Deon started his run at 8 AM that morning. Typically, he started his runs based on his class schedule - if he had a class at 10, he'd run at eight. If he had a class at 8:30, he'd run at six. On days with no classes, he would not run at all and would instead do weight training, or maybe he would do nothing except zone out in front of the television, occasionally sniping at Peter just to keep from becoming complacent.
Today, he had an 8 AM class. Needless to say, he didn't care about it. Come to think of it, he 'didn't care' for most of his other classes that past week either. Peter asked about the cutting, and Deon told him that he was sick (Deon thought this was a kindness to Peter- he wasn't going to tell him the truth, so instead he told a lie so blatant that he couldn't be accused of misleading). And sometimes Deon would seem so, laying in his bed with nothing but his iPod for hours at a time, until the call of dinner was too much for him to ignore. But increasingly, he found himself in need of wandering around. The night before, he hunted alone, and to kill some daemons on his own once again had an old sort of satisfaction to it.
But mostly, it made him feel even more like shit. And he couldn't even pin down why.
Running again might be his first step to actually returning to his old routine and his old schedule, he thought. He even stuck firmly to the paths that he must have gone over hundreds of times before, ever since he was in high school - a stretch bordering the orange groves, a distance through suburbian homes (even past his own home, though it didn't occur to him to interrupt their breakfast routine), through a park, along a beachside sidewalk. The run was perfectly normal and routine until that point.
A notion filled his head as he ran that stretch of beach. This bothered him because the point of running was to not think, and to shut away everything that nagged at his thoughts. He flexed his hands into fists and sneered to no one, quietly furious. Soon, he was so distracted that he nearly tripped over a bottle. This was the last straw for him.
Deon stopped at a picket fence, planting his hands on the top bars and hunching over so that he was staring at the sandy ground and his white Pumas. He rubbed his face against his shoulders, wiping off some of the sweat, paused, and ran his hand through his hair. What used to be dark, glossy hair was bright orange and stiff stuff now, prickly to the touch. There wasn't a morning that he would look at his reflection in a mirror and not inwardly cringe a bit. Whenever he went home, his mother would shake her head at him, his sisters never ended their teasing, his maternal grandparents, in the rare occasion they visited from Miami, would wail and bemoan how their only grandson had become a punk, and gave him no end of their grief.
He assumed that his hair would be stuck as orange and ugly, forever and ever, the end. Before the battle at Loews proved him dead-wrong, Deon had thought the possibility of becoming normal again would be a wish come true. Now, the summoner found himself simply disturbed.
Deon shook his head. He got his stupid notion while at the beach, but at that picket fence, he decided to actually act on it. He took an east road, and forced himself towards a mansion upon a hill.
--
"Come running with me."
(tag Mara)
