Memories, who needs 'em? [OPEN]

[Maxim Reagan]

"Maxim Alexander Reagan, don't you dare go out there."
"Aw, but--"
"No 'buts'. No forest."
"B-but why?"
"Because god forbid you got hurt or lost..."

He could see her opal shaped face as if it were right before him, her deep ocean eyes stern, yet amorous. The sun that beat down from above seemed to make her long auburn locks glitter beneath it's rays. Her bangs swept across her face as soft as silk, covering the majority of her beautiful features. She pursed her full lips in annoyance as this happened, a slender hand reachng up to swipe them behind her ear before she continued refuting his childish argument.

"Than I'd have to come out here and find you and worry about you and get all upset and...It'd just be a whole silly mess. So no forest, understand?"

It was a happy memory in all, yet here, in the same position nine years later, no smile crept up upon his full lips. There was no usual air of cockiness about Max, no granduor, nor an ego. Only silence enveloped him, his eyes locked intently onto mass of trees that sat before him on the edge of the grounds. From this angle here on the lawn, it reminded him of his backyard. The only thing that accompanied him was a disturbing kind of calm, which sat itself by his side, a sight escaping him lowly.

Lost? How ironic, the young man thought, his hands resting idly on either side in the moist grass at which he sat. He was the one that had lost her. He was the one who got all worried, the one who got all upset. And he, Maxim Reagan, was the one that came to this spot on the school grounds, periodically like clock work every other week to try and find her.

His finger tips began idly playing with blades of grass, Max shaking his head and letting his dark locks fall into his inherited eyes. The peace that fell around him was almost a deception, his mind feeling more like a battlefield as the thoughts of his mother made themselves prominent. This was weak, reflecting like this--it was weak to even be here. There was no time worth wasting on trudging through memories, soiling his generally blissful state in life and wishing back to things that have allready been. He shook his head again, pulling his hands from the grass to reach into the pockets of his docker style shorts to retrieve a lighter and a pack of cigarettes.

With the quick flick of the lighter, the lit tobacco product was placed between his lips. He inhaled deeply, the smoke lining his throat and lungs in a satisfactory manner as he absent mindedly tossed the lighter to one side in the grass. Holding his breath for a few moments before letting the tainted air billow from his nose, he gazed around the area in dissatisfaction. No matter how many times he sat himself beneath the belligerent sun before this replicated memory, she would never come back. This was just fucking pathetic.

[Crystal Dinaia]

The day hadn’t had a particularly good feeling to begin with. Rather than waking up happily with the sunshine, she had known that though the sun was shining, she would have an overcast day. This happened from time to time and it was hard to place a reason why exactly that she woke up feeling bad. Perhaps it was the creature from her nightmares. Fedafyr was it? How dare she play coy, she knew his name more intimately than she knew her own. After all, somehow, he was embedded inside her, creeping into her thoughts at the most inopportune times, much like now. But he was a nighttime terror and the day had already broken and was shining at full force. Crystal had skipped her classes today, feigning some ominous sickness like, “feminine things,” and headed outdoors to overcome the case of the blahs.

Much to her chagrin, it had only gotten worse from there. As she hopped down the stairs, her eyes feasted on a creature of the daytime, a real life monster in her own front yard, a four-wheeled, gasoline powered, anti-lock break having, air bag deploying monster. The sheer look of a car had the ability to give her the willies, though she didn’t have to worry about it often here at Somnium. She simply steered clear of the student parking area as often as possible, but on days where a transfer student got dropped off, they often sat lurking in the front of the school. Her fears were unreasonable, of course. It wasn’t as if the car was threatening her physically, but a phobia had a tendency to make the unreasonable seem very, very reasonable. She side stepped the car, because if she hadn’t, she would have smashed into the side of it, a feeling that would have made her teeth ache. Dancing around the nose of the fancy black car, she almost bolted from the front of the school, gooseflesh raised on her arms and a slight feeling of tightness in her lungs. As she rounded the corner of the school, her eyes were set upon her final destination. Under one arm, she had tucked a yoga mat and carried a water bottle in her right hand.

In order to flush away the slight overcast days she had, Crystal often took to the outdoors and practiced a few simple yoga poses that she had learned a few years back. The stretching exercises legitimately lowered her stress levels and when she was done, she had the lean, limber feeling as if she was a new person all tuned up and ready for the world. Today, she could have guessed that there would be a wrench in her plans. She always tended to practice later in the day than she was going to her favorite spot right now. Almost two hours early for her “scheduled” work out, Crystal found another person in her spot. She didn’t know what gave her the right to consider the small grove her own, but somehow, she did. Was it a flush of anger, or was it primal territorial feelings that flooded through her all of a sudden? The upperclassman couldn’t tell and laughed at the very idea of being territorial of a patch of grass and some trees. Yet… She was.

Stubbornly, Crystal decided to wait him out for her spot for a few moments. He didn’t move even though she slowed her pace significantly, trying her best to walk slowly despite her long legs. Her athletic shoes drug through the grass, leaving green stains on the white parts, a happening that made her want to put an end to all grass, everywhere. Rather than keeping up the imaginary battle with the dark haired man, she instead looked directly at him, her blue eyes a bit more intense than she intended them to be. A bit more confidently than she felt, she strode toward him, the pony tail she had affixed her long red hair into bouncing against her back as she went. Perhaps her very presence would make him a bit uncomfortable and she wouldn’t have to do the embarrassing but beneficial stretches in front of him. For some reason, the idea of doing yoga in front of anyone still dumbfounded her and made a queasy sensation sneak into her stomach. She liked to avoid the queasy sensation at all costs. She set up camp about two feet away from him, spreading out her person long mat parallel to where he was sitting. This spot was good enough until he left, she supposed as she pulled off her Reeboks and stuffed her socks down inside them. Yoga was meant to be done barefooted, of course.

She knew she looked like the crazy hippy chick at the moment, though she didn’t consider herself to be that way at all. Crystal was anything but “new age” in her ideals and morals, in fact, her mother had once stated that she had been born into the wrong century and should have been raised in the Civil War south or even the early colonial United States. The idea of her own mother was still a sensitive subject after all of these years, however, so she pushed it to the back of her mind. She waited a few awkward moments before drawing her knees up against her chest and leaning against them. Crystal hadn’t yet turned to the other person on her hill, but now she spoke without turning to him, her voice soft and friendly with just a hint of warmth at the end. “So, I suppose you don’t come here for the yoga lessons?” The ice was finally broken, however strangely it might have been done. Crystal had never been great at introducing herself.

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[Maxim Reagan]

Static. Constant. The seconds trudged on in this placid state, the etherial smoke that flowed from his lips and nostrils tainting the air about him. This was his forth cigarette in...how long? He wondered f the groundskeeper would come out here and shout at him for giving mother nature lung cancer, or maybe if mother nature herself would hit him for killing the ozone layer. If he was, of coarse. Nicotene didn't promote global warming -- did it? He shrugged, taking another drag. His own thoughts were distracting, usually he'd force himself to focus while chain smoking.

The seconds aligned into minutes, pressing on into the void of time he found himself wasting in this state. It was far from theraputic, sitting here in solace, but a vacation none the less. This isolation ensured him the solitude he needed to get over this...this....His brow furrowed, blue orbs closing as his free hand pulled at the strands of grass near his palms. ...this what; this issue? He plucked the blades from the ground with ease, tossing them a few centimeters away. It wasn't an issue that she had been plucked from this Earth, no issue of his. His only issue was how hard of a time he was dealing with it, even if it did happen eight years ago.

Confused, Max took another drag of his cigarette: a long, over drawn, over-dramatic inhale, as if sucking out its soul. The tobacco burned red from the pull on oxygen, quickly combusting into ash and going out as it became nothing but a stub. There was no problem here; no issue, no fucking reason to be upset. Nothing what so ever. So why the melodrama? He coughed, flicking the cigarette butt into the uncut grass some distance away, shaking his head in shame. This disposal of precious time angered him. There was a thousand and three better things to be doing than sitting here in such a nostalgic mindset.

He was sure of it. If he stumbled upon himself doing the same thing as he was now--he'd spit in his own face.

Reaching for his pack, his heart skipped a beat as some melodic tone greeted his ears. For a nano-second his mind had processed this strangers voice as his own mothers, blue eyes darting to find their source as reality sunk back in upon her identity. It was just another patron of the school. Another mindless atomoton who walked these halls with their little notepads chalk full of notes on the subconcious and fangirl screams at dream-creatures. Max inspected her, turning to look at her and taking a few moments to analyze what kind of a person she was via her appearance. Jesus-Christ...She did yoga.

"No," His voice was low as he spat out some kind of reply to the new-wave hippie who sat next to him, "I come down here for private and nostalgic purposes. Something you might not understand considering you can't grasp the concept of personal space, either." Max looked at the two feet of space that sat between him and bare foot red-head, the arrogant man returning his attention back towards the forest before continuing conversation (which was only made due to the fact that she was, in fact, rather good looking for one of /those/ kinds of people), "The grounds are just lovely at this time of evening. Feel free to carry out our pretentious and placebo-like psuedo-asian excersize routine though. I apologize if I've interrupted."

[Crystal Dinaia]

Crystal sighed dramatically, her breath all released in one big “wooshing” noise. This was why she didn’t do yoga in front of people. Everyone was always a critic, quick to judge and even quicker to insult. Becoming accustomed to this type of person was easy here at Somnium Academy because many troubled students came here. They always had a story behind them, something that Crystal respected but at the same time, she resented the way people treated each other. Most couldn’t be troubled to even act polite, let alone be truly wholesome on the inside. “Oh…” Crystal murmured, her voice purposefully dreamy and soft as she spoke. “You know how it is in the realm of we: the tree huggers. We are one with the earth and therefore, all space is communal space and none is personal space.” She couldn’t keep up the routine at the end, her voice growing just a bit sarcastic at the end.

She had a thing for hurt puppies and crying children, she admitted. Crystal could have just as easily moved her mat elsewhere and practiced her relaxing yoga moves, but there was something that made her stay. Perhaps, thanks to the wisdom of the universe, they were both in this place because they were searching for their own lost mothers. They both had about the same likelihood of finding those mothers, at least his hadn’t wanted to leave him. Hers, on the other hand, had run away willingly from both her and the only life they had all known. Then again, it could have just been that she had encountered a jackass who wanted to insult her without even knowing who she was.

“You can’t interrupt something that hasn’t started yet.” Crystal smiled gently when she turned to him, the action of her full lips turning up transforming her plain face into something lovely. “But I don’t think you’d apologize even if you had interrupted. Yoga seems to be the bane of your existence, from what you said. What was it that you called it? “Placebo-like, psuedo-asian? That‘s… Actually very amusing.” Crystal laughed gently, “And I never thought that it was very pretentious, to be perfectly honest.”

He spoke about yoga as if it had offended him personally by simply being a form of exercise. It didn’t offend her greatly though, because to be honest, yoga wasn’t something that she was particularly passionate about. It was much like the cigarette the boy was smoking, simply a form of release. Then again, with the way he wrapped his lips around the cancer stick, it seemed as if he was quite passionate about his acrid smoke producing device. It was almost sensual. Crystal rubbed a spot on her leg that a bug had crawled onto and had began gnawing away at. Her porcelain skin reddened at the point of impact and she immediately began searching the grass near her for his brethren. Finding no other bugs, she calmed down and pulled down the legs of her black capri leggings, protecting her knees at least from another onslaught. She gazed down at her manicured toenails and decided that soon, it would be time for another pedicure. “Oh… And I apologize if I’ve interrupted your.. Smoking?” Crystal wouldn’t insult him, that just wasn’t in her nature.