head on collision [open]

[saya]

[bg=D6B79A][atrb=border,0,true][cs=7] It was as quiet as it was dark, the creatures of the night slipping away to their homes to let sunlight take over the land. The sun's rays were reaching, her bloody fingers trying to grasp at objects to help bring herself further above the horizon. The day creatures had yet to make appearances, yet at the long forgotten place, overgrown with flowers, there were signs of life in the area even so early. There was a fresh track worn in the dewy grass, betraying that someone had been here earlier. In fact, hidden from sight, a black bag sat in the shadows, waiting to be claimed. And suddenly, there was a disturbance. A girl jogged into view, keeping a solid footing through the grass. Sweat clung to her forehead, her copper red hair pulled back in a loose pony tail that bounced between her shoulder blade with each footstep. She wore simple black work out shorts with a white stripe down the sides, but strangely, she work a cotton jacket. It was tight, showing off that despite her small height, she was obviously not a 'girl.' The jacket wouldn't have been so strange if it had been of a different material nor if it wasn't so hot already. The shorts showed off strong, toned legs; the kind you'd expect to find in someone who had a career in some kind of sport. Even from a distance, one could see the slightly foreign bone structure of her face. The white head phones in her ears blasted the quick, upbeat song. Her steps were quicker than a jog, almost a run, each foot pounding into the ground in time with the beats to the music. Her eyes were fierce and bright, the fire of life flickering strongly behind the peridot hues. She stopped suddenly and, panting lightly, wiped her forehead free of sweat and plucked her headphones from her ears. She picked two fingers up to a slightly tanned neck and took her pulse, eyes on the wrist watch she held. It was more habit now than anything. She ran this same track every morning, four miles. Habit was hard to break for her; once she had done it for a reason...now because she had nothing to do. Suddenly there was a loud noise, not from the music, coming from her shorts pocket, a cell phone obviously. She plucked said item from her pocket and quickly read the text. She made a noise, a sharp exhale of breath through her teeth, almost a scoff. She typed a quick reply then shoved said phone in her pocket. She made her way to her hidden bag, shoving the head phones once again in her ears, and shuffled through the contents listlessly. She pushed aside her drawing booklet and pencils, and withdrew a water bottle and an orange bottle of pills. She sighed as she twisted the top open and took out a single round, blue pill. She placed it in her mouth, closed the medicine bottle and dropped it in her bag. She downed the whole water bottle, and pill, in record timing before also reaching for a breakfast bar. She started at the food for a moment before blinking and shaking her head, shoving the food back in her bag. Food wasn't exactly on her mind right now. The remnants of last night's nightmare lingered, even though she could never remember what it was about. All she knew was that when she awoke at two in the morning, she wasn't going to sleep. So, like always, she left earlier for her morning run than her parents believed she always left. She had been here in the clearing for quite a while actually, star gazing, thinking. She had started her run on time, but finished it faster than she normally did. So with time to kill, she couldn't decided what to do. She leaned back against the abandoned rail road tracks, struggling to get out of her jacket. She was alone. The jacket fell off petite shoulders, tanned only slightly despite being in the sun for so long, leaving her behind in a tight white muscle shirt. A long line, pale, puckered, and raised, ran a good six inches diagonally down her left shoulder blade. She lifted her face to the sun, letting the warm rays strike her face. The sun highlighted the raised, deformed skin that skirted along her left cheek bone, forehead, and lower lip. Scars; and not your simple, everyday scars, but the kind that turned heads. Turned heads to stare, wondering how she could have gotten such ugly marks. Turned heads away in disgust. Brought pity to others faces and only made her angrier. She sighed, the exhale surprisingly soft despite it obviously being meant to not be so soft, judging by the heavy lifting of her shoulders. She fiddled with her Ipod, running her thumb over the dial, looking for a different song other than the one she was listening too. Might as well practice a little dancing since she was warmed up pretty good. Maybe she should practice something a little slower than her normal pace.

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[prospice4]

There was magic in the old bridge. It guttered in the eaves, under the high rafters, where occasionally one would catch the flicker of a bat's wing or, from the corner of the eye, a flash of some unidentified thing moving there in the dark. The tracks ran through it still, the metal rusted and hidden by shadows that, towards the east-facing entrance, gently blended with the foggy morning light. Even here, where for most of the day the light didn't intrude much past the entrance, the tracks were overgrown with weeds. Running roughly perpendicular to the tracks cut the river, more of a brook at the moment, cutting easily through plumes of pepper-smelling watercress. Up the banks, the fields were dappled with color - foxgloves, dandelions, wildflowers. Along the bank itself a few wayward irises stood sentry, with their long bearded faces looking out over the water.

Nat did not oft visit this place, although part of him held on to a long distant memory of it. Stumbling through the tall grass with Hanna's hand clasped in his own, his tiny fat chubby baby fingers. He had been young - probably six or seven. Young enough to believe in faerie tales, anyway, and trooping on behind her he thought he'd seen a ring of faeries dancing, hidden in a natural hollow of the grass. He was too old to believe in such things now, of course, but for him the place held a certain nostalgic quality. The grass in the fields, through which he now walked, dragging his heels slightly, wasn't close-cropped like that in his garden, but had been allowed to grow almost unchecked in the exceedingly fertile, silty ground, and was as thick and rough and tumbled like a horse's mane, all crests and troughs.

Twined between his index and middle fingers was a spray of bryony, the ghostly pale flowers unconsciously picked from up the field, where there was a long section of hedge up towards a thin, queer forest. The tree trunks were straggled widely and there was hardly any underbrush, giving it a strange luminous quality. Nat looked over his shoulder at it as he continued up the tracks, his back to the sun, traveling nearly due west and away from the covered bridge. There was a distinct purpose for this, because walking the other direction things in the distance appeared only as silhouettes. And, as any good bird watcher knows, it's rather hard to identify the silhouettes of avians. So far, Nat had seen a couple of swifts darting low across the grass, brushing wingtips on the tops of grass. Martins, nesting in holes under the riverbanks, darting low over the water and back again to their nests.

He continued well up along the tracks as they rose up to the hill, stopping occasionally to watch some wing disappear and trying to catch the edge of it in his vision, look for some telltale wing or tail bar to tell him what it was. He was more watching to pass the time here than anything else, alone in what had once been less than a wilderness and was now reclaimed by the grass and the weeds and the swallow's wing. He slipped through the heather, for further up away from the river the plants became thicker, more vociferous, hardier. Down by the bank it was all soft grass and wildflowers and butterflies, iridescent dragonflies flicking over the water's surface easily. Up here, though, as the land rose, the gorse grew thicker. It was a perfect place for snakes, but Nat wasn't too bothered about that so early in the morning.

As he crested the rise, his well-worn leather boots scuffing along a spray of gravel, he became aware of a solitary figure sitting well ahead against the tracks. He couldn't make out much from his distance except the rough outline of shoulders and the color of the hair. Red. He'd only seen a few people with red hair, and most of them he'd glimpsed only briefly haunting the hallways of Thorpe, so many minnows swimming by through the school thinktank. He brushed a stray lock of hair back behind his ear and decided not to bother himself too much about it and continue up his intended path. Up here, pink-orange breasted chaffinch, the low calls of mourning doves from somewhere in the wood. Something he didn't know the name for. The odd lilting speech of a mockingbird, first screaming and then twittering as tame as a canary.

As he drew closer he recognized her, which was good because if he hadn't already seen them he might have gasped at the old scars, those white raised patches of skin. He'd seen her around the hallways of Thorpe... he knew her name, too, if only he could think of it. He flinched involuntarily as he drew closer, but for the most part his features were blank enough. He was quite close enough to talk now, maybe twenty yards away and still walking along with one hand looped easily into his pocket, still grasping the dying trail of bryony. "Hey," he said, as easily as he could manage but stumbling nonetheless because he'd never been the best at initiating conversations, "...Saya, right? You go to Thorpe too. Nat. ...Is my name, sorry. Uh..." He looked awkward, uneasy, but had figured that ignoring her would be rude.