready.” She smiled, waving to Valentine and closing the door as he walked off. She headed back upstairs, breaking her twelve o’ clock dressing rule and stepping back into her clothing strewn bedroom, chucking the garments littering the carpet onto a tall armed wicker chair to get hem out of the way. That done, she opened the door to her wardrobe which miraculously had clothing not laying on the floor, yawned one more time and chose something to wear.

[♥]

THE BEAST WITHIN

Several uneventful hours later, Freya was lounging on the sofa again, dressed in a pair of blue jeans, a white T-shirt and a pair of stripy pink socks. She was, again, idly flicking through the channels on her television whilst taking the occasional gulp from her glass of lemonade. For the second time that day she jumped as the bangs came at her door again. Fully dressed and hair at a respectful level of straightness, Freya once again opened the door, this time, behind the black haired adolescent stood a slightly younger girl with sandy blonde hair. It was evident the pair were closely related – both has the same emerald green eyes, and just gave off the effect of being siblings. Whilst the girl- Kesriel, had taken after her mother, Valentine had unfortunately taken after his somewhat notorious father. The reason his hair was black as opposed to his sister’s sandy blonde was so that his resemblance was less striking. Half his fringe came down to and over his left eye, the back of his hair just long enough to tuck behind the ears and flicking up slightly at the base of his neck. Kesriel’s was tied back into a ponytail, her features softer than her brother’s, who had that strange impossible to age look about him, though that was possibly because he usually kept his head down, a habit born of his painfully shy personality. Perhaps the most striking difference between the two was their outward personalities; Kess was flamboyant and bubbly, Valentine shy and withdrawn. Then again, Valentine knew the secret about their parentage, Kesriel remained blissfully oblivious. Freya smiled at the pair.
“Come in you two. Got the ‘ancient family board games’ so you call them?” in response Kesriel shook a dog eared looking box with the word Ratrace on the side, under which her slender fingers held a second box, equally moth eaten, bearing the words Game of Life.
“Yup!” the girl chirruped. Her voice had the kind of cheery quality that was almost impossible to remain upset while listening to. She sounded a couple of years younger than she was… Come to think of it, she looked it too. Kesriel, though two years younger than her brother, at seventeen, looked more around fifteen. Freya grinned, ushering the pair inside and prompting them to take a seat on the now bare couch. Kesriel plonked the two boxes unceremoniously on the coffee table. “Right!” she exclaimed, patting her knees before slipping the top off of the upper box- Ratrace. Valentine was sat next to her, leaning forward slightly so as to help set up the game, Freya the same as she took the playing pieces out from their plastic alcove and set them on the table. Kesriel suddenly shrieked as Valentine collapsed forward, would he not have been unconscious already, he probably would have knocked himself out on the table, very nearly banging his head on it as he fell on the floor, still, but breathing. Kesriel panicked, Freya getting a hold before the worry set in, dialling the one number she could trust in situations like this – not the ambulance, but someone else. Freya by now knew that when Val collapsed like this, no normal doctor could treat it without discovering something best left unfound. She hit the numbers in, held the phone to her ear and said, trying to keep the rising panic out of her voice,
“Jesse, its Freya. There’s a problem. We need you here as soon as you get this. Which, knowing you, will be too late…” and, with that, she reunited the phone with its receiver, turning back to the unconscious Valentine and biting her lip with worry. Why now? Of all times, why now?

Jesse was running now, trying not to skid on the slippery cement, blonde hair darkened and plastered to his head with the wet. He skidded round a corner, regaining his footing in time to pelt up the alleyway, where the rain fell less from the sky and more from the overhanging roofs. His internal compass telling him that he was nearly there, he took a final turn, leaping over the brick wall instead of just pushing the gate open and running up to the door. He grabbed the brass knocker and slammed it several times against the door, three or four, to be precise. His heart was racing; he knew his friend was in trouble. If he wasn’t, Freya would have said the problem. As he was thinking, a brunette haired figure answered the door with a relived cry of “Jesse!” and pulled her drenched companion inside, accumulated rain and all. Brushing his hair from his eyes with a hand, he shook his arms off – to no avail, and stepped into the living room where Kess was watching over the now pale looking Valentine with a look of undiluted anxiety for her elder sibling. Jesse took one look at him, pulled back the curtains to look up into the night sky for a second and muttered.
“I should’ve known, Damnit!” the last word raising to an intelligible volume. “We have to get him out of the light, the curtains let enough through…” he said, flicking water at Valentine to stir him. Without waiting for him to wake up entirely, Jesse hauled Val to his feet and helped him, which meant allowing the weakened adolescent to lean on him, out of the living room. He looked around for a second, having forgotten the layout of the house, Valentine now almost fully awake and barely using Jesse for support. He stumbled forward, catching himself on a door handle, twisted the chrome knob and half stepped, half collapsed into the room, which was pitch black. Jesse turned to Freya who was standing with a look of bewilderment, then to Kesriel who looked similarly baffled. Jesse bit his lip with an expression somewhat distorted by the water still dripping down from his hair. Freya gave the man a look that could say nothing but ‘explain’. Jesse sighed.
“Alright, alright, I guess Valentine collapsing then me stuffing him into a closet isn’t exactly normal behaviour and warrants an explanation. If I were to say… Look at the moon, would you understand what I’m saying?” Freya and Kess turned, looking out the large kitchen window, staring in shock at the silver, glowing and round orb that was the full moon.

[♥]

DECEIT

“No bloody way.” Freya growled, coming to her senses and glaring at Jesse. “Quit messing with us and tell us the… Truth…” she trailed off at Jesse’s look. “Come on Jesse… Like it can be real!” she snapped. Kesriel was standing, listening to the conversation as Freya asked all the questions lingering in her own mind. Jesse sighed, not responding as he thought of a suitable explanation.
“A few months back… You know when Val and I went away for a bit?” he started, Freya and Kess nodding in acknowledgment. “Well uh… What happened was we took a walk down in the nearby woods, we’d have asked you guys to come, but we knew you were busy. Or thought. Anyway, we went by ourselves. Being the idiots we were-“
“You were.” There came a snarl from the other side of the door. A human snarl, however. Jesse winced, looking at the door as if his apologetic expression would be seen through the solid wood. Jesse paused, turning back to the pair and continuing.
“Yes, I suggested we go at night. For the fun… What fun it turned out to be. Well, whilst wandering we came across a wolf, not exactly common around these parts so… It was pretty weird. Also, not many wolves have slitted yellow eyes and stand on their kind legs so, you can bet it freaked us out a lot. Well, we ran, which isn’t surprising considering we’re a couple of human guys facing a wolf with jaws as big as our heads, but it caught up, again, not surprising. It went for me but... Valentine tried to help… It grabbed his shoulder… luckily it barely got past his skin, but it was bleeding and looked nastier than it actually was. So we took him to hospital, said it was a dog bite. Which it was, the doctors looked edgy but didn’t have a choice but swallow the story. We didn’t want you guys to worry so we hid out until his shoulder healed, saying we’d gone on holiday. Didn’t take too long, it was only a flesh wound…” Freya interrupted.
“Two weeks. You went for two weeks, no explanation, to London. I can’t believe you lied to us, Valentine was hurt! So what if he’s a werewolf, we wouldn’t have cared!” she cried, her shock and anger coming through and into her raised voice. Kesriel nodded weakly. “And now... And now he’s locked in the bathroom...” her laugh had a touch of hysteria to it. Freya glanced at her friend.
“Yes, now he’s locked in the bathroom, and keeps collapsing every time the full moon comes out…” she paused, her morbidly curious side rearing it’s ugly head. “Has he... Changed yet? As in, gone wolf?” she enquired in a low whisper, shoulders hunched and eyes darting slightly.
“Let’s just say we’re... Positive he’s a Lycan.” Jesse sighed, folding his arms in a way that suggested he would say no more. “It’s not my place to tell. I’m sure Valentine would tell you, but… I knew, if I had a secret, I’d want to give you the truth myself.” The trio stood in grim silence, solitary, amongst themselves. Somehow, despite the human nature of disbelieving all said to be mythical, the pair had managed to take the story, truly believe it. Maybe it was the fear of having Val prove it the accidental, painful and quite possibly fatal way for at least one of them. Or maybe, just maybe, it was the hope that there was more to life than the mundane thoughts of being born to die. Their dark, individual thoughts were sent clattering as Jesse spoke up. “I better head home. If anything else happens… Call me.” He stated, the last two sentences carrying an ominous ring that Jesse could not have intended. Kesriel felt a small squeak worm its way past her trembling lips; Freya bit hers in an attempt to still it. Without another word, the still damp blonde turned, striding to the front door and, with a final glance backwards, he stepped outside into the now still night. Kesriel was shivering, eyes filled with fear, her childish personality overwhelming her biological age as she slid down the cream painted wall, cradling her head in her hands and letting tears slide silently down her cheeks. Freya took a deep, shaky breath, a bold but feeble attempt to mask the pandemonium now raging inside her once logical mind, and spoke to her friend who, in her eyes, was still just the same Valentine. Nothing could, or would, ever change that for her.
“Will you be alright in there Val…? I need to look after Kess, she’s still a little shaken from your... Collapse.” She stumbled, the words tumbling from her mouth in an awkward rush of syllables. There was a brief pause, and a tired, sorrowful ‘yes’. Freya nodded even though the male couldn’t see, and put her arms around the young girl, comforting her in ways only best friends could, and, in the attempt, finding some calm within herself. However, by far the worst thing for Freya was the distinctive feeling of worse to come. That werewolf had to come from somewhere. Wherever it’s from… I know there will be something more… Perhaps there’s a whole underworld. Perhaps… Perhaps we, just the four of us, have our roots in this, just as solid as Val’s wolf genes. And it was then, in that moment of grim thought, and silent contemplation, that Freya began to truly believe in destiny.

[katsumi]

Woooooooooooooooo....w. Long story. 0.0

^_^ Nice.

[♥]

Not finsished, either. Probably won't. xD

[katsumi]

It is a good story, should finish it.

[♥]

CHOCOBOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

[katsumi]

I think chocobos are cute, especially the gold ones, and greys. ^_^

Its Boko! *Glomps*

[♥]

I wantaseeablackchocobo.

[katsumi]

Weird enough, i don't think I've seen a black chocobo. 0_o