Dreams of the Quill

by Flak

“I was just hanging out my futon to dry on a sunny morning, contemplating my dark future. It was a normal day in every aspect. Those elementary school girls meeting up at the corner and greeting eachother cheerily before walking to school, the birds cawing up above, a gentle breeze whistling in the sakura. The scent of spring came to me as I stood out on the balcony, basking in the feeling of sunlight.

“Normal day, right? Yeah. That is, until I saw that figure descend from the sky. There was that single instant, where I could see clearly- a woman, borne on blazing wings, landed gracefully on the pavement outside my apartment building. It was such a huge shock at the time- seeing, that is- that I didn’t stop to think about the why. And so it was that when that woman looked up at me, she probably just saw a gaping idiot.

“Idiot? Of course not. I knew who she was. We called her Hanabi, the Queen of Embers. She was a destroyer, an enemy to the world. Even now, I’m not sure if choosing the Elementalist path was right for me. It was all impulse, really. Here comes this shining figure, you know. Exploding into the vision of my blind eyes. Exploding. I’ll never forget Hanabi-sensei.”

___

He had one world. That swimming pool. Within it, he could see, he could live a full life. But as soon as he surfaced and took his goggles off, as soon as he left the water, the world became an empty, black place. A cold, unwelcoming place.

I want to see.

Suigeki grew up blind, graduated high school blind, and lived a frugal early adulthood on his parents’ money. When he was twenty one, Hanabi, the current Elementalist, blossomed above his apartment and sought him out. Eager to follow the one person he could see, he learned the ways of Elementalists from her, resulting in his slaying of her in 2001, at the age of thirty.

During the two years before he encountered Kaze, he wandered and grew more and more obsessed with the idea that he’d been in love with his mentor. As he grew weary of the world as a side effect of coming to the realization that he’d killed the one person he could see and loved, he began seeing more and more of it. He made his way into Russia, thinking to hide away there in some desolate wintry place.

Unfortunately for him, he found himself dragged forcefully into a secret program that was looking for people with the Elementalist talent and training them to be weapons. For a while, he had no conviction to stop the program, and no will to do anything aside from what he was told. When he learned that the officers were secretly ‘disposing’ of any trainee that stopped improving, he realized that this was not the way it was supposed to be.

The young should live, the new should blossom.

With this, a new reason to live crept into his being. He felt a tug at his soul, a tug in the direction of the cycle he’d followed in an unforgivably loose fashion since the day he had told Hanabi those three words:

“Teach me… everything.”

Following the path he felt was right, the path that he felt was the sure way to carry on the Elementalist cycle, he acted. He rebelled, destroyed the facilities, and slaughtered the personnel with his powers. He fled Russia, and Asia all together, cutting straight through the Pacific Ocean. Suigeki first touched ground on the coast of Oregon, where he used his weak grasp of the English language to get around the necessities of food and shelter. Before long, he felt that tug again, and journeyed in a southernly direction, where he met Kaze.

When Suigeki first caught a glimpse of Kaze, he was dying from wounds he’d received in Russia previously. He fully intended to speed the cycle up, initiate the young high school student, and die a death fitting an Elementalist. However, Kaze denied him this, and, using the only ounce of power he would accept, healed Suigeki. Suigeki began to hang around Kaze, but after hearing him out and his reasons for not learning the ways, stopped pestering him.

___

Suigeki stands tall and lean, and with presence. He has black hair with a small shimmer of electric blue in good sunlight, and golden eyes that glow in the darkness much like a cat’s. His skin is fair, though not much of it is ever to be seen. As the main component of his every day outfit, Suigeki wraps his entire body- save for a little space around his eyes- in white bandages. Though he has long since taken to wearing street clothes to avoid being marked odd, his official Elementalist uniform is comprised of black boots, over-sized deep blue shorts, a cowl that shadows his features, and long, flaring blue sleeves that go from the shoulder to well below the wrist. The three-foot span of cuff is encircled with a design of circular stars depicted in once-brilliant yellows, though these of course have faded over time.

Suigeki is quiet and calm most of the time, and he rarely becomes startled. He refuses to become close to anyone due to his attachment to his dead mentor, or at least that’s what he’ll tell you. In truth, he becomes attached to new people and things quite easily, and it scares him. He cares greatly for Kaze, as though his student were his smaller brother, and it hurts him to see Kaze come to pain.

Suigeki refers to Kaze as “Kaze-mikoto”, an honorific conveying the feeling of owing one’s life to the target. Kaze hates it, but Suigeki won’t use anything less odd, and insists on it. It is plausible that he does it solely to bug the guy now that he knows Kaze doesn’t like it, but it’s far more likely that that is just how deep Suigeki’s devotion to him is.

Suigeki now supposedly attends Kurosakura U as a graduate student, but he doesn’t really spend time at school. He’s back in his homeland, and spends the time he’s with Kaze wandering the countryside around Osaka. Little by little, he’s leaving Kaze’s side more, entrusting his care to his roommate Nimue Fuuko. He sees the sojourn in Japan as a resting time while Kaze attends college, and believes that they’ll be going back to America in three years or so.

Suigeki has great insight into things. He can understand situations in a glimpse, can understand a person’s direction when they begin to say something. This makes dealing with Kaze’s troubles easy, because he always knows when or when not to shut up and give his student quiet. It would seem his only difficulty is in deciding that enough is enough, and he has to give up on Hanabi already, because she was broken from the beginning…