Tag Archives: bodhi

Beatrice struck the hammer down and slammed the nail into the piece of wood. A drip of sweat fell from her chin and plopped on her arm, but she paid it less mind than a gnat fluttering about around her head. She struck the wood again to make sure the nail was in place, and smiled when she saw it was good.

A wave of exhaustion had set on her, but she kept going. The warm sun overhead had just reached its apex, and the birds had finally come back out to sing their chirpy tunes. With a free meal waiting at the end of the day, Beatrice was never going to quit helping here, not until it was all complete.

It was grueling work, repairing the damage done to the restaurant Foron’s. Half of northern Balarand had burned to the ground, but the Dannark government had done nothing to help rebuild So it was up to Beatrice and the other former junior priests of the St. Helens Academy. The school had been shut down permanently, but that wasn’t going to do a bit of good in stopping its students from helping their favorite afterschool dining spot.

Her face was covered in sweat, and she had nailed more boards than her mind could comprehend, but Beatrice felt amazing. She really felt like she was doing something. And best of all, she had her friends around to help.

There was one friend missing from all of this volunteer work, though, someone Beatrice had been secretly hoping would show up the entire time. 

But it didn’t happen.

At least, not until the lunch break was over. Then Beatrice saw that silly little hat, and those shining blue eyes.

Bodhi Makala had showed up to help rebuild Foron’s.

***

It wasn’t until after the volunteer work was over that Beatrice and Bodhi finally got a chance to talk. Without exchanging a word, the two met up and began walking down the street in a random direction. They were going north, up towards the port and where Runa still lived, but they probably wouldn’t need to walk that far.

The streets were quiet, with at least one guard posted on every city block. Many shops and businesses were still facing fire damage, broken windows, or even total destruction. With the occupation government busy putting down pockets of guerilla resistance, nothing could be done except by their own hands. 

One day, Balarand would all be back to its vibrant, pretty self, even if it took a hundred more days like today from Beatrice and her friends.

Bodhi finally spoke, saying, “You look beautiful, Bea.”

“Beatrice,” she replied instantly. “And thanks.”

“That dress… It’s really a work dress?”

“Oh, yeah, this?” She looked down at the plain outfit she had on for her volunteer effort. “I made this for sewing practice. It’s not very useful as anything other than a work outfit. And I definitely learned today that skirts are not good for hard labor…”

“You learned how to sew? Darn, you never cease to amaze.” Bodhi flashed one of his classic smirks. “I see you’ve kept growing out your hair, too.”

“Yeah… It’s really long now.”

“And cute.”

“Really? You think so?”

“I know so.” Bodhi, for just a split second, began to reach out to touch her hair, but pulled back before his hand went anywhere. “Anyway, I’m glad about today. I’ve been waiting for Foron’s to reopen for weeks now.”

“Did you love me?” Beatrice asked suddenly.

“Uh….”

Beatrice lowered her head and smiled. “You didn’t come help out at Foron’s just to see me, did you?”

“Well, I…” Bodhi sighed. “That’s exactly what I did.”

“I thought so.”

“I heard you were there, and I heard you passed the Priesthood Exam. I wanted to see you one last time before you left Balarand forever.”

“That’s sweet.”

“And yeah, I loved you,” he said. “I loved you for years, Bea. But you were always… How do I say it? Unattainable.”

Beatrice giggled. “What the heck does that mean?”

“Always nose-deep into your books. Never wanted to hang out. Committed to becoming a celibate priest and abandoning everyone around you. That sort of thing.”

“It took me a long time to realize how felt about me, Bodhi,” she said. “Until after I broke up with my girlfriend. It kind of hit me how you must have felt the whole time, and… I felt a little guilty.”

“Guilty?”

“Because I never returned your feelings, not one little bit. I don’t know why. Maybe in some other world it would have worked, but… the Gods didn’t Will it, I guess.”

“I felt really jealous when you met that girl,” Bodhi said. “All those years by your side, thinking you’d see me one day for more than that annoying guy who always calls you Bea. But then you found someone else who loved you.”

“And so you’re here now looking for… closure?” Beatrice asked.

“No way. Closure is Mammoth crap. I’m just here to see my friend.” Bodhi laughed a little bit, but Beatrice couldn’t tell if it was genuine or fake. “Listen, I sorted out my feelings for you a long time ago. Maybe I loved you in that schoolboy kind of way, but it was nothing. When I saw Emi, and I saw the way she looks at you… that’s when I realized all I had was an overgrown crush. That girl REALLY loves you, Bea.”

“And I really love her,” Beatrice said.

“You really love her, but you’re still becoming a priest.”

“Yes.”

“Just… why?” he asked. “You two are perfect for each other. She loves you, and you love her. So why would you ever do something to end that?”

Beatrice shrugged. “What’s it to you?”

“I just don’t want you to make a decision that could ruin the rest of your life,” he said. “Love is so important and you can’t just throw it away to serve the Church. They have a billion priests. You only have one Emi.”

“There’s something I realized during the rebellion,” Beatrice told him. “I have a duty to serve. Tsubasa is about to enter a dark time, and the harmony will disappear if there aren’t people around to save it. With my knowledge and ambition, I can become the kind of priest who saves lives every single day. I can change the entire continent for the better. The kind of love I have for Emi is the same kind of love I need to give to the whole world.”

“I… guess I can’t argue with that,” Bodhi said. “So it’s all religion stuff.”

“The Will of the Gods and all that,” Beatrice said.

“You really don’t believe, do you? In the Gods and the Church?”

“I do, I do.”

He looked at her with an intent stare, and said, “I… can’t tell what you’re thinking anymore. You’ve really changed, haven’t you? You aren’t an emotional open book.”

Beatrice rolled her eyes. “Or you’re not some sort of Beatrice Expert like you think,” she said. “Now, is there any destination for where we’re walking, or are we just going nowhere fast?

“Going nowhere fast, I imagine.”

“That’s fine by me.”

Beatrice could have felt pangs of bittersweet nostalgia. She could have felt sad. But she didn’t. Instead, she enjoyed a walk with a good friend, and that was that.

<== Previous ♡ Next ==>

There was a nice salmon restaurant near St. Helens Academy called Foron’s that students often flocked to after class. On most days, it found itself packed with teenagers relaxing, gossipping, and spending good coin on good food. Today. however, it found itself with only two occupants– Bodhi and his impromptu tutor Beatrice.

It was homely in that sort of grandmotherly way, the chairs and tables arranged so that it felt like every meal was a big family gathering, not that Beatrice would know. Unfortunately, with no other customers in the restaurant, it was spacious enough to make it feel like an uncomfortable afterparty, long after everyone else had stumbled out, leaving just these two behind to bask in the candlelight. There wasn’t actually a candle here, but the sun was already setting, so it was a bit dim.

The fish wasn’t as good as what you could find at the night markets, Beatrice thought. It was a lot more expensive, too; two silver coins for one plate of fish and one bowl of rice? She could have gotten three days’ worth of groceries for that. But it was still nice to branch out and try something new every now and then, she guessed.

“I really thought Naesala was going to show up,” Bodhi said. “But it looks like it’s just us two.” School uniform or not, he always had a cap on his head, and this time it was bright orange, clashing with the burgundy shirt and trousers he wore. It was intentional, Beatrice knew.

“That’s okay,” Beatrice said. “You wanted to study, and I said I’d help you study.”

“Yeah,” he said. “You’re a real good friend. Even if your hair’s getting too long for that face of yours.”

“What do you know about hair?”

“Nothing, I just think you look better with short hair, Bea,” he said.

“Beatrice, not Bea,” she said. “So, I bet you want to wait until we finish our food to start?”

Bodhi nodded and swallowed the piece of fish in his mouth. “Yeah, I think so. Maybe first we can–”

“What’s the fourth precept of ritual-making?” Beatrice interjected.

“Really?” He groaned loudly.

“Well, what is it?”

“The fourth precept is to avoid false speech,” Bodhi recited. “The spell will only work if your words are clear, concise, and projected loudly. The spell will register if your souls are attuned, and the better your speech, the more in-tune you will be with your partners.”

“Great work,” Beatrice said while cutting the head off the salmon and biting into its little fish face. “You might be an expert already.”

“Nah, we just drilled the darn precepts so much, I’ll never forget them.”

“That’ll help you out the rest of your life.”

“I highly doubt that,” he said.

“It helps everyone out, even if you don’t think about it that often,” Beatrice said. “Think about the discipline we’re learning by doing all this training. Isn’t that something?”

“It’s a lot less demanding than carrying stacks of leather strips back and forth all day.”

“Well, and think about the critical thinking skills we learn. Being able to analyze the Gods’ will and see the harmony of our…” Beatrice trailed off.

“Even you think that’s too ridiculous to finish your sentence,” Bodhi laughed. “The magic part is cool, but if everyone has to do it together, it’s kind of useless most of the time. I wish we studied more about real life skills.”

She didn’t respond.

“Well, anyway, I don’t get the whole deal with speaking spells or whatever,” Bodhi continued. “Why does it matter what you say instead of what you think? Shouldn’t group magic be like, some weird mind-reading thing?”

“It’s a lot simpler than that. You don’t HAVE to speak, but for untrained junior priests like us, nothing will happen unless we really sync-up well. Do you understand what I mean?”

“So what you’re saying is, if I’m together with someone who I sync-up with perfectly, we can hold hands and then create mega lightning bolts or something because our magic is so strong?”

“Not… exactly,” she replied. “Humans just aren’t that good at magic. Other creatures around Tsubasa can perform much more magic than us, like the striders in the Plebias Mountains. Striders can shoot beams from their antennae like it’s nothing, but it takes us a lot of work just to levitate a pencil. We can’t really get beyond that.”

“That’s a load of Mammoth crap,” Bodhi said. “But you know what? I think I understand how it all works.”

“Good. So then you think you’re ready to try it in action?”

“Right now?”

“Well, I mean tomorrow at practice. We couldn’t do it just ourselves.”

“Oh… But… Why can’t we, Bea? I mean you and me, we could probably do a lot.”

“My name isn’t Bea! And– Huh.” Eh? Beatrice was taken aback by the question. “No, two people can’t do any magic ritual alone, not any worth anything. That’s for fairy tales.”

I sometimes snicker at Beatrice’s adamancy towards things she didn’t fully understand herself. Her explanations were foolproof with logic, and yet even as she said them, she felt a pang of sadness. Perhaps it was the faint memory of when she believed those very same things. Times when she ran around her bedroom with a stick and pretended to be a powerful wizard, or when she went to her first day of junior priest school with an oversized school bag on her back and eyes that twinkled like a newborn star. 

Now with Bodhi, two years her senior but asking the same questions she had wondered about so long ago, she was struck with the realization of just how much time had passed since she entered St. Helens Academy. How much she had grown.

“It can’t be impossible,” he said. “If Mr. Statusian can do a little bit of magic on his own. And maybe, if he had someone else he cared about who could also do a bit of magic on their own. Then together, they could turn a little bit into a lot. It’s just math, isn’t it?”

Beatrice was instantly reminded of Emi, at a very inopportune time. 

Gods, she missed her.

It had been long enough that she no longer thought it might be simply a sudden vacation, or punishment for staying out too late. It was either something serious, or Beatrice had greatly misinterpreted Emi’s feelings for her. As much as she hoped it wasn’t the former… It would make her a lot less upset than the latter.

And now, Bodhi basically bringing up the magic of love…

“Bodhi, the reason that it doesn’t work is…” Beatrice tried hard to figure out the right words to explain. “Magic doesn’t work without a lot of effort, not for any of us. Sometimes you might find someone where together you can make miracles, but that’s really rare. You have to be compatible and you have to be able to understand each other, and sometimes that just isn’t what some people want. And no matter how compatible you are, that doesn’t mean you can change things.”

“Are we talking about magic spells here, or…”

“Ah, never mind.”

Bodhi put aside his study materials and began eating his other salmon. “I gotta ask you something, though,” he said. “Why the priest stuff? Why do you care?”

Her answer was almost immediate. “Because I really appreciate the Gods and how they’ve helped out Tsubasa, and I want to devote my life to them.”

Bodhi scoffed. “You don’t care a thing about the Gods, Bea,” he said, his mouth full and voice muffled. He swallowed before he continued. “There’s got to be more to it than that.”

“I do too care about the Gods! Why would you even say that?”

“‘Cause in class you’re always talking about the rituals and spells and academic theory and whatnot. Like you’re a step beyond the class. You’re too smart to believe in the Gods.” He kept his smile, and paused for a moment before adding, “And even if you did, I never see you at church,” Bodhi said. “The priest at my church asked about you a few weeks ago.”

“Well, I just go to a different one,” Beatrice said. “My family visits the shrine to Bk’Man near my apartment. You know the one, right across from your store. We go every week.” Just because she didn’t attend church very often, it… It didn’t mean she didn’t have faith in the Gods. Just because she went to a shrine once a week, while her Dad went once a day, didn’t mean she was less of a follower.

He was incredulous. “Fair enough. I understand why you’d wanna be a priest. You get to travel the continent, seeing new places, helping other people, and making the world a better place. Plus, you get to learn magic, even if it’s about useless. I just don’t think the trade-off is so great. I want to have a family someday, myself.”

“I understand. It isn’t for everyone.”

“My pop would never forgive me if I ran off and joined the priesthood,” Bodhi said. “I got an apprenticeship coming up and then I’m gonna be running the whole place so he can retire. If I didn’t do that, nobody would be able to take over for him.”

It had been the only thing on Beatrice’s mind for most of her life, though, becoming a priest. Her parents had accepted by now that the Ragnell family was never going to carry on past their child, and their legacies would end with her death, however far in the future that may have been. She thought they had accepted it, at least. She never really asked what they thought about it.

Beatrice thought to her own Dad. He worked in the library, a publicly owned business that would be handed over to the other employees once he was gone. All of his expertise and knowledge would be passed down through his writing and his research.

But her Mom was a seamstress, a profession going as many generations back as the Ragnell Family line could carry. It was never a valuable line of work, but it had been the source of most of Beatrice’s clothing her entire life. And because she had never learned how to sew herself… it would disappear from the family line forever, whether or not Beatrice ever had any children.

“Not having a family will be really tough,” Beatrice said, finally. “I’m a little scared, but for now I’m not going to think about it. It’s not important yet.”

“Ha, just push it off ‘til the moment comes to decide. That’s so you. It’s why you’re so good at everything, Bea. You can just focus on what’s in front of you and pull it off.” He finished the last pieces of his salmon and set his utensils down.

“Th…thanks.” She paused for a moment. Focusing on what was in front of her… Huh. Something hit her. A restaurant worker came by to pick up their empty plates and clear off the table. “So, Bodhi, you would say it’s better to take advantage of the moment than to plan your life ahead of time?”

“Well, I’m saying you’re good at doing that. If you got the ability to do what you want, you should do it.”

“Well then…” Beatrice stood up from the table and pushed her chair in. “I’m sorry, but I need to go.”

“Huh?”

“I have somewhere to be and I’m not letting it wait another moment.”

She exited the restaurant without another word, leaving behind a confused and probably disappointed boy. 

Waiting for Emi this long was enough. She was taking it into her own hands.

<== Previous ♡ Next ==>

“Groupwork… I hate groupwork…”

“What was that, Bea?” asked Bodhi.

She didn’t reply.

Beatrice and five other students sat in a circle trying to storm up ideas for a group project to be presented at the end of class. To be more accurate, though, it was less a group project and more a group debate right now.

Beatrice wasn’t the type to contribute much to a big conversation and was currently sitting there, muttering to herself, and jotting down anything interesting she heard from the others. But the others weren’t saying much either. Why was nobody ever interested in working together for group projects? Why did they always go so poorly?

 The topic was to argue anything from a headline in today’s Balarand Circle newspaper. There were literally a dozen options. But they hadn’t even picked anything out yet. And now they had twenty minutes left. This was communications class, far out of the realm of Beatrice’s interest or expertise, so there wasn’t much she could do.

The classroom, its students divided up into groups scattered around the place, had a special atmosphere reserved for the time of group projects, something nobody enjoys, and never will enjoy for the remaining history of mankind. The collective sense of frustration was so thick in the air that it was breathable. Or maybe that was sweat, because the fireplace was making this room quite warm.

“We gotta do the war story,” one of the girls said. “Dannark is gonna, like, use the new skirmish as an excuse to end the ceasefire with Doros. They’re gonna conscript all the Elincians so, uh, so they can kill all the young people and then there won’t be anyone else left to resist.”

“That’s a terrible topic,” Bodhi said. “How do you argue that?”

“Then do you got any ideas, shoe guy?”

“Obviously not.” Bodhi lowered his cap to cover most of his face, as if he were being cool or something.

Beatrice used to think this whole enthusiasm problem was endemic to religion classes– they were never going to use anything they learned in real life, so they never bothered to learn it in the first place. But communications classes were very important for adults trying to make themselves in the world, and still nobody really cared.

Only this time, Beatrice wasn’t exactly impervious to the criticisms she was mentally lobbing to her classmates.

She found her attention wandering even as her classmates spoke. Why were newspapers printed on such uninviting, rough paper, when they were read by literally tens of thousands every day? That question felt more interesting to her than anything they were currently doing, and she wasn’t even sure why.

“Well, we can talk about how they’re putting more guards at all the Nexurk shrines because of those protestors last week,” Bodhi said. “I think that’s a better topic.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?” the girl from before asked. 

Beatrice butted in finally, saying, “Maybe it would be a better debate if we chose a different topic than every other group in the class.”

“Like what, Bea?” the girl asked.

“Maybe, uh, something about Reo L’Hime’s floating bridge test?”

They looked at her like she was crazy. 

“Isn’t it kind of interesting?”

She faced the daggers of ten pairs of extremely unenthused eyes and felt herself shrink away.

“Whatever, it’s not like I’ll be doing this much longer,” said Bodhi in an admission of defeat. “My pop’s gonna train me the moment I get the certificate.”

“That’s pretty cool,” said one of the students. “You gonna give us free shoes?”

“Yeah, if you give me all the materials and then pay me to make it.”

The conversation then became about Bodhi’s shoe cobbling and the various designs he had been tinkering with in his filled-up sketchbook.

Honestly, it was incredibly annoying that she was going to fail this assignment because she couldn’t bring her classmates to pretend to care about this subject even a little bit. They weren’t going to figure out a topic to argue, and Beatrice wasn’t going to put in the effort to try and lead the group herself. Her frown deepened, and Bodhi seemed to notice that.

“Bea, don’t worry about it,” he told her. “You’ve got the best grades in the junior priest class like, ever. They aren’t gonna hold it against Ms. Ragnell if her slacker classmates do bad on one project.”

“My name isn’t Bea,” she grumbled. “It’s not my grades, though.” She felt really sad all of a sudden. “I guess I was really hoping once I reached AA-grade there’d be more people who… I don’t know. I like being a junior priest.”

“It’s pretty fun,” the girl said. “I like the Winter Ceremonies stuff we’re doing. This here is a load of Mammoth crap though.”

“I’d be a priest if it didn’t mean I have to become some celibate traveler the rest of my life,” another classmate added. There were murmurs of agreement. 

“Well, I don’t exactly…” Beatrice cut herself off. She had that conversation with herself too often. The celibacy requirement was no small deal, that was for sure.

“Yeah, it’s a bit of a jump to make it into the priesthood,” Bodhi said. “I’m glad you like it so much, but none of us really want to do that with the rest of our lives. But we know how much it means to you to do well, so… maybe we should try something for this project. For you.”

“It’s okay,” Beatrice told him. “You don’t have to do anything for me.”

It was a bit of a self-pitying comment, but they took that as a resignation to abandon the group work assignment. They ended up picking the Doros-Dannark skirmish after all… just like every other group in the class. 

Oh well. It wasn’t long before the Priesthood Exams and then everything would change.

<== Previous ♡ Next ==>