Work Text:
On the first day of her final schooling year, she is handed a sheet of paper, along with some colored pencils, and is told to draw a self portrait.
Ordered. The arts are often seen as a pathway on Xelayah—stepping stones, colors scribbled between lines and realms, paintings on the walls during a transient period. They help you get to where you want to go; they aren’t a destination. She is told to paint whatever defines her, she is told to encode her entire self into a little capsule and spill all of the pieces across this tiny thin canvas, and she isn’t sure if this exercise has any kind of point except maybe to give their instructor a bit of a break already. It certainly doesn’t have a point for Alara, who is going nowhere after this year; it doesn’t have a point for Alara, who is doomed to float slightly above her childhood bedroom like a specter in slumber until the day she dies. It would be easier to paint the things Alara Kitan is not.
She has many facets, a wide variety of roughly polished traits that could make the sun itself blush -- but Alara Kitan is more than her parts, more than her ability to protect, more than her rare smile and endangered joy. To put it simply: Alara is defined by the lack of space in her body, Alara is defined by:
-The places in her mind where the intelligence and spark could fit if she sucked in her stomach just right, held back everything that kept herself herself just to stuff in a larger, more scientific purpose
-The way her mother's eyes look away from her in s h a m e and her father's eyes look at her like they are supposed to be mirrors outwardly reflecting the image of his love and her sister's eyes
her sister's eyes
her sister's eyes
smile without meaning, look without looking, love without loving. For Ildis it is disappointment, for Drenala shame, and when her parents touch and embrace and kiss and animal-fuck the negativity becomes one ensouled whole creature that wants to gnash Alara's chunks right up with its teeth. Xelayah is suffocating, but what choice does she have? Alara is defined by:
- Each flaw that is so visible to the public, her cerebral blemishes painted over each palm as her touch corrodes all surroundings; everyone can see that the way she ticks and breathes and tick-breathes-like-something-artificial is wrong, everyone, that is, but Alara Kitan, the only person who can fix anything and everything besides the problem of herself.
Alara is defined by:
-The love, except no, not ever. Sometimes on Union ships you get to have a dog, she learned recently---Earth creatures that just love and love and love, she learned recently, loyalty on legs, loyalty with a mouth. Alara is loyal and Alara has a mouth, but that is not enough to make anyone love her.
So Alara is defined by:
-Love.
-Loyalty
-Body parts (
If the Union were to ever want her---
No.)
(If the Union were to ever want her - and the Union practically torn-knee begs Xelayans to enlist, so they want her - they would only want her for her strength. Her ability to crush, forgetting that her ability to be crushed is just as strong, and the odds are more likely, her skin l i k e ephemeral spiderweb l i k e flayed-off exposed inner layers, painful and raw to the touch l i k e real gold battle armor; inefficient l i k e a Nothing, and there is always and eternally and for-ever-and-ever a Nothing. So in actuality the Union does not really want her, and neither does Xelayah, and the only conclusion she can draw with her logic-sunken mind is that nowhere in the universe wants the authentic version of Alara Kitan. No one, nothing, The Nothing, and especially not her family, no sir no ma'am, get that idea out of your mind right now or so help me.) -Inadequacy
-Collected and detached nature (What happens
to something bright-burning and expansive and loving and inviting
when there is no planet for it to shine down On To? What happens to societies when they are scuffed out, and where does that beauty go - the beauty of having lived and experienced and loved and fought and loved? The Universe was the first storyteller--what happens when there is no one left who remembers how to listen? What happens when there is no one?
What happens when there is just no one? You stop caring, is the answer, or at least what the answer should be in her position but she just can't stop the caring, just can't stop the hope(1).)
-Low-end-of-average intelligence, as it is phrased with great care and caution by a Xelayan pediatric neuropsychiatrist
-Love, again, somehow (There is always
someone or something for Alara to love or maybe to yearn for. There is always a yearning, like a wound in her chest she cannot stop deepening, can't dig her fingers out of until she's been pried open from the inside with nothing in the cavity left. There is always something for Alara to want! So why does she feel so empty?)
(1)Hope--to want, would be the definition in Earth English as a verb; as a noun, it refers to the desire or expectation that something will happen. She's never understood the difference between the two, the reason for the splinter. Is it not all the same at its core? Love is an action word; to love is to desire and to desire is to hope regardless of logic. She's sure it makes sense to someone else---someone more worthy, someone whose mind can wrap its tendrils around academia and slide into it with ease.
Alara picks up a pencil, draws herself a round head, two bony shoulders, the base of a body that is not hers. She glances around to the other students and their drawings—they’re all talented, they’ve all got sparks in their hands, and the body she’s drawn - just like her real life body (but this isn’t—) - is drawn shaky and misshapen and unfavorably sketched. So she reaches for a bright yellow pencil, draws out stripes of blonde hair covering the figure’s face, gives her pink lips to poke out. There. That’s the way it should be.
Solana's first boyfriend is named Ildis---their father's name. It's weird, Solana jokes as she brushes her light hair behind her ear, right? It's just so weird! Right? Alara, right?
"Right," Alara replies; Solana would sense the skinning anger-agony in her response if she could focus on anything besides her first love, the first person to want her like that.
Well. Not the first person.
"Hey, maybe we should do a double date," she says, eyes wide in bared excitement. "I can set you up with--"
"Oh, I'm busy, with... school club stuff," Alara offers, "but thanks."
"Well, it's good to see you getting more involved, then," Solana says, her hand resting down on Alara's shoulder, touching down on her surface like a Union vessel. "Proud of you."
Alara hates her, and Alara wants to tear her hair from her head - the fight wouldn't be fair, Solana isn't trained like Alara, even in her youth, is - and Alara wants and Alara wants and Alara wants-so-much-it-could-break-her, send her strength running into the water streams, send her bravery and toughness packing, never to be witnessed again - Alara wantwantswantshopeshopeshopes -- h a t e s! Despised, sound out the word -- desires, all of it mudding together in the teacup & when drained the leaves just look like Solana, a clumped outline of her to predict Alara's downfall.
Proud of you.
And this is what stings most: when Alara does well she is focusing on learning. When Alara is good, that means she is performing well, and when she is performing well, she is good. If she wants her mother to give her a hug she joins Xelayan wrestling and tells everyone it’s a tutoring group instead. She could just join a tutoring group, of course, but she’s tried that and there simply is nothing to excavate. It just didn’t develop and it might take an entire lifetime for Alara to grasp this stuff, sort of like how if you lost a tooth a few centuries ago you weren’t able to grow it back because the technology just wasn’t there yet. When Alara is being the Good and Worthy Alara, she is a school-focused Alara, an eternal fight upwards into academic excellence where she punches down the numbers and tears up the equations with her energy weapon and after the catastrophic final battle she is left with
nothing. It’s not what she wants, even if she could be the Good Alara full-time and around the clock and always, which means that she is Just Alara a good 95% of the time, and Just Alara isn’t very special. This Alara who is just Alara spends her time daydreaming of escape routes and open arms and thinking about whether or not she should lighten her hair too, maybe her parents would love her then, if she was a little more like Solana, if she had more of a solar shine.