{Open} The sorrow and the fights.

[Talia Winchell]

Her wrist throbbed with a pain that was constistently recurring and she had pulled down her sleeves over her hands in an attempt to make herself believe the crimson wasn't there; averting her eyes to distract herself, she scanned the individual needles of the conifers that bordered the camp. The daughter of Hermes saw that the images were sharper than anything else she had looked at in years, despite the fact that the colors were gone and had been replaced by grayscale since the beginning of the wintertime. She could remember that time of year all too well, when the temperatures and her relationships were sloping downward. And then there was...

Shaking her head, more for herself than any passerby that might see her, Talysus told herself that she wouldn't think about it anymore. It was a new year, bright and early. The new dawning had to mean something. Twenty-thirteen had approached faster than she could have thought beforehand, and maybe that was a good thing. Scars faded in time, she had been told things like that since she was little. But now... she had physical ones in addition to emotional ones. Several, rusty red and aching on her right wrist, and they were all her fault. She wasn't quite sure why she did what she did, if she were completely honest with herself, but she had felt as she needed to. Though they hurt her, they were easier to handle. Anything easy was welcome at the moment, no matter the price. That was how she thought. Perhaps it sounded twisted, but it made so much sense when she sat and thought it over. Tal mulled things over a lot, it was a commonplace thing for her to do; however, never before had they been situations such as this.

The strawberry fields were frozen over with January frost, the kind that kissed your skin with ice and accentuated everything, yet made it feel calmer at the same time. The gentle winter breeze may have been lazy, but it bit at her and sent the obligatory shudders down her spine for every second longer that she sat under the tree with her legs crossed. Surely, her dark-washed jeans were getting slush or mud all over them, but did she care? Negative. She probably looked a mess in any case. Her hair and face had gone unwashed, hair hanging loosely and unattractively, her face was free of makeup, and the bags under her eyes could have been noticed from a distance. The eyes themselves wandered, but then all at once they came upon a hallucinated sight that made them freeze in place.

Those blue eyes, she couldn't escape them wherever she went. She could see him. Twitching, she opened her mouth on reflex. Her voice was hoarse from lack of use, but she didn't stop to swallow. "Stop staring at me," she spit out, jaw quivering. "Go away." She was fully aware of the insanity she felt, that pulsed outward from her heart always. And this was only confirmed when she let her eyes flutter shut then reopen, and in her dead boyfriend's place there was someone else. He hadn't been Luke at all. Moaning quietly as she took in that she had spoken to a stranger unintentionally, she still didn't get up. "Sorry..." she rasped out, then raised her voice. "I thought you were..." Awkwardly trailing off for a lack of preparation of speech, she just examined the figure who stood there. Shifting in her seat, she waited for a reply.


listening to; be alright - justin bieber.

[David Murphy]

The camp was so still. It was like death, the cloud looming over the area. Nothing moved. Nothing was alive. The temperatures were low. It was one of those days where you could see the tall, bare trees stand out against the pure white sky. It was one of those days were nothing stirred. It was one of those days that smelled like nothing, felt like nothing. It was one of those days that everyone forgot about, because it was so insignificant. It was one of those days that didn't matter. It was one of those days that David Alexander Murphy despised.

David was a man of YOLO and living every single day like it was your last. If today was his last day, he would never forgive himself in hell. This day sucked. You could feel the depression rolling into to camps, crashing against everything and everyone at the camp, like waves of misery. The sky was pure white and the air was still and calm. David hated calm. Calm was boring, and this was calm, and this was boring. He had spent most of the morning laying upside down on his bed, his head hanging over the edge. He tried to make shapes of the distorted figures that were upside down. He's picked at a few scabs, and then couldn't even take it anymore. He just walked out of his cabin and to the strawberry fields.

"Strawberry fields" didn't really describe it anymore. Everything was really sad at the fields, and nothing grew much. Only a few rotten, shriveled strawberries were splattered across the field. The satyrs didn't play their annoying pipes, children of Demeter didn't giggle along, helping the plants grow. The fields were practically empty. David yawned as he entered the fields, pushing his glasses up his nose. He just didn't have the spirit to waste his time putting in contact lenses today. He felt as if the life had been sucked out of him.

The son of Nike didn't even realize that there was a girl there with him in the fields until he heard her voice. He looked up from his black Nike sneakers, curious as to what she was saying. She said something about him going away, and realized that he wasn't who she thought. She was sort of pretty, but looked as if she was suffering big time. She had messy, uncombed blonde hair and bags under her eyes. She looked as if she had been crying for a billion years. David blinked. She looked so ... sad. Upset. Grieving. Confused. Depressed.

Now, David had zero experience in talking to girls. The only girl he really ever had steady conversation with was his half-sister, Max. But the conversation usually ended up with Max getting annoyed out of her mind and rolling her eyes and walking away. Or with David getting slapped, punched or kicked in places he preferred to be just left alone in the first place. But he was great with talking to sad people, and he always tried to cheer up sad people.

"You know, you look pretty awful," he told her, and realized how offensive that must sound. He awkwardly tried to patch it up. "I mean ... like ... you look ..." he coughed "You look sad, is all. Like something real tragic happened to you." he coughed again, awkwardly. He felt stupid. He rubbed the back of his neck and pushed his glasses up his nose again, positioning them correctly. He sniffed and shivered. It was cold out. "Something bothering you?" he asked her, cocking his head to the right questioningly. "If you don't want to talk about it, it's fine ..." he added hastily, clearing his throat "It's just that ... um ... you looked sad ... so ... yeah." he said, and blinked hard. He felt really dumb.

[Talia Winchell]

No, he really didn't look anything like Luke had, Tal realized while her cheeks burned a crimson that contrasted with the rest of her winter pale face. He had the same color of hair, but the shade was different; she could even tell when it was all in grayscale as her world had been since those dark December days. Luke had never been one of those boys who had a troublemaker grin, per se, but this boy did. You could tell even now when his face was settled into a more somber expression, and it stirred something inside Tal. Like a soft pair of butterfly wings, though she didn't even notice the stirring at first.

After his blunt declaration, Tal yielded no reaction. She was much used to worse, and who was she to defend herself against a fact that was plainly obvious to everybody including herself? She didn't do so much as nod, just simply looked at him with her icy eyes and shivered slightly as she noncommitally made eye contact with this stranger. It was strange, she supposed, that even mere eye contact with a person gave her a headache and made her twitch until she broke it. Soaking up the words as they came, she breathed in and she exhaled and tried to ignore the fact that she was cold and wet and her mind was spinning.

"Something bothering you?"

Yes, yes, yes. "N-No." She shook her head, which just made her colder as the wind whipped around her face. She had tuned out for his next words, numbed by the shock that came with partial conversation; this was an activity she hadn't partook in for months now. That was what it felt like, in any case. "I..." Why he was talking to her was like a mystery, honestly. It hadn't crossed her mind that he would care or that anybody besides Jamian or maybe Bailey or Cinder would care.

"If you don't want to talk about it, it's fine..." Tal nodded, keeping her eyes on her but away from his eyes, the eyes that seemed to burn right through her. Expose everything that she had ever felt. "It's just that...um...you looked sad...so...yeah."

Those words made her bite her lip, and though she was oblivious to the physical pain that came with drawing blood, the words shot through her like knives and hurt more than the new cut did. The blood ran down her chin in a uniform line, a crimson teardrop. "Oh?" The words came quiet, her sweet voice hoarse from lack of use. "Oh." Before she knew what was happening, the clear saltwater tears ran down her face to join the red one at the bottom. She cried but there was no noise; she'd almost spent the rest of her tears by now. It didn't even flash across her mind that the standard reaction would be embarrassment, breaking down in front of a strange boy, but that was something she didn't care about anymore. She knew what others thought of her. Swallowing, she trained her eyesight downward so as not to look at the figure standing near. More than anything, she wanted him to leave, be gone; never appear again.


this stinks, sorry.
listening to; castle on a cloud - isabelle allen.

[David Murphy]

It really killed any spirit that was left in David's heart. Seeing a stranger cry ... it hurt, even if he didn't know her. David was one of the happiest, most ignorant people above eighteen years old on the planet, but even this crushed him. He blinked and opened his mouth to tell her that it was all okay, but he couldn't bring the words up his throat. Because nothing was ever okay. It never, ever would be. He folded his lips together and fiddled with the drawstrings on his gray hoodie, unwilling to watch her cry in front of him.

"Yeah, you do look pretty sad." he told her, his brown eyes shifting from his hoodie to her face, pale and thin. Broken. It sort of hurt just to watch her cry, silent tears rolling down her cheeks. "And ... um ... you don't have to be." he murmured softly, the air still as death around them. He picked at a blade of grass and poked a dark red, shriveled up strawberry sadly. He didn't know why he had said it. He knew he might regret it later, but David had had an impulse to just say something. Maybe it was ADHD, maybe it was him being annoying, or maybe he just needed to say something.

"I-I'm David, by the way," he told her, blinking and holding out his hand for her to shake "David Murphy." he only introduced himself because David could never stand silences for more than about ten minutes and it felt weird talking to someone he didn't even know the name of and he just thought he should do something about her clear lack of socializing in a long time.

ooc , sorry that this post sucked even more than yours did.

[Talia Winchell]

Forcing herself to direct her train of sight to the ground instead of back at the boy who had approached her, Talysus's cocoa eyes followed the dry cracks in the ground that screamed for care. She felt as though she wasn't even a person anymore, and honestly, she was sorry that she was in the state she was in. Crying in front of people she didn't know, something she would have been mortified by one mere year before. But she didn't have the energy to be mortified; all she did was let in the monsters and the melancholia. What had made her completely crack? she couldn't help but wonder, still avoiding setting her gaze back on the figure who was standing over her. Was there any way she could have been better now if she had just done something minor differently? If only there were a way to find out.

"Yeah, you do look pretty sad. And...um...you don't have to be." Jolting her from her absorption of the thoughts was the boy's voice, floating towards her, the words once again forming sharp points. She didn't have to be? It took so much self-restraint not to snap at him, tell him that he wasn't allowed to tell her things like that. But there was something so comforting about his voice and in the way that he tried to console her. It felt so oddly familiar to her.

"Why not?" was the phrase that she would settle on instead; this time tilting her head to look up at him, the tears unconsciously paused, she formed the words without stuttering or pausing at abnormal places. She sounded better, and she wasn't sure why that was. Her life was an enigma to her, and it made her feel as though she didn't have the right to have it. People were supposed to know what they were doing and the reasons behind it. She, on the other hand... what was she doing? What made her feel as though her sadness was in control of her life instead of the other aspects of her, and what made it so much stronger than everything else? She had so many questions but nobody to turn to for answers. She'd asked Hermes some, but that was during the obligatory offering and occasional personal prayer that went on every night at the dining pavilion. Nobody expected their divine parents to directly answer their pleas, in any case; Tal felt as though she had hit a complete dead end.

"I — I'm David, by the way. David Murphy."

The daughter of Hermes watched him as he extended his hand to her, and she just looked at it as though she was unsure what the standard response to the gesture was; though she clearly did, she did not stick out her hand for him — David — to shake. "Tal Winchell," she responded in a quiet tone of voice, swallowing before she spoke.


sorry this took so long.
listening to; the great escape - p!nk.