VOICES TELL ME I SHOULD SLEEP , - - - [CRYSTAL]

[MICHAELANGELO DONATELLO GRACE]

VOICES TELL ME I SHOULD SLEEP ! [cs=2][bg=060606][atrb=border,0,true,b]

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tag ! crissie && crystal ;; word count ! 700 exactly Oo ;; setting ! Maple Hollow public library ;; outfit ! sneakers, jeans, and a sweatshirt ;; [cs=2][bg=060606][atrb=border,0,true,b]

Heather. It was a name, but it was also a type of grain, from what little he knew of plants and biology. He didn’t remember what heather looked like. He wasn’t quite sure it mattered either. He just knew he didn’t think it fit. It just didn’t. Heather. The name just didn't suit her as a person. Of course, some names fit people better than other names. He didn’t think his name fit him very well, though his mother liked to disagree copiously. Supposedly, she’d seen it in his face shortly after he’d been born. As much as he doubted his mother’s choice of names, he doubted the choice for his deceased therapist. Hearing the first name ‘Heather” come from his mother's lips just felt inappropriate. He'd called her "Dr. Jellycut" for so long that anything else just didn't fit. They'd never been close enough for him to call her by her first name, though she'd always called him "Angelo." She had respected his distaste for his full name, but she'd wanted to preserve his mother's originality and call him something a bit more unusual than Michael. So Angelo it had been. Angelo and Dr. Jellycut. Not Angelo and Heather. He shuddered at the thought. It just didn't suit the woman he remembered. The woman who had been dead for exactly eight months today. The perfect opportunity for him to look up some new laws as a method of avoidance. He didn’t want to deal with the memories, so he wouldn’t. He was stubborn enough to make it work. Or, at least, he’d hoped he was. Standing on the street, watching the cars go by, made his heart hurt. It was like acid reflux or getting the wind knocked out of him. It hurt. Thank god there wasn’t a car crash. He might have broken down right there and then if he’d seen one, and he absolutely refused to do that. He didn’t want to let himself cry. He didn’t want the duct tape and superglue to fail because he was his own favorite crafts project. He’d held together so far. He was still alive. He was still functioning relatively well in society, especially considering his situation. Hear voices, only to be made worse on the anniversary of his therapist’s death. Maybe he shouldn’t have reacted so horribly to her absence, the sudden loss that had felt every bit as violent as the car crash itself must have been. And god, he was back on that. He smacked himself upside the head with the heel of his palm and dragged both of his hands over his face, trying to make himself face a reality not dripping wet with emotion and memories. He looked around quickly, not recognizing any faces, which was a good thing. Strangers were neutral. Strangers didn’t invoke emotion like people you knew did. People you knew tended to make you react. Hiro made him angry. Avery just confused him. His students usually frustrated him, though they could also be incredibly entertaining. A deep breath inflated his chest. The air, unusually chilly for the warm weather, felt good as the ice calmed his lungs. The morning air was perfect. The gray was just beginning to settle in the air as the sun made its way beneath the edge of the mountains, painting the sky a pleasant, pale gold. He stared at the sunset, inhaling another mouthful of oxygen and wishing it would just wash away his thoughts. Thank whatever power was up there that the library opened early. He shoved the door open exactly at 8:02 am and wandered around the shelves for a minute before he grabbed the most recent law book and settled down at one of the tables. His gaze flickered around for a moment, but then he opened the cover and heard the wonderful crack of the spine that signaled it had never been used before. Hips nudged from one side to the other as he made sure he was comfortable, and his eyes dipped to the words on the page, mostly familiar. He didn’t have any classes. He had all day to read up on this, all day to get his therapy.

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notes ! worse mood than expected but I hope ti sets the scene okay for you anyway ^^; ;;

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[crystal]

Why did this morning have to push her to her limits? Did life have to throw her curve balls like this all the time? Eight months ago she had mourned Heather Jellycut thankfully she was not all that close to her other then having a mentor figure to help her get settled into the new town. It was nice to have at least one person not look down on her for taking a job that was far below her expertise.

Though now after eight months of not thinking about her she opened the mail only to find a few of her old mentor's files with a request to please take up these cases for her now that she was dead. Crystal herself would have thought that it was a joke but they were the same files that she herself had consulted on before. The names and personal information had been added but they were still the same. Although one of the names left her with a pit in her stomach. Michaelangelo (Angelo) Donatello Grace.

Not only had she consulted on this file in the past but she also worked with Michaelangelo or Angelo as Crystal presumed he liked being called. She went to staff meetings with him like all the other teachers and hadn't even really paid him much thought other then when students complained to her about his teaching style, but then again there were complaints about almost every teacher at the academy so instead of firing teachers until every student agreed with their teaching style (for that semester anyways) it made more sense to just help the students with the trouble they seem to be having at the time.

She sighed pushed her hair out of her face, this was not going to be an easy day in the least and that reason was why she found herself at the public library. Whereas most of the reference books at school were for students and those who for some reason wanted to know about something that would normally be found in a school library. Sadly that didn't include the reference books that she wanted to look up to really help these patients, she could turn them down with the amount of work she had on her plate already... but no she couldn't really. So it was time to work herself into the ground to really help these people.

So onto the shelves... Why was she so distracted... She had worked this heard before... hadn't she... She promised she would sleep tonight... Ok at least this week... Before the semester was over? That she could settle with. She blinked and found herself among the psychology journals, all glorious thirty of them... It looked like she would be doing some research online on those awful contraptions. She sighed and pulled a few relevant journals off the shelf and tucked them under her arm along looking for where those computer things were kept.

It was bad enough that most of her mail now passed through email but now she had to go through all sorts of subscriptions to get the newest journals online. It was never a piece of cake to read through the journals and find what she was looking for, all those buttons and such. She sighed and almost tripped over a table right in front of her. "Shit,"

[/b] Crystal sprawled out on the ground having narrowly missed the man in the chair but she did manage to trip over the leg of his chair. Some graceful water she was turning out to be, "sorry I didn't mean to..." that was when she turned up and recognized Michelangelo, she had wanted to approach him once she had really read up on his file.... Yeah this day could most definitely get worse.[/size][/blockquote][/blockquote]

[MICHAELANGELO DONATELLO GRACE]

VOICES TELL ME I SHOULD SLEEP ! [cs=2][bg=060606][atrb=border,0,true,b]

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tag ! crissie && crystal ;; word count ! 869 -prepares for giggles- ;; setting ! Maple Hollow public library ;; outfit ! sneakers, jeans, and a sweatshirt ;; [cs=2][bg=060606][atrb=border,0,true,b]

Angelo was not a name he preferred. Of course, it was still far better than his full name, so he wasn’t likely to complain. He was pretty sure it would have found its way into Jellycut’s most likely impeccable notes somewhere. He’d seen some of her work, usually not directly related to any patient in particular because that would be an ethics issues, and it was always neat, written in scrawling longhand that was ultimately far more legible than his own handwriting would ever be. He didn’t necessarily have chicken scratch, but rather looped and cursive—his mother had once teased him for having feminine handwriting—but it was also squished together to fit as much as possible on a single line or page, and hurried to the degree that he himself was sometimes not even able to decipher what point he’d been trying to make. Elsa had, on more than one occasion, encouraged him to write more neatly, but ti took too much effort for an otherwise pointless endeavor. So what if he couldn’t read something he’d written one time out of twenty? It wasn’t like he followed his written lesson plans anyway. And if he desperately needed to communicate through writing, he was fairly adept at typing. If his students didn’t understand the comments on their papers, they had to ask. They were adults (usually) and they needed to take responsibility. He wasn’t sure if whoever had killed Jellycut had taken responsibility for their actions. Had it been a drunk driver? Had it been her fault? He couldn’t picture that. He couldn’t see his therapist as being that irresponsible. Besides, she was a good driver. She’d driven him home on occasion when one of their discussions had run late, and he’d promised not to tell anyone because he knew it was unprofessional and he really appreciated it. Walking home in the dark didn’t scare him—he was physically fit enough to defend himself if potential came to actual danger—but he preferred the driving because it was faster. It could get cold at night, too, but that was generally irrelevant. It was what boots and overcoats and thick pants were for. You had to dress to accept the weather. He was dressed appropriately for the autumn chill and the early morning that always seemed to make it worse because the sun hadn’t had time to heat the world yet. Well, the part of the world for which it happened to be day, considering the time differences and other stuff that was very good at occupying his mind away from the unpleasant notions of what today really was. Unfortunately, the laws in front of him were droning into each other, difficult to separate, and his eyes were growing bleary from the small text. It was as if the people who formatted these books were doing their best to stop the common folk from actually looking up the laws. Maybe that prevented lawsuits, maybe it encouraged them because people were ignorant of what they could sue for and couldn’t. He rolled his eyes and rubbed at the sides of his face with both hands. He was tired. He hadn’t slept well the night before and he’d gotten up way too early this morning. He was usually fine with waking early—his job sort of required it of him—but sometimes it just didn’t work out the way you wanted it to. A lot of things didn’t work out the way you wanted them to. If things did, Jellycut would be alive, he wouldn’t have nightmares of killing his sister, and he wouldn’t be picking up medicine from various places sporadically. Of course, that brought him back t another subject of confusion, and one he’d rather avoid for now. He wasn’t even sure why he was avoiding that. Maybe it was just the confusion that put him off. Maybe he just want things to make sense for once. And then his thought process was most gloriously interrupted as a woman sprawled on the floor beside him with a curse. He studied her for a minute, quickly taking in that she had probably stepped along the leg of his chair. He half reached out to help her, but hesitated, studying her face. She didn’t look outright familiar. Instead, he felt the odd sense of deja vu that he had seen her somewhere before, but he couldn’t place a name, location, or situation to the feeling. Was she even real? He looked around, hoping someone else had seen her fall, but no one was in sight to have witnessed the accident. The reference section wasn’t exactly the most popular in a library. He frowned a little, turning his gaze back to her. There was no recognition in his eyes, only suspicion. Was she even real? He wondered again, grimacing. Of course his head would be fucking with him today. He reached out again, offering his hand once more, and hoping she was honestly and vigorously going to grasp his hand. The voices—or rather, the visual manifestations of them—never touched him. If she did, she was real. Easy criteria. “You okay?” he even dared to ask, still frowning. “Who are you?”

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notes ! FWAAAAAAAAA. ;;

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