Amaranth

1.

A/N: Hello, hello, Sofia here and welcome to another masterpiece of ours!(we’re very humble, you see)
…Ok I’m gonna be serious now.
So, we tried to write something different and I think we succeeded ^_^ We really hope you’ll like this and yes, it is a Tuorja fanfic, even though you can’t see that in the first chapter.
Enjoy <3
-Nina and Sofia

“I'm not going to bother with long intros, let’s put it simply. I’m Olivia Soile Holopainen.
I don’t know exactly why I started writing this diary. Everybody tells me that I have nothing to complain about, yes, that is true. But I think you’ll agree that every person needs someone or something to talk to and to share their thoughts and feelings with. Don’t think that I have no friends, on the contrary, I’ve never felt lack of them, also, don’t think that I’m hiding something from my parents. It’s just that something is always bothering every human being, something that they can’t share with anybody, can’t trust anybody, in my case I can’t even trust with that myself. I need to free myself from my thoughts, and for me, writing means exactly this. Paper will never rebuke you, it never speaks and in general, it’s not alive, it helps you even better than a real person ever would, at least that’s the way I feel. Here I’m going to write such things, that I cannot trust anybody else with, not even my mind.” I laughed slightly at this and continued to write, seemed like my hands wrote everything themselves, I didn’t even need to think. “Here I’ll write everything I can’t tell anybody else, those feelings and thoughts, sadness or happiness that don’t let me sleep at night. Thinking at night is probably the worst, then you start thinking about everything together, you start remembering things you don’t want to remember, every problem and every little embarrassing thing that has ever happened. Then, your brain starts making up problems itself and you start worrying about them and so, you barely notice how you stay awake the whole night. Everything crumbles and you turn into another walking robot that locks itself in its own mind, forgets the surrounding world and slowly falls into depression. Yes, into depression, depression has always associated with black for me, although black is my favourite colour. I imagine it as a smoke, as black as coal, that slowly surrounds you, makes its way into your mind and into your body, like a disease that doesn’t let you go, eats you from inside and destroys you. And you follow its mild flow, before drowning in its big whirlpool. You try to come up but your lungs feel heavy and lack oxygen, you can’t neither breathe nor move, but still, you won’t stop fighting, fighting for survival, until you don’t have strength anymore.
I’m talking to you as if you came to life and took a human form, if someone reads this, they’re going to think that I’m crazy. But, well, everyone has flaws. Maybe it’s good to imagine you, a piece of paper, as a person, even then you won’t be able to talk. And that’s what I need right now, someone who only listens.
I’m afraid. Afraid of the future, afraid of becoming one of those robots, among which we’re used to living, I don’t want to be like those depressed people who are bored of life. And for that, I need you, my permanent friends, paper and pen.
Yes, I’m writing bullshit right now, but I promise to improve.” I smiled again, closed the diary and hid it in a reliable place, where nobody could find it, even Mom, who usually examined every corner of the house while cleaning.
I had been awake for some time now, it was 8 o’clock in the morning when my alarm went off. I sat up on the bed, yawning and cursing the alarm.
We had finished our studies in December and now we only went to school to get ready for exams and get the diploma. Well, what could I do, I stood up, went into bathroom and took a shower, which managed to wake me up completely. I put on clean clothes, grabbed my bag with a frown and went downstairs, smiling and inhaling deeply as I felt the smell of my favourite waffles hit my nostrils. When I entered the kitchen, Mother was already there, I went up to her and gently kissed her cheek.
“Morning.” She said and smiled widely at me. I really didn’t have much time, so I grabbed a waffle and took a huge bite.
“Aren’t you ever planning on having a normal breakfast? Once in your lifetime?” She asked me in a fake angry tone. I looked at her, my mouth full with waffle, smiled and shook my head. After grabbing one more waffle and car keys, I walked towards the door.
“Exams are coming” I noted uncomfortably and closed the door behind me.

I drove slowly through the streets of Helsinki, to be honest I wasn’t late anywhere, both of my friends, Aleksi and Anna lived quite close to school and I only needed 10 minutes to get to school from home. I turned up the volume. I listen to metal, it helps me and calms me down like nothing else, and besides, I’ve been used to it since childhood. I fell asleep to those songs, woke up to them, and so on. Right now, I was listening to one of my favourite bands, Disturbed. My head felt like it was going to explode because I was thinking about so many things at the same time, but especially, I was thinking about Mom and Dad.
I arrived to Aleksi’s house without noticing how fast I’d got here. I stopped the car in front of the big, old but rich house. In a few seconds a tall, wiry boy with a smiling face sat in my car. He had a bit long but straight nose, and slightly sunken cheeks. Beautiful, big, grey eyes stood out on his pale face, which was framed by long (and not characteristic for Finns) dark hair.
“Good morning beautiful.” He grinned at me and threw his bag on a backseat.
“Morning.” I gave back and felt my cheeks redden a little. I started the engine.
“Hurry, Anna is probably cursing us already.” Aleksi laughed. Both of us knew what would happen if we were late and I laughed too.
“It’s okay, I’ll say you spent too much time combing your hair.” I snorted and drove on.

He was right, Anna was raving when we arrived; she sat into the car, throwing furious reprimands at us. Aleksi and I were used to this, the situation repeated every morning, Anna always scolded us and we always laughed it off. She was very eager, hard-working student, unlike us. She was always the first one to enter the class and she was the top student. Anna was polar opposite of me and Aleksi in every other way too, and we adored her for that.
She was shorter than us, with blonde hair and beautiful eyes that changed colours, sometimes they were deep green and sometimes they were blueish, most often, both together. Her eyes were always sparkling, one would see the whole universe in her eyes. We were indeed a magnificent trio. Mine and Aleksi’s style was more “metalheadish”, while Anna was a big lover of fashion and always wore the most fashionable clothes. Neither did she listen to metal, like us, but she could bear everything for us. Both me and Aleksi understood that she didn’t exactly enjoy going to bars with us, but she still agreed to come enthusiastically every time we asked. We also tried to bear her parties and modern music, which seemed quite senseless to us sometimes.
To cut a long story short, in spite of all our differences, all three of us understood each other perfectly and we couldn’t endure a single day without one another.
We arrived to school, still quarreling. Anna had to bear mine and Aleksi’s endless jokes, and of course, it made her angrier, but both of us knew it would last for 5 minutes, maximum.
The moment we stepped into the school, everyone’s gaze fell on me. I hated this feeling. I hated going through the halls with friends and hearing people whisper about me, indecorously discussing my life, my parents and everything that connects with me.  I often felt envious of those students, whom nobody noticed. I sometimes wanted everyone to forget who I was, to rest from everything and everyone for a while, to feel left out and forgotten. Yes, left out, because I was fed up with being in a spotlight.
We entered a library, a huge room with high walls and endless shelves that reached up until the ceiling. As we headed towards the table that stood farther from others, near the big window, I heard “a school princess” mutter something about me to her friend. I turned to them and looked at them with disgust, both fell silent and avoided my eyes. I sat down with Anna and Aleksi and took out my books.
I wasn’t too surprised by this, it was only natural for everybody to pay so much attention to me. For I was the only daughter of two people Finland was especially proud of – Tarja Turunen and Tuomas Holopainen themselves.