Friday, March 19, 2004
As It Is
Part I: Perfect
...you have to believe / in the power of love...
A girl gave a heavy sigh as the song ended, drifting off into a quiet instrumental before falling altogether silent. Believe. Yeah, right. She had lost the ability to believe long ago. Believers were idiots. And love? Hah! Love was a lie. Love was a cruel joke played on the innocent, the guiltless.
She knew.
She'd been in love once.
He'd been a pitiful specimen of a guy, thin and wiry and blonde and a full foot shorter than she was. He played sports, sure: Tennis. And that only because his mom made him. He hated sports. He certainly wasn't hot, by any definition of the word; he wasn't even cute. He talked with a weird lisp, and people made fun of him for it all the time. He wore thick glasses because he liked them. He told bad jokes. He smiled too often. He was a bookworm, pure and simple.
He was perfect.
A boy sighed as his computer screen went dark, leaving his room in an inky blackness. He didn't like the light. It was too revealing. It might tell the world about his innermost, most secret thoughts, his dreams, his desires.
His love.
He shook his head bemusedly at himself. He had no right to talk about love. It was an infatuation, that was all. Sure, there had been moments, moments that a solid couple would be jealous of, moments of pure bliss in the most unlikely places (Biology class stood out sharply in his mind, as did a certain field trip), but what were a few instants? Flukes, that was all. They were nothing. It was all just wishful thinking on his part.
But they were so real...she was so real...
She was tall and dark, not particularly thin but not fat, either. She didn't hate sports; she just preferred that other people played them. She didn't have an accent, unless she was speaking in Spanish. Her voice was completely and totally neutral. She had her own peculiar dialect, a strange mixture of English and American English and Spanish and Japanese and Quenya and computer lingo and what she referred to as "otaku-ese." She toned it down, usually, but he had heard her angry, heard her exuberant, heard her devastated. He knew and understood her language. He could speak it fluently. She wore glasses because she didn't feel like dealing with the hassles of contacts. She played the flute. She didn't tell jokes. She didn't smile enough, didn't show her twisted and chipped and slightly yellowed and absolutely stunning teeth. She had more hobbies than she could handle at once. She was a weirdo, pure and simple.
She was perfect.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Part II: Popcorn and Sugar Cookies
The school's halls were empty, or nearly so; it was seven in the morning. Classes didn't start until 8:15. There was no reason to be there for a half-hour at the earliest. And yet she was there, computer bag full of books and schoolwork and CDs slung over one shoulder and a folder full of Japanese lessons clutched in one hand, ID case hanging dutifully around her neck. She paced the halls, taking a turn around the back corridors and breezing through the technology section, passing through the Commons wiith nary a glance at the police officer and then pulling up in front of the library, legs stretched and shoulder aching from the weight of her computer bag. The doors were locked. No surprise, the library wasn't supposed to open for another twenty minutes anyway. She retraced her steps and found a seat into the water fountain set into the wall, opening her notes and beginning to study. Five minutes ticked by slowly. She began to hear voices, distant but coming closer. The band hall was open. It was time to leave. She tucked her notes back into the front pocket of her folder and slipped her pen into her ID case, swung her feet back down onto the floor, and was gone before the first of the early-morning band members had the chance to sense her presence.
She had been in the band, once. Two years previously. She had given it her all, spent all of her spare time practicing and helping others, had even organized a morning sectional to bring up the low-level players up to speed, but it hadn't worked out. The other players weren't willing to put forth the effort. She knew she was just wasting her time and energy, so she quit. The few members who had stayed had never forgiven her. She had spent the last two years avoiding anything to do with the band.
Snapping out of her thoughts, she realized she had walked back to the library entrance. Still locked. The librarians were late, as usual. No matter; she set her bag on the floor and leaned against the locker, relishing the relative peace of the school and breathing in the strangely scented air.
The air was the whole reason she liked standing in this particular hallway, really. The library was great, sure, but by 7:45 it was packed with students, loud and noisy and no better than the other congregation areas. No, it was the hall she came for. The air had a slight chill, enough to make her think about putting on a sweater but never enough to be uncomfortable. And the temperature was counterbalanced by the queer, somehow warm smell of sugar cookies and popcorn. She had yet to figure out where it came from - it certainly wasn't the cafeteria, even though the kitchens were only about fifty yards away, and there were no classrooms nearby, so it couldn't have come in with any teacher. It was as if the smell just appeared there in the early morning, as if by magic, and disappeared by lunchtime.
The last ten minutes slipped away and the library door opened from the inside. The librarian greeted her with a small smile and a handshake; it was nothing unusual for the girl to be there well before the library was open. Actually, it was more unusual for her not to be there. She took her normal seat, in the middle of the lower area but sheltered behind the wall, equidistant from the History and Foreign Languages sections and only a few feet from the little computer island, and spread her papers over the table. It was 7:30; her day had begun. Japanese lessons were replaced with World History worksheets, essays, and Chemistry notes.
The door opened. She looked up in surprise; no one else was ever this early! She glanced up. It was a fairly short guy, long light-colored hair and black T-shirt. She couldn't see his face. He was bent over the front desk filling out the sign-in sheet. The girl gave a small shrug and turned back to her work.
"May I see your ID, sir?" the librarian asked politely. The girl heard the chair sliding back along the carpeted floor as she got up.
"Sure. Here."
The girl froze.
It was him.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Part III: Equilibrium
All's fair in love and war.
Riiiiight. A boy shook his head in amusement. Love, war, what was the difference? Love your enemy. That's all it was. A battle for dominance, but over what - land, money, power, your heart - it didn't matter. It was all a war.
They had made peace, once. There had been stability. The fighting had stopped, replaced by the blissfull calm of oneness...and then it had all fallen apart.
The war was back on.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Part IV: The Joys of Webmastering
Tap tap. Tap. Tap-tap-taptap-tap taptaptap tap. Tap tap. Tap. Click.
Silence.
"Damn!" A sigh of frustration; a curtain of hair falling around a grimacing face. Another murmured curse. Long fingers danced over the keyboard again, this time to a more productive end. The boy's face lit up in a wide smile. "Got ya, ya bugger," he murmured.
"Got what?" someone asked.
"Huh? Oh, I've been trying to get this color scheme to work," he said, not sparing a glance to see who was talking to him. He didn't have to. It was her. His voice was as calm and controlled as he could make it, but he couldn't master the flush rising up his cheeks, so he kept his face turned squarely to the screen in front of him.
He heard a chair scraping back, and then she was there, leaning over his shoulder to look at the page. "Hmmm... Have you tried making that background a shade darker? With, I don't know, maybe a pale yellow text? That'll make it easier on the eyes, and it'll fit your graphics better."
The boy shook his head. "I've tried that. I can't find the right name. It always gives me these weird oranges."
"Here, let me try." He stood and gave her the chair, watching with more than a little curiousity as she typed in the school homepage.
"What are you doing?"
"There's a really nice color chart I know of, that I think will really help," she said, not looking up. "Let's see...ah, here it is. You click on the colors you want, like this, and it'll bring them up off to the side and overlay them for you. That way you can see what it looks like before you go change all your code."
The boy gave an appreciative nod as she clicked a handful of blues and yellows. "The second and third ones go well," he said, leaning in for a better look.
The girl's shoulders tensed, and he straightened quickly. His cheeks turned another shade of red.
"Er, yeah... Where's your source code?"
"It's on Geocities," he stammered. "First window on the left..." She pulled it up and replaced some of his text with seemingly random series of letters and digits. He let out an appreciative whistle when she refreshed his page. "Wow...that's a huge improvement already."
She nodded. "Yeah. Now all you have to do is replace the light blue and gold tags with the colors on this one, and you should be good."
He winced. "Guess I should get started then. I've got about ten pages, and they're all tables and stuff..."
"Ouch."
"Yeah."
She tapped her finger on the mouse thoughtfully, skimming over the page. "Have you ever tried CSS?"
"What's that?"
"Cascading Style Sheets. It's basically a slightly fancier version of HTML. It's kinda weird at first, but once you figure it out it's great. I use it all the time. You can set it up so that you only have to change one page to change your entire site, and if you have a part that you want to be different you can change just that part too. Here, let me show you." She opened up the Geocities window again and selected Create New, typing in "style.css" as the filename.
"Okay, here's how it works. You've got a body tag, just like in HTML, except that you use the curly brackets instead of the arrow things. You can put in background color, scrollbar properties, font face and size, all sorts of stuff... And then down here you can play with your links. You know, get rid of the underline, change all the colors, give it a background when you roll the mouse over it, all that fun junk that the better sites have. And if you want a special look for, say, your tables, you can add that in up here, above the body tag." There was a minute or two of furious typing, and then she clicked Save. "And all you have to do to put it into your pages is link to it, like this..." She put in a short string of code that the light-haired boy didn't follow.
"That's awesome," he said, looking at the page. The colors were all off - for sake of demonstration she'd used colors like "rose" and "fireorange," and the overall effect was extremely tacky - but even so he could see how much faster the page had loaded and how many fewer errors there were.
"Isn't it, though?" she said, sounding rather proud of herself. "I'll e-mail you some good links tonight, so you can go learn how to do it. For now just go ahead and play around with what I already wrote; copy and paste the link into the other pages and get rid of the extra tags, and you should be home free. What's this for, anyway?"
"Oh, it's just something a friend asked me to work on," he replied. "Eventually it's going to be his fanart archive. But he's even more clueless about HTML than I am, so he asked me to make the page for him."
The girl opened her mouth to say something, but the bell cut her short. She glanced at her watch. "Crap! I've got to go - my class is on the other end of the building, and I'm usually there by now!" She snagged her bag and nearly ran for the exit.
"Hey, thanks," he called to her retreating back. "You really helped me a lot."
"Anytime," she said over her shoulder, giving him a small half-wave as she blew through the door.
Making a conscious effort to wipe the stupid grin off his face, he logged off first Geocities and then the computer, and made a beeline towards his first period class.
-----------------------------
[A/N] Not one of my favorite works. More than anything else, this was written as an outlet; I may occasionally add to it, or it may get dropped permanently. It was never meant to become anything big. And expect the style to change a lot; like I said, this is just a random thing, so I'll tend to switch into whatever style I'm currently using in my other fics.
Random Quote:
The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.
- George Bernard Shaw
...you have to believe / in the power of love...
A girl gave a heavy sigh as the song ended, drifting off into a quiet instrumental before falling altogether silent. Believe. Yeah, right. She had lost the ability to believe long ago. Believers were idiots. And love? Hah! Love was a lie. Love was a cruel joke played on the innocent, the guiltless.
She knew.
She'd been in love once.
He'd been a pitiful specimen of a guy, thin and wiry and blonde and a full foot shorter than she was. He played sports, sure: Tennis. And that only because his mom made him. He hated sports. He certainly wasn't hot, by any definition of the word; he wasn't even cute. He talked with a weird lisp, and people made fun of him for it all the time. He wore thick glasses because he liked them. He told bad jokes. He smiled too often. He was a bookworm, pure and simple.
He was perfect.
A boy sighed as his computer screen went dark, leaving his room in an inky blackness. He didn't like the light. It was too revealing. It might tell the world about his innermost, most secret thoughts, his dreams, his desires.
His love.
He shook his head bemusedly at himself. He had no right to talk about love. It was an infatuation, that was all. Sure, there had been moments, moments that a solid couple would be jealous of, moments of pure bliss in the most unlikely places (Biology class stood out sharply in his mind, as did a certain field trip), but what were a few instants? Flukes, that was all. They were nothing. It was all just wishful thinking on his part.
But they were so real...she was so real...
She was tall and dark, not particularly thin but not fat, either. She didn't hate sports; she just preferred that other people played them. She didn't have an accent, unless she was speaking in Spanish. Her voice was completely and totally neutral. She had her own peculiar dialect, a strange mixture of English and American English and Spanish and Japanese and Quenya and computer lingo and what she referred to as "otaku-ese." She toned it down, usually, but he had heard her angry, heard her exuberant, heard her devastated. He knew and understood her language. He could speak it fluently. She wore glasses because she didn't feel like dealing with the hassles of contacts. She played the flute. She didn't tell jokes. She didn't smile enough, didn't show her twisted and chipped and slightly yellowed and absolutely stunning teeth. She had more hobbies than she could handle at once. She was a weirdo, pure and simple.
She was perfect.
Part II: Popcorn and Sugar Cookies
The school's halls were empty, or nearly so; it was seven in the morning. Classes didn't start until 8:15. There was no reason to be there for a half-hour at the earliest. And yet she was there, computer bag full of books and schoolwork and CDs slung over one shoulder and a folder full of Japanese lessons clutched in one hand, ID case hanging dutifully around her neck. She paced the halls, taking a turn around the back corridors and breezing through the technology section, passing through the Commons wiith nary a glance at the police officer and then pulling up in front of the library, legs stretched and shoulder aching from the weight of her computer bag. The doors were locked. No surprise, the library wasn't supposed to open for another twenty minutes anyway. She retraced her steps and found a seat into the water fountain set into the wall, opening her notes and beginning to study. Five minutes ticked by slowly. She began to hear voices, distant but coming closer. The band hall was open. It was time to leave. She tucked her notes back into the front pocket of her folder and slipped her pen into her ID case, swung her feet back down onto the floor, and was gone before the first of the early-morning band members had the chance to sense her presence.
She had been in the band, once. Two years previously. She had given it her all, spent all of her spare time practicing and helping others, had even organized a morning sectional to bring up the low-level players up to speed, but it hadn't worked out. The other players weren't willing to put forth the effort. She knew she was just wasting her time and energy, so she quit. The few members who had stayed had never forgiven her. She had spent the last two years avoiding anything to do with the band.
Snapping out of her thoughts, she realized she had walked back to the library entrance. Still locked. The librarians were late, as usual. No matter; she set her bag on the floor and leaned against the locker, relishing the relative peace of the school and breathing in the strangely scented air.
The air was the whole reason she liked standing in this particular hallway, really. The library was great, sure, but by 7:45 it was packed with students, loud and noisy and no better than the other congregation areas. No, it was the hall she came for. The air had a slight chill, enough to make her think about putting on a sweater but never enough to be uncomfortable. And the temperature was counterbalanced by the queer, somehow warm smell of sugar cookies and popcorn. She had yet to figure out where it came from - it certainly wasn't the cafeteria, even though the kitchens were only about fifty yards away, and there were no classrooms nearby, so it couldn't have come in with any teacher. It was as if the smell just appeared there in the early morning, as if by magic, and disappeared by lunchtime.
The last ten minutes slipped away and the library door opened from the inside. The librarian greeted her with a small smile and a handshake; it was nothing unusual for the girl to be there well before the library was open. Actually, it was more unusual for her not to be there. She took her normal seat, in the middle of the lower area but sheltered behind the wall, equidistant from the History and Foreign Languages sections and only a few feet from the little computer island, and spread her papers over the table. It was 7:30; her day had begun. Japanese lessons were replaced with World History worksheets, essays, and Chemistry notes.
The door opened. She looked up in surprise; no one else was ever this early! She glanced up. It was a fairly short guy, long light-colored hair and black T-shirt. She couldn't see his face. He was bent over the front desk filling out the sign-in sheet. The girl gave a small shrug and turned back to her work.
"May I see your ID, sir?" the librarian asked politely. The girl heard the chair sliding back along the carpeted floor as she got up.
"Sure. Here."
The girl froze.
It was him.
Part III: Equilibrium
All's fair in love and war.
Riiiiight. A boy shook his head in amusement. Love, war, what was the difference? Love your enemy. That's all it was. A battle for dominance, but over what - land, money, power, your heart - it didn't matter. It was all a war.
They had made peace, once. There had been stability. The fighting had stopped, replaced by the blissfull calm of oneness...and then it had all fallen apart.
The war was back on.
Part IV: The Joys of Webmastering
Tap tap. Tap. Tap-tap-taptap-tap taptaptap tap. Tap tap. Tap. Click.
Silence.
"Damn!" A sigh of frustration; a curtain of hair falling around a grimacing face. Another murmured curse. Long fingers danced over the keyboard again, this time to a more productive end. The boy's face lit up in a wide smile. "Got ya, ya bugger," he murmured.
"Got what?" someone asked.
"Huh? Oh, I've been trying to get this color scheme to work," he said, not sparing a glance to see who was talking to him. He didn't have to. It was her. His voice was as calm and controlled as he could make it, but he couldn't master the flush rising up his cheeks, so he kept his face turned squarely to the screen in front of him.
He heard a chair scraping back, and then she was there, leaning over his shoulder to look at the page. "Hmmm... Have you tried making that background a shade darker? With, I don't know, maybe a pale yellow text? That'll make it easier on the eyes, and it'll fit your graphics better."
The boy shook his head. "I've tried that. I can't find the right name. It always gives me these weird oranges."
"Here, let me try." He stood and gave her the chair, watching with more than a little curiousity as she typed in the school homepage.
"What are you doing?"
"There's a really nice color chart I know of, that I think will really help," she said, not looking up. "Let's see...ah, here it is. You click on the colors you want, like this, and it'll bring them up off to the side and overlay them for you. That way you can see what it looks like before you go change all your code."
The boy gave an appreciative nod as she clicked a handful of blues and yellows. "The second and third ones go well," he said, leaning in for a better look.
The girl's shoulders tensed, and he straightened quickly. His cheeks turned another shade of red.
"Er, yeah... Where's your source code?"
"It's on Geocities," he stammered. "First window on the left..." She pulled it up and replaced some of his text with seemingly random series of letters and digits. He let out an appreciative whistle when she refreshed his page. "Wow...that's a huge improvement already."
She nodded. "Yeah. Now all you have to do is replace the light blue and gold tags with the colors on this one, and you should be good."
He winced. "Guess I should get started then. I've got about ten pages, and they're all tables and stuff..."
"Ouch."
"Yeah."
She tapped her finger on the mouse thoughtfully, skimming over the page. "Have you ever tried CSS?"
"What's that?"
"Cascading Style Sheets. It's basically a slightly fancier version of HTML. It's kinda weird at first, but once you figure it out it's great. I use it all the time. You can set it up so that you only have to change one page to change your entire site, and if you have a part that you want to be different you can change just that part too. Here, let me show you." She opened up the Geocities window again and selected Create New, typing in "style.css" as the filename.
"Okay, here's how it works. You've got a body tag, just like in HTML, except that you use the curly brackets instead of the arrow things. You can put in background color, scrollbar properties, font face and size, all sorts of stuff... And then down here you can play with your links. You know, get rid of the underline, change all the colors, give it a background when you roll the mouse over it, all that fun junk that the better sites have. And if you want a special look for, say, your tables, you can add that in up here, above the body tag." There was a minute or two of furious typing, and then she clicked Save. "And all you have to do to put it into your pages is link to it, like this..." She put in a short string of code that the light-haired boy didn't follow.
"That's awesome," he said, looking at the page. The colors were all off - for sake of demonstration she'd used colors like "rose" and "fireorange," and the overall effect was extremely tacky - but even so he could see how much faster the page had loaded and how many fewer errors there were.
"Isn't it, though?" she said, sounding rather proud of herself. "I'll e-mail you some good links tonight, so you can go learn how to do it. For now just go ahead and play around with what I already wrote; copy and paste the link into the other pages and get rid of the extra tags, and you should be home free. What's this for, anyway?"
"Oh, it's just something a friend asked me to work on," he replied. "Eventually it's going to be his fanart archive. But he's even more clueless about HTML than I am, so he asked me to make the page for him."
The girl opened her mouth to say something, but the bell cut her short. She glanced at her watch. "Crap! I've got to go - my class is on the other end of the building, and I'm usually there by now!" She snagged her bag and nearly ran for the exit.
"Hey, thanks," he called to her retreating back. "You really helped me a lot."
"Anytime," she said over her shoulder, giving him a small half-wave as she blew through the door.
Making a conscious effort to wipe the stupid grin off his face, he logged off first Geocities and then the computer, and made a beeline towards his first period class.
[A/N] Not one of my favorite works. More than anything else, this was written as an outlet; I may occasionally add to it, or it may get dropped permanently. It was never meant to become anything big. And expect the style to change a lot; like I said, this is just a random thing, so I'll tend to switch into whatever style I'm currently using in my other fics.
Random Quote:
The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.
- George Bernard Shaw
// posted by Ha'ri @ 3/19/2004 12:26:00 PM 
