Young Gods
You enter the darkened gymnasium and hear the sound of fists pounding a punching bag. The divider prevents you from seeing the boxer from the entrance of the room. So one of the other three is in there… which one? You do a quick mental checklist. No shouting. Not Angel. Rules out the boys, leaving the two girls. You listen to the footsteps. She jumps around, fighting like a wolf. Attack violently, retreat back, lick wounds if need be, attack again. It’s how she fights, it’s how she lives. She is a wolf, she is a fighter, she is a protector, she is Liar.
Liar is not her real name, but it’s the one you all prefer. It’s the word a cruel man cut into her back. It has scarred and stayed there and she carries it as a symbol of pride and strength. Truth be told, none of your names are your real names; they are all other words that represent your pride and strength.
No point in calling out. If you can hear her, she can hear you without trying. You enter and see her facing the other way, her pale skin illuminated by the sunlight above her head. She is wearing exercise attire- running shorts that clearly show the thorn crown tattoo wrapping around her right thigh, a sports bra showing off the scar on her back and a tattoo you all have over her heart, her hands and bare feet are wrapped in cloth bands for practice, and her long golden hair that she is so proud of is tied into a braid that bounces off her hips. From most accounts, minus the scar, she looks like a completely normal teenage girl punching a bag, except for the black cloth wrapped around her head and falling with her hair, blindfolding her.
Suddenly, the pounding noise stops. She is standing there, gripping the punching bag between her hands, her back facing you. Slowly, her head moves so her unseeing face is looking at the ground. The world then freezes. You both stand in your places, unmoving. For a few seconds, you stay like that. You know what she’s doing. She’s taking a mental checklist, just like you were doing when you walked in. She’s not going to ask who’s there; she is both too confident and too prideful. Finally, she decides she knows who is there.
“Hey, Axel.” Her musical voice carries well across the large room.
You smile, because she is smiling. “Hullo.” You both cross the room to each other, her walking in a perfectly straight line even though the blindfold is on.
She wraps her arms around your chest, and you hug her back and lightly kiss her forehead, just above the blindfold.
It’s often been thought that your group has some sort of foursome romantic interest, because you always are so close to each other. But you don’t, it’s just the way you are as best friends that have been through a lot together.
She backs away and reaches her hands towards your face. Slowly, as she has always done, she brushes her hands over the features of your face: your cheekbones, your nose, your chin. Her long pink fingernails tickle your face slightly at the strange, but not unusual, mannerism. You all know why she does it; you all choose to not talk about it, because you know it’s in her blood to do it. It’s also the reason she wears the blindfold.
When she puts her hands down, you reach to the back of her head and slowly untie the knot on the blindfold, careful not to worry her. When you take down the cloth, you are for about the sixteen-thousandth time startled by her shockingly blue eyes surrounded with mascara. Apparently, when she and her brother were born one of the nurses thought the babies were possessed by demons due to the brightness of their eyes. Well, technically, her eyes. Her brother had the same color, just his happened to be clouded over and blind.
The first few years of their lives Liar and her twin brother were impossible to separate. They never left each other’s sides- the sister on the left and the brother on the right. They had their own language that made sense to no one but them, and when she was old enough to figure out how to do it, and was allowed to, Liar began wearing a blindfold to keep her the same as her brother. Because of her on and off voluntary blindness she developed the incredible hearing and sensing ability of a blind person even though she still had sight.
There was a reason she was destroyed mentally and emotionally when her brother was killed by the same disease that blinded him.
You never met the boy, he died before you met Liar at age six, but you thank God every day he existed and Liar turned out the way she did. You wouldn’t change her, or the others, for the world.
“Ax? You okay?” Her voice spurs you out of your thoughts.
You look at her face, at the blue jewels staring at you with concern, and look down. “Yeah, I’m good.”
She tilts her head slightly, confused. You clear your throat and decide to change the subject as she walks to her duffel bag, the contents of which are strewn on the floor. That’s your Liar, classy as always.
“今、袋を使用できますか?” “Can I use the bag now?” you ask.
“絶対に。なぜ我々 は日本語で話しているか?” “Absolutely… why are we speaking in Japanese?” she replies, without looking at you.
“Your fighting style just now. It was Kenjutsu form. Samurai style. Or did you not notice?”
She smirks at you. “Very observant, young Padawan.”
“I’m older than you, you know.”
“You don’t act it.”
That was true. While often reckless (second only to you in the often reckless group of four), headstrong, overly emotional, impulsive, prideful, anger-prone, violent, and strangely independent (likely the result of being permanently separated from the person she was born to be with her entire life by none other than Death himself), Liar was the youngest but most mature out of the four of you.
You pull off your T-shirt, grab the tape on the floor, and begin wrapping your wrists the way your teacher taught you and your friends to years ago. You look at Liar, who is standing in front of the wall covered by a huge mirror, reflecting an image of the whole room. She had taken the braid out of her hair, and had begun brushing it. You hear a soft, light, musical noise, and realize she’s singing.
“But do you feel like a young god? And the two of us are just young gods, and we’ll be flying through the streets with the people underneath, and they’re running, running, running…”
You know the song. You ought to, considering she has been playing that album nonstop for nigh a week.
As she sets down the hairbrush and continues singing the chorus, her voice gains confidence and volume. Slowly, as she doesn’t mean to, her hips and arms begin swaying to the melody of song she is singing.
You don’t mean to, but you finish the chorus with her.
“and they’re running, running, running…”
She stops singing, instead takes on a much harder form of dancing along to the song you now sing alone.
“He says, ’Oh, baby girl, don't get cut on my edges, I'm the king of everything and oh, my tongue is a weapon-'” You are suddenly cut off by an unexpected banging noise from the door. By the mirror Liar nearly jumps out of her skin.
“¿Hola? ¿Niños pequeños? Are you here?” An old woman’s voice with a thick accent comes from the source of the banging. You smile, and Liar lights up.
“¡Abuela!” She shouts happily, and the two of you begin running to the door. There, you find your abuela, a Hispanic woman who is related to none of you but whom you love and respect as another grandmother.
As it turns out, Abuela had knocked over an old storage shelf, which you and Liar pick up and set back without a problem. That done, the smiling girl followed tradition and properly bent down and kissed the back of the old woman’s right hand; you followed suite.
The two women then speak in a flurry of Spanish- you understand of course, but don’t pay attention much. The two talk about what had happened in the few months since the teens had last seen their abuela.
Eventually, Abuela prompts that her niños pequeños (for some reason she still calls all of you “little children”, even though you all have at least a foot of height and 50 pounds of weight more compared to her) go get changed into more street-worthy clothes- “it’s not good for a young niña or niño go around like that!” – and you and Liar walk back into the dark gymnasium.
“Ax, what’s up?” she asks you.
“What do you mean?”
She shrugs. “You’re quiet,” she remarks, not looking at you.
“You’re making up for it.”
Slight growl from her. She’s trying to be nice, you think, not an easy task for her.
She starts humming and keeps humming until you leave the building together.
Suddenly, you start laughing, eliciting a quizzical look from her.
“You’re weird, Liar,” you tell her.
She stares at you. “Thanks, I think.”
She begins singing again, her lovely voice filling the air, and you soon join her as you walk together to meet the others.
“He says, ‘Ooh, baby girl, you know we're gonna be legends, I'm a king and you're a queen and we will stumble through heaven, If there's a light at the end, it's just the sun in your eyes, I know you wanna go to heaven, but you're human tonight’…"
~
Song: Young Gods by Halsey
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