#in which lauryl dooms herself still by writing 2 much oh well lmao this was great

[trip-downtheriverstyx]

First Day Of My Life || One-shot

Summary: Opal, Hades’ daughter, deals with the trials of a first day of university

The night before school, Opal does not sleep. She is like her father in that way. Often times he’s teased her it’s because she was conceived by the wicked blue candlelight of the Keres, which has turned her this colour blue on the inside—made her pale like him, made her restless, made her feel safest when the stars are out. Oh, she’s nothing like her brothers of course, both wearing the Underworld bold on their pale brow as they pass secrets to each other through the ghosts, their own invisible game of Telephone. But she is a child of Keres. A child born in the eye of Lachesis’s needle. A child who dances on the thread of fate.

And she’s Belle’s daughter too, which means she’s restless because it’s school tomorrow, and she’s excited.

There’s a soft knock on her door and she turns in her rocking chair, where she curled up with a book. It’s her father, who must have heard that tiny squeak of the chair.

“—You’re supposed to be in bed,” he said, arching a fine brow.

“I was just going to bed,” says Opal to that. “Really. I was just reading.” Her father keeps staring at her. “Alright, looking.” The stare continues. “Alright, my thoughts were wandering. I’m not nervous though, I swear.”

“You don’t have to go,” he says. He folds his arms. “I don’t see what that place can teach you that we can’t.”

“Don’t let Mum hear you say that—”

“I didn’t go to uni, I turned out just fine.”

“Well, I want a degree like any normal, Mundus 18-year-old—”

“Opal, you’re not normal.”

“Well—besides from being dead, I guess.”

Her father only blinks at the word, his lips still pressed in a line, so thin it was as though she’d drawn it on herself. He doesn’t like that language, he’s told her, not because it’s upsetting, but because it’s inaccurate. Opal Acheron is not dead. Not yet.

She’s almost dead though. She would be dead, if her father was not the ambassador of the three worlds.

“Next year, you will be 18 again,” he continues. “And if you want to go then, you can still go. In the meantime, I can take you anywhere in the world. To Japan, Germany, Russia. Anywhere.”

Opal closes her book in her lap and smiles at her father, who is quite good at pretending to be unbothered when he is just that. Only she and her mother know the correct crease on his brow to look for. It’s his tell. “Daddy,” she says sweetly. “Really, I’ll be fine. Alexandre and Bellamy will be there. That’s why I’ve waited a year to go. It’ll be like nothing’s changed.”

Her father snorts again, but he nods. “Alright,” he says. “Now go to sleep. Just because you’re dead,” he says it playfully, giving an eyeroll “doesn’t mean you don’t need sleep.”

“Yes, Daddy,” she says back to him. And as the door shuts Opal looks away from the window and to the candle of Keres there on its sill, touching the fire with the tip of her finger, and pretending, for a second, that’s she’s alive.

One year ago, Opal felt an old pain twinge in her chest and for a moment she became breathless. When next she breathed again, the air sat on her chest, growing heavier like a stone falling through her, dragging her down with it.

It was just a few days later that her father touched her cheek and made a face she’d never seen—he was terrified.

Opal had a tumor. Opal had a tumor that was too dangerous to operate on. Opal had a tumor that perhaps magic could fix, but Opal did not have anything for the magic to trade. Opal, and her family, had to make a decision.

“The only thing irreversible is death,” declared her father, looking her straight in the eye. “Before that, anything is possible.”

So Opal, 18-year-old Opal, decided to bargain with the ambassador of death.

She had not died, but she was not alive either. She stayed frozen, perfectly safe in Limbo during the waking hours, before she was called forth by the candle of Keres at night like her father before her, like the candles that burned on the bedside the night she was conceived eighteen years ago. Perhaps her father was right when he said that she was blue on the inside. She liked to think that tumor of hers was blue. She liked to think it was shaped like a flame.

When Opal wakes up, her flame is out and her bed is empty. She opens her eyes and is on top of the ceiling. She huffs—she always does that. A year in ghostskin and she still can’t keep her feet on the ground in the morning!

Her door opens and in comes Alexandre, looking up at Opal. “Still can’t keep your feet on the ground?” he teases.

“Oi, you’re supposed to knock!”

“You’re gonna make me late for our 9am. Mum’s made toast with that strawberry jam you like. If you want a taste.”

Opal closes her eyes and when she opens them again, she’s right in front of Alexandre, her once-younger brother (he’s caught up to her now—funny, strange, but still, she’ll always think him little). “Fine,” she sniffs. Alexandre bites into the toast and Opal feels her own mouth fill with the taste of strawberry. Fresh as summer, though summer is waning now, and, if Alexandre’s nose is right—it smells a little of dust and leaves outside the open window.

“Mum, I love it!” Opal throws her voice so it echoes in every single room of the house.

“She’s already at the bookstore,” scoffs Alexandre. “Bloody hell.”

“How am I supposed to—nevermind. Can we go now?”

“Aren’t you going to get changed?” Alexandre eyes her up and down. She’s in an old t-shirt from a community play (Hamlet—she was Rosencrantz) and green sofie shorts all rolled up. She blinks once and stares at him—hard—challenging their father. Alexandre just looks bored, turning and chomping on toast before clomping down the stairs.

“Up to you!” he calls to her.

“Plenty of students go to their first class in pajamas!” she calls back. “Even the ghost ones!” But she scrunches up her face and imagines herself in something else anyway. This is, after all, the closest thing to a first day of university that she will get. She imagines all the lines of her are solid, thick, real. She imagines boots on her feet and rolled down socks and—stealing Bellamy’s flannel to tie ‘cross her hips—

“Stop tryin’ to nab my clothes!” barks Bellamy from down the hall. Whoops. She forgets, sometimes, how wonderful she is at moving things with her mind now that her mind can be everywhere at once. Like father, like daughter.

Anyway, when she opens her knees, she’s walking along the stone path toward town next to Alexandre. “How do I look now, little brother?” she chirps as she skips in front of him, walking backwards.

“Boo-tiful.”

“Haha.”

“Hey, remind me--what did mum say about you possessing me if you knew the answer? That’s allowed right? She said yes to that, yeah?”

“Alexandre, we haven’t even gotten into town and you’re trying to cheat—”

“Just a question!”

In class, she cannot find a seat.

This is because she is invisible to the eye and no one will spare the poor ghost girl a place. A terrible excuse.

“You were supposed to save me that spot,” she sing-songs at Alexandre as she stands in front of his desk. He is staring through her, ignoring her now, only…

His voice fills the room, echoing off the walls of Limbo. Sit down. We’re goin’ over the syllabus.

“I have no where to sit, Xan!”

Sit on the ceiling for all I care. Stop. Distracting. Me. It’s my first day too.

Heaving a sigh, Opal turns back around toward the board where Dr. Thatch is yammering on about essays and due dates. At first she considers the sitting-on-the-ceiling method, but going topsy-turvy made her insides go all over the place. So she sets her jaw, reaches back to tighten her ponytail and then flounces through the desks and through the students toward the front of the classroom, where she sits, cross-legged, right there on the floor.

Like mother, like daughter.

Her next class is with Bellamy. He is Opal’s favourite little brother, in case you were wondering. Unlike Alexandre, he is not a cocky shit with attitude problems. He is a know-it-all with attitude problems. Opal, as a know-it-all herself, finds they share common ground. She finds him in the hallway outside their literature class, a book already open, nose in it. She flips a page from down the hall just to make him look up and scowl at her, as she skips on down.

“You’re not cramming are you? Not already? I thought that was Xan’s job.”

“I don’t think our European Folklore and Magiliterature class is going to feature Hubert’s Dune,” he tells her dryly, lifting up the book. A student—a blonde, pony-tailed creature who knows how to do eyeliner and Opal’s jealous of that-- looks at them, because Bell hates talking telepathically. It gives him headaches, he claims. Sometimes he accidentally says what he’s thinking, and gods forbid that!

His head jerks and he looks directly at her. “What? Sort of in the middle of a private conversation,” he informs her bluntly.

“Bell, be nice. She could be a friend,” says Opal.

He looks back at her and make a face. The girl goes “Uhhh…”

“I’m talking to my sister who is a ghost. If you’re new to Swynlake…” he trails off and rolls his eyes. Then looks back at Opal. “Anyway.”

“I think she’s sort of cute, you should ask her out,” says Opal.

“I don’t like girls, I like books,” he says.

“Right. Erm. Please save me a seat? Xan didn’t and it was bloody awful.”

He nods and then the door opens. When they all file inside, Bellamy puts one of his notebooks on the desk beside him and drapes that flannel from earlier. “My sister’s sitting here,” he tells a kid who comes in last minute and then stares him down until he goes away.

And Opal happily takes notes all class, she and Bell exchanging little looks every time someone gawks at the pencil twirling in the air.

Lunch hour, she lays out on the grass with Alexandre on one side and Bell—still with a book in his hands, reading as he munches on crackers—on the other. It’s beautiful out. Through Alexandre’s nose, she smells the fresh grass. If she closes her eyes and concentrates as hard as she can, she can feel the grass on his ankles and on his arms.

But she cannot feel the sun. She tries, but she can’t. It filters through her and all around and she cannot remember the last time she was warm.

“I think it’s going well, don’t you?” she murmurs half-way through the hour. Alexandre shifts on the grass and looks her way.

“Feel like you’re learnin’ anything?” he asks.

“Yeah,” she comments with a tiny shrug of her shouldesr on the grass. Then she sighs and sits up again and stares out at the busy quad, all the students rushing to their classes. She wants to be one of them. To feel the pavement scuff under toe. To feel the weight of the books on her back. She doesn’t want to keep stealing bits of life from Alexandre’s mouth and ears and eyes and nose. Maybe her father was right and all this was going to do was turn her heavy and sad inside, more ghost than girl.

She sighs again, then flicks her eyes up and sees—

Someone is looking right at her.

She looks to her left. Her right. Behind her. She reaches out on instinct to try to tug on Alexandre’s sleeve but just sends a shiver into his body, which is enough of a jolt for him to jerk up with a nasty snarl—“OI, what the HELL—”

“Xan, he’s—that boy is looking at me right? Bell? Bell,” she says his name again and jerks the book out of his hand, sending it halfway cross the quad.

He sits up too. “That was fucking rude.”

“Look, look at that boy—he’s looking at me. He sees me! He sees me, yes?”

Xan squints across the quad too and then heaves a sigh. “Christ, I guess, I dunno. What, you think we’re the only mediums in town—”

“—well usually towns only have one or two mediums,” starts Bellamy, as he leans over to grab his book.

“—Okay, but it’s Swynlake, Dad lives here, I think we’re a bloody exception,” grumbles Alexandre.

“I’m going to introduce myself,” says Opal, breathlessly. Or—she would, if she had breath to begin with.

“Uhhhh, think that’s a ba—Opal!”

But it’s too late. Opal has blinked and now she’s across the quad, standing in front of the picnic table, looking at the boy. He is eating a tuna fish sandwich.

“Can you see me?” she says. The boy drops the tuna fish sandwich.

“You can hear me!” Opal smiles and she sits right next to him without pause.

“Uh…” he glances around, then looks down at his hands. “K-keep… your voice down or—“

“Oh, I’m a ghost person. It’s okay, they can’t hear me. You can though,” she talks fast. “But you knew that, right?”

The boy swallows and nods. It’s a short jerky movement, then he breathes out a harsh, awkward chuckle. “Uh yeah, sorry…” he’s still muttering under his breath. “It’s um… it’s sort of new-ish for me… “

Ah, late bloomer. This makes Opal smile a little. She’d once wanted to be a late bloomer. She’d hoped and prayed for it, wanting to be like her brothers and her father, wanting to know all the names of the ghosts that drifted through this town. She’d come to terms with it around the time she got the tumor. Ironic, thy name is Death, she supposed.

“Is…Swynlake new for you too…then?” she asks as she curls her fingers in a fist on the picnic table. “Um, I mean—are you a fresher?”

The boy nods. “Uh yah, demonology major—”

“Me too!” Opal explains and she smiles again, so bright she almost can feel it. OR—she can, but it’s not something that lives in her cheeks. It lives everywhere, in all the energy that makes Opal, Opal. She could use that energy to project her voice, that’s how happy she is. “Me too—I mean, I’ve lived in Swynlake all my life though so…if you ever want someone to show you around or something—”

“Uh—” the boy clears his throat then glances toward her, his eyes lingering for a daring second before he looks back down at his lap. “Not to be rude, but aren’t you—you know…”

“Dead?” says Opal. And she smiles again. “No. Not yet.”

 She leaves the conversation, somehow, with a name—Harry—and a number jangling in her head. She sings it under her breath, over and over, so she won’t forget it—she makes Bell write it down in the dog ear of one of his books and makes Xan sharpie it onto the inside of his palm. And now it doesn’t seem so bad really, being a dead-ish, alive-ish girl, being stuck. She won’t be stuck forever. And she won’t let it stop her.

She walks home with her brothers, one on each side, looking straight on at the sun as it begins to set. “I think mum will be very proud of us,” she announces to them. “Xan didn’t fall asleep in class, Bell managed not to run into any poles, and I made a friend today.”

“Wa-hoo,” says Xan.

“Mm,” says Bell, reading.

And it is at that moment, she feels a tug at her navel, and it’s like being set on fire again—life flooding back into her veins, her blood rushing, toes curling into her boots—

And Opal opens her eyes and takes a breath.