Hello, and welcome to the classic story of boy meets girl. Or, rather, girl meets boy washed up on the beach. Umm, for updates, I'm not sure, but I'm going to try to aim for updating at least once a week. And while I will try not to diverge from canon that much, I'm not going to consider myself bound to it; it's much more fun that way. I basically consider this my interpretation, perhaps not correct, but still valid, of what happened in the "real world."

If you recognize the summary entry, yes, that is a Pushkin quote. I suppose this fills my quota of pretentious quotes. That quote is not my property any more than this story is; I suppose that fills my disclaimer quota as well.

Anyway, I hope you all like it.

Threshold

What makes up the true essence of a person? is a question that Hachijo Ikuko, young, experienced writer she may be, often asks herself. After all, it's important that she understand her characters completely; otherwise, they seem to her as flat as the paper upon which she brings them to life. Their personalities, their lives and motivations, all these things she feels she must map out before she ever sets to her plot, even if the story she plans to write only turns out to be twenty pages long. She simply can't think of any other way.

"The weather channel said it would be cloudy today," Ikuko mutters, wincing against the overly bright coastal sunlight pouring in through the large windows. She goes to shut the dusty white curtains. Enough sunlight filters through this sheer cloth that she can see just fine, without irritation.

Another question that doesn't make its way into her head quite as much is "What do they have?" It's a question that isn't often applied to Ikuko either, but it is important.

Ikuko has a house by the glittering sea and a small fortune in inheritance money—both from the same source. She has a great wealth of dusty old books, few of which were hers to start with. She has a five-year-old, long-haired black cat named Bernkastel, her only companion in this remote place five miles from the nearest town. Ikuko also has a talent for creating people and whole worlds in the breadth of cool pages, which she uses to while away the hours in comfortable solitude, left to the company of her writing, of her dusty phantom worlds.

What Ikuko does not have is any experience with tragedy.

("What do they not have?" is probably a more important question than "What do they have?" Ikuko never thinks about that, though.)

Something soft brushes against her leg and Ikuko looks down to see Bernkastel pawing at her anxiously. Ikuko crosses through the living room to the kitchen, only to have her suspicions confirmed; the food dish is empty. Bernkastel goes to circling the small white dish, tail nearly dragging on the floor, and it's all Ikuko can do not to roll her eyes; such behavior would be childish, beneath her.

"If you're so hungry, why don't you just go out and catch something yourself?" she asks dryly, referencing the many mice and small (or sometimes not so small) birds that have in the past been left for Ikuko to find on the front stoop, or, more commonly, on the back porch. "The cat door's not locked. Alright, if you want food that badly…"

Though she can write of tragedy and loss, Ikuko herself has lived a life largely removed from tragedy and the sting of death. Oh yes, someone had to die for her to get this big house—a grandparent, in fact—but she had not known him well and hadn't learned of his death until months after the fact. By that time, she was so distanced from the whole affair that she could react to it the detached, vaguely sad way one would have to discover that a stranger had died.

She has no dead parents or siblings to contend with—Ikuko has no siblings to begin with, so the latter will remain a non-issue. Nor is there the specter of lost love to follow her. She's never lost a friend to premature death nor watched her home go up in flames. There have been no great disasters or tragedies in her life, none at all.

Maybe that's why, though she can infuse so much passion in other things, can make them seem so real that they hurt, when Ikuko writes of tragedy and loss, there is a great, yawning emptiness in her words.