#jihm

[incorrect-chrystal-virtue]

John: Be careful when you cut the onions, they can make you cry.

Kim: NOT IF YOU MAKE THEM CRY FIRST.

Kim: *violently stabs the onion*

[fair-dinkum-mechanic]

did anybody ask for Tayler/Jihm backstory? NO? because I didnt but I wanted to do it anyway and I had a nice idea andI had to get it out before it got lost in my trash neurons. It’s not perfect but it’s nice.

Tayler raised her eyebrow and leaned forward. The bulky man turned up his nose, rising the right side of his upper lip as he did so, and turned away. Another signature grunt left his throat.

The Princess let out an instant loud 'Ha!' in reply.

He turned back and his eyelids lowered.

"What?" He mumbled in slight irritation.

It was Tayler's turn to flick her nose up and away from him, but she looked down, not away. Speaking down to her twin brother had taught her well. 'Don't scratch drawings into the floorboards, Keltoi.' The words echoed like nails on glass in her memory 'The Tainted will tell Father, Keltoi.'

It wasn't like that with Jihm though. It was all in good fun, and at least for her, in high spirits.

"You did it again." She pointed a long, lazy finger at his sitting, hunched figure. "You tried to speak, but only groaning came out."

Jihm rolled his glowing blue eyes and rubbed his fat hands down his tanned cheeks and around his thick neck.

"Sorry." He mumbled.

Tayler let out a sigh and slid her polished red nails through her strands of straight black hair. The library of the college was musty and old, nothing like the rest of the kingdom. Her people prided themselves on fine crafted marble structures, with golden trims and gems fit into ever possible crevice. Not the library though. The sunlight didn't catch on anything in there, and it didn't slide down the bannisters and spread out onto the floor like it did in the castle. No, there it caught at the windowsills and warmed a small square patch of floor that only slightly shifted during the day. Tayler and Jihm were sat at a dark brown wooden table that fell in such a spot. It was warm in winterstime, when they grey clouds would break and let the light through to breathe some kind of life into the landscape.

Tayler flicked to the five-hundred and thirty-first page of 'Astral Elements and their Qualities' by Fresick of Il'shoss. The pages seemed to be printed on some sort of animal skin, and she'd no idea why. Why not get with the times and use paper like every other normal Savil did? Why was Fresick so special? Perhaps he was one of those weirdos who offered to buy people's dead pets and stuffed them full of leaves or teddy bear fluff. Tayler's skin cralwed as her delicate fingers tickled the page, searching for what she was interested in.

'...and such a limitation is lain out for elementists by Angels as a ways to prevent unwanted infection between life and the natural happening elements of the soil, of which only the O'lai are capable of using...'

That's not what the fuck she was looking for.

She flicked her hair in frustration and flicked the heavy, floppy pages in her fingertips, back to the damn index.

Jihm grunted again.

"It looks like it's too difficult to find, we should stop."

Without a thought she slammed her hand, open palmed, onto the wood in front of him. His trunks of arms didn't even budge, and she'd made a point to put a lot of force behind the blow. The boy didn't flinch. This angered her.

"Are you really fine with failing your test tomorrow? You're just gonna walk into that room, Professor Harley standing there with her one bung eye, and grunt at her?" the Princess gave an exasperated sigh "I have enough trouble trying to teach my own brother, don't you start giving me shit too muscle cake."

He raised a dirt coloured eyebrow at her.

"Muscle cake?" he repeated.

"Good insults aren't worth being wasted on you." She bit back.

Truth was she didn't have any witty insults for a hugely muscled man that she could skim off the top of her brain in a stitch.

Jihm groaned and streched his arms out behind his head, staring out the window at the still pond with red and yellow willows crowding around it, dropping their small leaves onto the surface and yellowing grass around them.

"I don't want any of this, really." He sighed.

Tayler ignored him. Not because she was annoyed, but because she had no idea how to react when people got so sentimental. Did she reach out and pat his bicep and whisper 'there, there' softly until he shed a tear? That was not something she'd be doing.

The two sat silently, as Tayler madly rushed about in the large book to try and find anything, anything about imbuing metals with Astral essences. It didn't come, and it was frustrating her beyond belief. She adored reading the elemental books of the college's library. Of course she'd memorised any pertaining to fire cover to cover, but she was also very interested in the water school lately. The way the books spoke of the ability to push entire rapids aside and stride though as if it were nothing, and more alarmingly, the ability to twist the water of a person's body about into anything the wielder desired, it piqued her curiosity. Probably because she'd never seen a water bearing elementist before.

"Do you like being here?" Jihm had asked.

Tayler took a while to actually pay him mind, and her eyes widened as she realised she needed to give an answer.

"Oh, um, well, yeah?" She screwed up her nose as if it were obvious.

Jihm sighed and began to fiddle about with the corner of the book's cover absently.

"I just thought with being the princess you'd have a lot more to worry about."

She didn't know how to respond, and her face morphed into the closest expression of a question mark she could get.

"I like my fire though." She said "It's part of who I am, and I use it every day. That's what I keep telling my brother, the sooner you actually embrace it as part of your being and not something everybody is forcing you to do, you'll be much happier and find it much more natural."

Jihm actually let out a laugh. Sure, it was a grunt of air from his slightly parted lips, but it still counted.

"That would be difficult for him. He's got the Astral energy in him. I don't know how anybody could embrace that."

Tayler rolled her eyes and clicked her fingers in front of Jihm's distracted eyes.

"You have it too. Stop bitching about it, and let's focus!"

He looked slightly affronted, which probably meant he was extremely affronted if it warranted an expression change.

"I didn't know that power over light was an Astral energy."

Tayler sighed and returned her head to the book.

"It's a gray area, that's why you're not shunned but my brother is." She mumbled, not giving up on finding even a single sentence that spoke of holy light. "Nitcharia was using the same ability you have only last year when she fended off that attack almost single handedly, and they didn't burn her. So see what you're capable of? Just stop grunting and listen to your tutor."

He summed her up for a few moments and leaned his back into the wicker chair and crossed his arms, looking back out the window.

"I wish I could just be a medic, like my father." He sighed.

Enough with the deep emotional contemplation. Boy, she probably should've let him stay silent and stoic, it was less complicated that way. She did feel sorry for him though, she'd always just thought he'd never wanted anything else. It was her fault he was in that position after all...

"Just because they're fattening my elemental abilities up to make me your suitor."

There it was. The thing she was just starting to feel bad about. Even the thought of holding him closer than three feet made her stomach turn. He was a friend, nothing more.

"I won't make your my suitor, like, no offence." She waved him off.

He let out another one of those weird laughs without actually laughing.

"That's not what my father or your father seems to think. They'll have me High Duke as soon as your Trial is over."

She looked to him and raised her eyebrows.

"Keltoi could just as easily excel over me in that."

He raised his eyebrows back at her, but he didn't need to say anything for her to get his point.

"It could happen, the training might pay off!" She lied to herself and him.

What they spoke of was years off yet though, they were still only seventeen, much too young to be thinking of such adult issues. It would happen one day, but for that time, they needed to let it fade into the background, like some kind of omnious lingering black fog that clouded their entire existence. It wasn't pretty but there wasn't much either of them could do about it, the adults had decided. Or... Maybe there was something they could do about it after all.

"Do you really want to be a medic?" Tayler asked quietly, closing the cover of the book over, giving up.

She leaned in so nobody lurking around in the shelves would hear.

He nodded slowly, a little confused.

The Princess gave him a knowing smile and tapped her nose.

"Then I promise, if I'm picked as High Lord, I won't choose you as my suitor. You'll be able to run off and pour alcohol in bloody cuts if you really want to that badly."

His eyes glazed with a flick of a sparkle.

"I don't think..." he trailed off back into his own mind.

She shushed him.

"If you promise to keep it a secret, forever, and try hard as long as we're both still at this college. We'll want both our parents to think I'll pick you out from the line up, it's the best chance for both of us."

A slight upward curve tickled the right side of his lips. Oh, oh that was supposed to be a smile. Tayler smiled herself.

"You have my word, Jihm. I might be a bit bitchy, but I won't screw you over." She giggled.

He reached out and took her hand in his gently. Oh, no it wasn't going that way was it? That was an alert, that's definitely not what she was aiming for. It's not like she knew what boys did when they wanted a girl, but she assumed contact played quite a significant role in it.

His weird pained looking smile left him and he gleamed at her and the sparkle returned.

"Thank you." He whispered, squeezing her hand tight.

She wavered and felt her own smile coming and going as she scrambled about for an appropriate response. All she did was nod and tug her hand away gently.

"You're welcome." She uttered, turning her head down and pushing the skin-paged book aside.

'Imbuing Weaponry - The Complete Savil Guide' by Teressa of Shin'till. Tayler flicked the cover open and checked the index.

Jihm leaned in and skimmed the chapters with her.