Staining, One

Meilin I

By my recollection, the lights of the orphanage were a dull white on that day. That day, this day, and every day between.

All of the orphanage, floor to ceiling, wall to wall, was a dull palette smeared in its infractible monotonous pallor.

Dull didn’t do it justice. It was not just that white was the only colour that came to mind, but that it brutally forced all other shades away, carnivorous to description besides. Try as I might to think of anything else at all, to imagine something else in the sea of nothing, it never came. Rather than dull, it was dulling, as a light depleting.

The light prickled at the skin and washed out the vibrancy of everything it touched. A flow of electric monochrome which split clean down the line between memory and imagination, burning away without discrimination and leaving only hazily-painted silhouettes behind.

It was a place pristine to the point of hideousness, too clean to touch at the skin, and as I wrapped myself tight in my bedsheets, I didn’t bother to pull my head underneath, knowing all too well that they weren’t thick enough to block out the light.

As always, the lights were to stay on until some late hour of the evening, tethered to the clocks on the walls and their synchronised chiming more so than the sun. What prodding I’d done revealed this was by request of some higher-up whose name had never managed to fix itself firmly in my head, but I never came to know him, and so it never mattered. His name was just another among a long list of flitting names belonging to once-visits and explanation-inhabitors.

Five or so years ago, on a night a lot like every one since, I saw those lights for the first time. It was the first time I heard the buzzing of these fans, spinning against their dry air. I walked into the mouth of this place, and I knew I’d never leave.

If I were alone, it might just have been enough to snuff out what was left of my hope, but I wasn't alone. My mother was there.

She was a sweet woman with a face like mine.

Where our skin touched at the palms of our hands, at the middle of my spine, those lights couldn't bleed through. Like a cease in the burning sun, the sparse shelter of a tree’s shadow. I felt her as she held my fingers tightly knit among her own, and I felt her fingers lace at the tips as they extended past.

When the mattress gathered up enough of my heat to leech it back into me, I thought I remembered the way she felt warm at the skin, but cold just beneath. I could swear I remembered the wavering in her touch, and when I lingered on it, I knew it couldn’t have been true.

When I forced myself, I could just barely remember the truth. I could remember the way her skin was so dry that it took no warmth from mine, a perfect mirror that gave back only what it had received.

In this way, through wishing a better goodbye into existence, I wrote over the real one, and so even her memory slipped away. In the name of remembering, I hastened myself along to inevitably forgetting.

When I thought back on it, I felt a pit tearing into my stomach. An old wound blossomed out to reveal the space beneath. Each time I thought of that day, her face became less clear and more ideal. Each time, her words turned to careful poetry, and everything I’d ever wished to hear was placed on the tip of her tongue.

With every passing week, I became less sure I could recognise her from a photograph, if I had one in the first place. If I wasted no time on thinking about it, when I imagined her eyes, I saw nothing but my own.

In that dry-rotting glow, the memories, played ad nauseam, polluted themselves. They rearranged to fill the gaps left behind in decay, folding over and layering into an approximation of that day and every day before it.

With each day, the shadows disappeared from her face, her cheeks filled in from their gaunt, leaving only a warm smile and shining eyes behind.

It was true that I couldn’t remember the days where her grip didn’t shake like an old doll straining against the stiff wire of its joints, but even back then, when the wound was fresh, I’m not sure I could have.

That was my anchor into reality. She never told me, but even when I was younger, I’d always thought she was sick.

Or rather, I knew she had to be.

I couldn’t remember a time before my mother was sick, but I knew she must have been better than this, if only once, if only somehow, if only some time before I could remember. I’d never known a day like that. Never one where she was well, never one where she was better, nothing at all like that.

I could dream up memories of times where she seemed better, but unlike the others, they were thin, tearing at the slightest pressure and most cursory lingering.

And beneath it, I could see what I was trying so hard to avoid. I remembered the day she left my bedside for the last time, how she squeezed my hand as she kissed my forehead, and the way her grip was firm like it had never been before. It was real, just this once. As it happened, I somehow knew that I would never feel her wavering touch again. The mouth closed behind her, and I was swallowed freshly into a separate life entire.

But five years had passed. Five years of hallways which slithered by timed to the brackets of a paper schedule, five years of loaned books, five years of dry air.

Five years of forgetting, remembering what I could, imagining where I failed. The finer details might have been nothing but a trick of my stray imagination. I didn't know how much of it was real, and in all honesty, I'd started to doubt even those few memories which hadn't faded away.

I grieved for what I’d lost, what had been taken from me and what I’d forgotten.

But I shouldn’t have, because I was a lucky child. Everyone knew it.

That was it. That was the word that hung on every lip.

I was lucky. I was never allowed to forget that, and every day, it was branded hot across my brain to steam the tears filling my eyes.

When the bread was dealt out, when I felt the food in my stomach before I could taste it on my lips, I was lucky to eat it. Other stomachs sat empty. When I plucked a book from the shelves, settling on some volume that was just close enough to one we didn’t have, I was lucky to have it. I was reminded, and never let to forget.

I was lucky, they said, because I was not born as agristock or labour. A poet-soldier's daughter, they told me, born into a time of profound peace. The war was over, a sacrifice had been made, and I stood only to gain from the way the scales balanced out. The children in the southern colonies reached through the gates for a sliver of what my mother had left me into, but my way had been paid. I carried the key from her, from my father, unlike so many others. It was my privilege to live unbound.

Unbound to servitude, unbound to service, and unspokenly, unbound to my family, though that was much less a privilege than it was a great deal of trouble. I wasn’t held, because when I’d paid for my stay, I could leave. It was lucky to have a debt so plainly laid out in such clear terms.

I spun my glasses between my fingers, still stuck on digesting those words I'd been made to swallow so many years ago, the same I’d been spoon-fed each day since.

My birth was a gift, beyond all doubt. They were correct to say it, even if I felt the urge to argue my case every single time. It was the sort of bargain that demands a miracle, and I was wrong to feel I’d gotten the short end of it.

Even knowing that, for a second more with my mother, I would’ve traded it. I would’ve halved it and sold the rest off, then crawled into some cool dark place to die.

But it was still her gift to me, however selfishly I felt about its specifics.

I basked in gratitude, because I knew it was right for me to be grateful. I thanked her each day, when I came to my senses. I thanked my father, for dying off and alone somewhere else, and I imagined him a hero, and I imagined his thoughts were of me, wherever his body came to rest, wherever his face was buried before I could see it.

And yet, when those tears filled my eyes, when they told me I was lucky, I felt something sour spin in my heart.

Maybe it was worse than if I had just been alone.

Maybe, in those low hours, forgetting what a blessing it all was, I might have said I would rather I’d never been born. Forgoing that, maybe I would rather never have come to know her for the time I did. I didn’t know my father, and I didn’t feel this way about him. I remembered nothing about him, and so I remembered it perfectly. Painlessly.

Then, there was that feeling. An aching hole in my being told me that all of this was worse than if I had just been left alone, to never know what could have been, to never know what had been taken away. Burdened with something I longed to return to, I was forced now to feel that I was without.

And yet, here I was.

In this place where the walls were white, in this place where the floor was white, in this place where the soul had been scrubbed so thoroughly from everything that the surfaces themselves couldn't even bear to harbour the scent of what was used to clean them, rejecting the sharp odour of bleach back into the air.

Barring a wooden desk piled high with borrowed books, spilling loose over the edge and onto my dishevelled bed, there was no sign that anyone could have lived there. I was afforded only that which I needed to rise each day, to read from the library, to eat my meals, and then to drift off in the evening.

If I ever left, it would be impossible to guess I’d been there at all. It was no place for anyone, but excluding that, it was no place for me.

Then, piercing the stale air, a knock echoed through the room.

It disappeared so quickly that I wondered if I’d imagined it, too. All reverted to silence.

Then it came again, a bit firmer against the door’s wooden frame.

In blind panic, I threw my pillow over one of the overflowed books and fell over top of it. What little weight I had to toss around secured the forbidden secrets beneath. The book was nothing like that, but it didn’t matter. An overdue book could well enough serve as justification for a ban from withdrawing any others.

"Come in!" I shouted, posturing myself as best as I could to look a bit less like a criminal caught in the act. My fingertips messily dragged through my hair and straightened out the wrinkles in my shirt, setting right the best attempt I could make for the image of a proper young lady.

After a moment, the door cracked open.

From the time of my visitor's first step into the dormitory to the last, the clock hitched. Indelicately, the figure carved itself out of the empty.

Tall. The visitor was tall.

It felt shallow to say, but that's all I could notice. The man was tall. Bluntly, he was taller than any man I had ever seen, and that’s how I knew I’d never seen him before. This was the sort of man they measured doors against.

Even still, he carried his crooked spectacles and astonishingly ill-fitting coat with enough confidence that they didn't mar his authority.

That was the second thing I noticed: his air of importance.

The cuffs of his coat slipped loose of their brassy buttons, splitting up a short length along his arms, not quite halfway to the elbow. It seemed like something that had happened while he was too busy to notice, or maybe he was simply too important to be corrected on it, if it was a mistake at all.

Along his shoulder, there was some sort of long patch I couldn’t recognise. All over, the coat was a deep grey, sparkling with hints of blue thread against the light. It was double-breasted, as seemed right for a military man, or at least as I had read was right for a military man.

Then came the doubt. Given everything else, was he even a military man?

At a second glance, I couldn't be sure. He might not have been out of place among the library staff. Maybe not a hospital, but it had been a decent span of time since I’d last seen the inside of one, so I couldn’t trust myself enough to exclude it entirely.

His hair, although he wore it plenty long, didn't seem to be styled correctly for the military. Though it was tied in traditional fashion, it was just a little bit too messy for that sort of thing.

He looked official, but unrefined. He stood over me with a look on his face that could have been sour, but could just as well have implied nothing at all, and sensing my discomfort, his shoulders dropped. He shuffled himself into less imposing form and sat beside me on the bed, wordless.

I nearly flinched away. I couldn't think of why I didn't. It was a contradiction, but something about the shift in his demeanour set me at ease. An overwhelming feeling set in, even if I couldn’t explain it at all.

I recognised another human in that coat, one who had gathered himself before entering just as I had before welcoming him. Somehow, I knew that as intimidating as he might have been, important as he surely was, this man meant me no harm.

After another moment of silence, the man adjusted his uniform. He set about flipping several pages of documentation on his slate-style comlink before his expression finally softened. The corners of his lips drew back, as though he still tasted something bitter and was rolling it politely in his mouth, buying time to spit it out when his company looked away.

At the same time, they quivered up into the makings of a smile, which came out as more of a smirk.

His finger rolled, and as it did, the analogue wheel on the side clicked, magnifying the page. A scanning line passed over the screen and stalled at its destination, followed shortly by a paragraph taking on a pale highlight.

“Ah. Here we are.”

His voice was warm, but restrained. It crackled in the mouth, yet flowed smooth.

“Meilin, was it? Bond category twelve…and Hirudo status is blank, which tells me you’re unevaluated, but you seem to have no scheduled assessments, or at least nothing outstanding and only one past instance of contact, so it’s safe to assume you haven’t had any remarkable incidents…”

I nodded politely, though I didn’t exactly understand what I was affirming.

The man cleared his throat before continuing. “Circumstances of…I'm sure you don't need to be reminded of all that,” he muttered, trailing off. “Good day, Meilin! To most, I am Administrator Biltruf, but we don’t have to be that proper. To you, then, I am Tyhrus, and you may call me such.”

“In ordinary circumstances, you would be meeting your sponsor today, however…”

Tyhrus gave a few more fidgety flicks to his comlink, eyes narrowing as vast landscapes of text danced from the glittering lenses of his glasses, stalling out on a sea of words parted by an image. That smile crept back across his lips as he finished, stronger than the smirk from before.

“It would seem that, due to special circumstances, you are already speaking to him.”

As if to punctuate the announcement, he folded the device and slipped it back into his pocket, the boxy shape imprinting clearly into the fabric.

A surge of numbness came in fast. I looked around the room to see if I’d misunderstood. Catching my confusion, the administrator took the opportunity to elaborate.

“In my capacity as the administrator of Biltruf Group, licensor to the Seneschal Shield Academy’s Veter-Callistan branch, I will be your caretaker and guardian from this point onward,” Tyhrus said. “Reviewing your case, you were an exemplary candidate. No action on your part will be required, and application will be expected of you. In short, we would be honoured to welcome you into an apprenticeship, effective immediately.”

“An…apprenticeship?” I asked.

“Your voice is quiet. I will ask that you speak up in the future, for sake of my understanding,”

Tyhrus blinked a few times, finding his train of thought. “Oh, but the apprenticeship. It's business-speak, all to say that it’s nothing that serious. To put it in simpler terms, more suited for someone your age, you have been adopted. Along with this, I have taken the liberty of enrolling you in the academy already, so there is no need to worry about the process of doing so.”

I was no stranger to the school he mentioned. The Seneschal Shield Academy was not obscure in the slightest. A branch of the Seneschal Shield, but all the same, the single most prestigious school outside of the capital proper. It was just as much an invitation-only military institution as…for lack of a more polite description, a path to power. It was the straightest path to the Seneschal Board, or at least, long term employment in an associated company.

I remembered reading about it, and until that moment, I had never imagined it as anything but a recurring backdrop in the history of Veter’s most influential. I stumbled for words, tripping over my tongue as shame crawled up my throat.

“I can't afford anything like that. If I need to be in the academy to go with you, then I cannot go,” I said. “Everything we earn here goes towards paying back what is spent on our board and debts. Every piso I own is spoken for, and will be for a long time.”

Tyhrus produced a payment slip from his pocket and set it in my palm. “The funding for your development is no object.”

“Your outstanding debts were paid by the Seneschals, with a small number of debts voided from my seat as administrator to fill the gaps,” he elaborated. “It should be evident that the Academy invests a great deal of faith into its prospects, and you are, in this regard, no exception."

“I'm not old enough to sign, either!”

Tyhrus stopped in thought. After composing himself, he spoke again. “My formality may have only served to make things sound more complicated than they are.”

He placed a hand on my shoulder. "From today on, I will be acting in an official capacity as your parent. You will be invited to live in my personal residence, should you feel comfortable enough to move from the dormitory — all provided, of course, that you wouldn't prefer to live elsewhere, so long as it is within daily travelling distance to the Seneschal Shield Academy.”

If only barely, I thought I saw something change in him.

In his corrections, Tyhrus betrayed a hint of insecurity. The composure so befitting of his office had slipped clean off his shoulders, briefly revealing something more empathetic. Something more familiar. I couldn’t shake the feeling.

Had these appearances really only been maintained to impress me? Did that matter to him?

“Of course, while I have no intention of forcing you to act as family, I do insist you consider my offer.” He tugged at the edge of his coat, folding his fingers in his lap. “You are already enrolled, and as I’m sure you know, it would do no good for a student of such a prestigious academy — and it is quite prestigious, as I'm sure you're aware — to live in such bare conditions. The worst gift one can waste is, after all —”

Looking up from my lap, I flattened my palms onto my knees and interrupted his rehearsed speech.

“— I’d be happy to go with you, Master Tyhrus.”

At those words, he froze.

Whether or not he was willing to say it, I could tell from the look on his face that he'd expected to spend far more time convincing me on the idea.

Just as suddenly, he let out something like a half-sent chuckle, extending an upturned palm towards me. The cuff, unbuttoned, draped loosely as it moved, swaying a bit like a deacon’s robe.

“Just call me Tyhrus… and there’s no need to be so formal about things. Just because it’s my disease doesn't mean you’ve got to fall sick over it.”

I grabbed his hand and he squeezed mine. His grip was both firm and gentle. Warm, but rehearsed. He was a proper man of business, just like in the books.

I’d never known my father, and I still felt that was true. To gain something was to lose it one day, and staring that down, I felt myself standing at the edge of a cliff.

“Thank you, Tyhrus.”

Even so, I felt that I might come to know my father in the years ahead.