Deceitful

Language Class Part 1: Normal POV

The male of the twins cast a violet, lazy eye over at Ziel.

"You take him, Tyrie," he snapped at his twin, turning and stalking off. The female, whom Ziel now knew as Tyrie, seemed pretty used to it as she took it in her stride.

"What's your first class?" she asked him briskly.

"Er... Language-"

"Hey! Tye! His first class is the same as yours! You take him!" She yelled at the retreating back of her brother. At this Tye visibly rolled his eyes without Ziel even needing him to see his eyes. He turned back at them over his shoulder, still looking unconcerned.

"I don't know the way to the classroom," he replied. He then looked at Ziel for a moment longer, sighed then mentioned for him to follow.

"Right then! Bye, kid!" Ziel heard Tyrie say, turning to leave.

"Eh? Hang on! He said he didn't know the way!"

"He will soon enough," was all Tyrie had to say before completely vanishing. Ziel blinked and stared at the place where she disappeared.

"Oi! I don't have all day, you asshole!"

"C-coming!" Ziel called back, hurrying to catch up with Tye, who had already turned heel and started walking in the opposite direction. People were turning in the corridor to stare at the slender twin for his atrocious language. Of course, such language was common at Deceit High, but no one expected it from a twelve year old.

Seems like I ended up with another person with the same attitude as Poison… Ziel thought as he jogged behind Tye, who was walking with long and extremely brisk steps, and for some reason, running his hands over a wall. I wonder if he’s like Poison inside too…

Ziel ran forwards, accidentally-on-purpose brushing his hand against Tye’s arm. All Gifts had limitations, and Ziel had to touch the person who he wanted to read the mind of at least once (which made all the people being squeezed under one barrier to shelter from the rain a plus point). Touching Tye was most certainly not because of some perverted reason.

Ziel focused on the mind beside him. He felt his mind searching for the twin’s. Ziel stopped walking abruptly. Several people walked into him at once, cursing, books and bags spilling to the floor.

Ziel’s mind, for the mere second time, had came back empty-handed.

“Oi, dude! Don’t stop walking all of a sudden man!” numerous such yells sounded behind Ziel which he numbly took notice of. He turned and apologized distractedly to the four people whom he had caused some minor misfortune.

“What happened, moron?” The cool voice emitting from behind made Ziel jump forward, stepping on a burly guy’s books.

“Oi,” he stood up to full height, and quite expectantly, towered at least a head over Ziel and Tye. He picked up the book from the ground. It had a dirty shoe mark on it.

“S-sorry,” Ziel stuttered in the hooligan’s shadow.

“You think you can get away with just a pathetic ‘sorry’ eh?” he thundered. Under normal circumstances, the corridor would be completely deserted, but Deceit High was no normal school, and everyone in the corridor had stopped to watch the show.

He reached out, undoubtedly to get hold of the front of Ziel’s shirt, but his hand was swatted away before it even came close to Ziel. Tye was glaring at Ziel’s ‘attacker’. What was creepy was that every feature of Tye’s face was still the same as per normal, but his eyes blazed with cold anger. Now people were starting to clear out slowly as the temperature dropped a fair few degrees.

“What? You wanna fight it out, eh, you midget?” Nobody missed out the fact that the guy’s voice lacked the confidence it had when he threatened Ziel. Tye continued glaring for a few seconds. Ziel thought he was not going to answer, but he thought wrong.

“Before I answer, I would like to educate your damnablely undereducated brain on certain sensitive subjects. Number one, I am not a f***ing midget. And neither is Ziel. I am exactly 165 centimeters and that is much above the average height of twelve year old boys, and seeing as the moron here is only a little shorter than me, it is improbable that he will be under the average height, and on top of that, we are still freaking growing. In fact, you asshole, we haven’t even reached our growth spurts yet. As for you, you hooligan, how old are you? Sixteen? Seventeen? And yet you can’t be more ten centimeters more than us, and might I remind you that you ought to have stopped growing already. Although a fact remains that currently you are rather big and fat in dismal comparison to us. Most unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the size of your pathetic brain, which seems to have stopped growing since you were at the tender age of three. And as for the answer to your question, hell no, and may I please express my shock at knowing that you actually know the word midget. I understand it must have taken you years to learn how to pronounce it. I wish you luck in learning how to spell ‘apple’,”

Tye had said his rebuttal to the simple question of the bully’s very quickly, using a number of difficult words and slipping in an amusing number of insults. What was most applaudable was the fact that he had said it all in one breath.

The bully blinked a few times in the now still full corridor, seeing as everyone hanged back to hear Tye’s most amusing rebuttal, and in that few seconds, Tye had turned a beautiful, perfect 180 degrees, grabbed Ziel by the wrist and dragged him back into the crowd, losing the bully before he realised they were gone.

“You moronic dumbass…” Tye grumbled a few minutes later, still leading Ziel through a maze of corridors by the hand. “You sure gave me trouble,”

“Sorry…” he muttered, looking down at his feet, which turned out to be a bad move, as Tye made a few sharp turns and Ziel nearly bumped into a lot of people for not looking where he was going.

Tye glanced back at Ziel and gave a small sigh.

“It’s okay. Don’t worry about it. And keep up,” he added as they turned into a less crowed corridor and slipped his hand from Ziel’s wrist.

The lack of vulgarities in those few sentences made Ziel so stunned he was tempted to stop in his tracks once more. To cover up for his incredulousy, he asked.

“So, where are we going?”

“Language class. What else, ballet school?” Tye voice dripped with overflowing sarcasm.

“But, I thought you said you didn’t know where the classroom was… so how did you know?” It was Ziel’s turn to blink confusedly.

Tye turned back at him, the first sincere smile that Ziel seen on his face, albeit a small one.

“Kind and generous informants,” he answered, winking. Ziel only realised much later that Tye had sidestepped the question neatly.

0o0o0o0

A few minutes after crossing a connector to the classroom block, they arrived outside the language classroom. Tye looked at his watch.

“f***,” was the only word that passed through Tye’s lips, and Ziel assumed from that, having no watch himself, that it meant they were late.

Tye reached for the doorknob, and hesitated enough for the space of a heartbeat, but in that tiny space of time, the door had been opened from the inside, and there, in the doorway, stood a rather eccentric looking woman.

Her blond, shoulder length hair was half tied up in a single ponytail at the side of her head. She was wearing a grey, sleeveless shirt with a hood and light blue jeans that were artistically ripped at the knees. Although she was dressed like an adolescent, she had a certain motherly aura around her. She was shorter than Tye, and she was beaming up at him.

She turned back to face the class.

“See? That is what I call Language,” she exclaimed to a class of obviously incredulous students. She had a funny accent. Like a bit of everything. “What are your names?” She turned back to the duo.

“I’m Tye Fong,”

“Ziel Heaven,”

“Alright then, Tye and Ziel, if you will take your seats,” she gestured to a cluster of empty seats at the front of the classroom. “I am Professor Wither, and I am your Language teacher, 宝贝儿,”

Ziel did not understand the last bit of what the Professor had said, but Tye grimaced, having obviously understood. He slinked into one of the few empty seats furthest from the very front of the class, and Ziel followed suit beside him.

“… as I was just saying to the class, do not expect Language class at Deceit High to be the same, or even slightly similar to Language classes in normal schools. Here, you don’t just learn grammar, vocabulary, adjectives and other such crap of English here. You learn the true art of Language. Unfortunately, the Headmaster forbade me to teach you the proper way of speaking English, and to speak so, but I will encourage you to do so,” she nodded at Tye, still beaming “Other than English, we will, in fact, be learning a lot of other languages. And not just that, Chinese dialects too. Today, however, we shall just start with Mandarin itself. Now, who here is Chinese, or has Chinese blood in them?”

No one raised their hands. Professor Wither raised an eyebrow.

“Come on, now, you can’t fool me. Tye for one,” Tye gave a small start “Fong is a Chinese surname. Don’t think I don’t know. Come out here,”

Tye swore so harshly that Ziel edged away from him. Tye put both his hands palms down on the table and pushed himself up and sauntered to the front.

“Anyone else? You better own up or I’ll start checking your family lines, and I can do that,” Professor Wither cast a threatening eye around the class, and one by one, hands rose reluctantly into the air.

By the time Professor Wither had filtered the class of anyone with Chinese relatives, there were only five, including Tye. Other than him, there was a girl and three boys, two whom looked distinctly Chinese. The Language mistress clapped her hands together.

“Well, let’s do an introduction! Tell us who in your family is Chinese and things like that. Let’s start with you, Tye, love. You don’t look the least bit Chinese. What happened? Genetic mutation?”

Tye stared at his Language teacher, doubtful that anyone could be so seemingly stupid.

“My father is Chinese and my mother is French, and I took after my mother,” he said as though it were the most obvious thing on Earth. Telling the eccentric woman what race his mother was of was a bad idea.

“Your mother is French? Charmante! Next time you can help us with French as well! Now what’s your Chinese name?”

“That is private information that I will prefer not to f***ing reveal,” Tye replied immediately. A few girls giggled, batting their eyelids at him, but he ignored them.

“You will tell me your Chinese name, Tye, or I will write to your father and ask him myself,” Professor Wither put her hands on her hips, glaring at Tye.

Tye bit his lips and muttered something intelligible.

“小宝贝啊, do speak louder,”

Tye cracked.

“DON”T BLOODY CALL ME THAT!” he bellowed. Cue for more giggles. “My Chinese name’s Qiao Zhen, happy?”

“Yes, Tye, you made your teacher very happy, and you will make her even happier if you will just write that on the board in Chinese Characters please,” Professor Wither pulled a red marker out of nowhere and handed it to Tye, who snatched it and wrote on “巧 臻” the board as though the board and the marker did something terrible to him in their past lives.

Professor Wither did more or less the same thing for all of the Chinese students, except for the two that did not have immediate Chinese family members and thus did not have Chinese names, so at the end of the interrogation, five Chinese characters were on the board; 巧臻 Tye’s Chinese name, 辉 (pronounced hui) one of the other boy’s name, and 浩泽 (pronounced hao ze) who you could tell was Chinese the moment you looked at him, but if you let your eyes linger on his long enough, he gave you a slightly Japanese feeling.

“Well then, let’s have some fun with the language, shall we?” Professor Wither exclaimed, subbing her hands together with a rather sadistic glint of mad joy in her hazel eyes.

__________________________________________

Author's note:

宝贝儿: literally precious treasure, but is used to call people you are close to, normally little children.

小宝贝啊: just means precious little treasure, also used for young children, and the last word is just ah, a sort of slang.

巧臻: the first word means 1. Ingenious or skillful 2. Cunning 3. Fortuitously and the second word means: to be arriving at a higher level

辉: means 1. Splendor (less used) 2. Firelight or light

浩泽: the first word means great, vast or grand and the second word means 1. A pool, a pond or waters 2. Kindness, benefaction

P.S I named the last one, Hao Ze, after my beloved bro. =D


~~Asphodel_Winter~~
Battle between~
Rationality and Surreality~~~~


~~Asphodel_Winter~~
Battle between~
Rationality and Surreality~~~~