this beautiful cruel world :: vixy

Simon bent down, eye level with the shrubbery outside the big house. Because winter was melting into spring, the bushes had started to sprout little buds of green. A miracle of life, and Simon was witnessing it. Weak, transparent sunlight hit his back, its beams just reaching an freshly rained on camp. The demigod remembered the rain well, it was part of his childhood, seeped into the very essence of his soul. Rain was present on the farm nearly everyday in London, and here in America it was quite odd to him because it hardly ever rained here, and when it did it was only for a short period of time. Still, it certainly smelled nicer here in the forest than it did out at the farm. Like fir trees and moist earth instead of animal dung. Simon had stood outside in the rainstorm, it being his first one since getting out of the lotus casino. His soft, beige, old-fashioned collared shirt clung to his skin, the dark brown suspenders digging into his wet shoulders like clamps. Simon’s blonde hair dripped in front of his grey eyes. He loved it. 

“You know, we’re not so different, you and I.” Simon told the plant, his british accent stark against the American air. “We both hate the winter. We hide ourselves. But the moment spring comes we’re really happy and we start to show our leaves.”  He took a bud in two of his fingers, rolling it between his pads gently. Next to the Demeter cabin, the Big House had the best plants in camp. They were well taken care of, always green and full of life, and the flowers had the most beautiful blooms. Simon may have been a soldier, but he loved the beauty and naturalness of nature. Maybe someday he’d become a gardner. 

This was the place where he and Tessa went for their ‘modern lessons’. They were smart children, the brightest in their class in 1913, but they’d missed so much information because of their time in the lotus casino. So every week the siblings went there for about three hours, and they vigorously studied history and current events. Tessa, unsurprisingly, was doing better than Simon. He didn’t care about Hitler or North Korea or the independence movement of Kenya. All he cared about was 1914 and doing his part for queen and country. He thought their little lessons were over, but apparently a girl wanted to help him even further. 

Yet if she was so eager to teach Simon, then why was she late? The only reason why the sopping wet boy wasn’t already inside his cabin was because he believed in punctuality. When he would see this girl he’d chew her out for a minute and let the lesson commence. After all, it was rude to waste someone’s time. But then again, her time would be wasted anyways because Simon didn’t care about anything modern.

Simon saw the girl appear through the rain as if she was some mystical being. He scoffed at the thought. This girl was nothing more than the offspring of a god and mortal, not a chimera or fairy or nymph, as he thoroughly believed that none of those creatures existed. No. In this world, there were only cold hard facts and truths. Like, for instance, it was a fact that the British had won World War One, which had only further invoked a sense of pride and nationalism in the young demigod. It was also a fact that that Simon would never believe in witchcraft. Tessa, his older, more snotty and stuck up sister, often did ‘magic’ as a way to help out around society and home. But Simon thought that what she was doing was just advance chemistry and physics - things he’d never excelled at or understood. So to him, the girl was just a girl. And she was just a girl upon further inspection. A much too modern girl, in Simon’s opinion. 

Every girl should be covered, and while this one could’ve worn more revealing clothes, it still was too much. The boy had not gotten used to the clothing style’s of this era, and he doubted he ever would be. Simon had never met a lady with half a shaved head, so that was particularly strange and unappealing to someone like him. It curled wildly, making her look like a lion with a knotted brown mane. Simon hated it. He held out his hand for a formal handshake, speaking in a fine, articulated british accent. “Simon Crane. A pleasure I’m sure.” Except he didn’t think it was. Any girl who dressed like this was not going to be a pleasure. Still, he smiled sweetly.

He eyed her as she ran around in the ran. What a child. Young adults at this age should be working in stores, preparing how to get a good work ethic and learning how to survive in the real world. None of this ‘let’s play in the rain!’ sort of business. Besides, you just got dirty. Simon only stood out there because he missed it. “No. Playing in the rain is for children, and I am not a child.” 

The rain felt nice on Simon’s fingers. It was like the wet, coolness of the water was making his senses tingle, as if they’d been asleep for a hundred years, and the rainstorm was finally awakening them to the new world. He closed his eyes, feeing the raindrops hit his closed eyelids, like drums. It was as if this was a cleansing process, washing away his ambitions for the old world, for the war, for the life he would have lived. Simon often wondered what life would have been like for him. He would have married a wife, with long, curly brown hair and eyes the color of the clover he often saw on his pastures. He would have gotten a job, one that paid well and was an honest living. He would have had children. A boy to carry on his name and a girl that was the spitting image of her mother, beautiful and slender. He would have watched them grow up and marry and have their own children. Simon would have been happy, he was sure of it. Yet that was all stolen away from him the day Tessa took him from war. 

Simon rolled his eyes at Brianna. “I’m not stupid. I know the legal age of an adult.” He didn’t mean to be so rude. Usually the demigod was courteous to everyone, but he didn’t like Brianna. He was judgmental, sure, but he didn’t think that ladies should have shaved heads, even if it was half. Ladies were made to be proper, pure things of the earth. “And you must be mistaken. You actually get sick from playing in the rain. Your immune system can’t handle being in the rain and then immediately going into a warm place.” He wondered what the girl’s IQ was. But he didn’t think it would be her fault if it was low. It probably was the American school system. It wasn’t as good as the British one was. 

In the demigod’s opinion, there was nothing wrong with how he was standing. He stood like a soldier, one that was tall and proud, ready to die for his country. If Simon stood any other way, he felt like he was a disgrace to so many souls - living and dead. “I stand like my brothers in arms. And you absolutely are right. We could die any day. That’s why I’m grooming my self to be a soldier so I can die with honor. I don’t need friends, I need comrades in arms. I don’t need to have fun, I need a gun so that I may kill my enemies.” Still, he decided to indulge the girl. After al, it wasn’t her fault that he was stubborn. And she was trying to be nice to him. “However, I think I shall play in the rain with you.” 

There had been plenty of times where Simon had been sick throughout his life. There’d been pneumonia when he was about three, and then yellow fever when he was seven. As a child, he’d had a pretty weak immune system, and until he was about nine rarely was allowed to go outside except on nice, warm summer days when the breeze blew from the south, warming the demigod to his bones. However, over time Simon’s body strengthened, his immune system becoming a well oiled machine instead of separate greasy parts clanging around together inside him. Being able to go outside whenever he pleased was one of the reason why Simon wanted to join the army. You basically had to be outside so you could fight the enemy. Loving the outdoors was mandatory. “Your father is a smart man, Brianna. Much like my own.” Simon often remembered the lessons his father handed out to him like they were precious family heirlooms. Needless to say, the boy soaked up any information like a sponge. 

Whenever anybody talked about war, Simon tended to shut out any bad things that people said. To him, war was glorious, and nothing could change that. Even Tessa, his own sister, couldn’t sway him to see reason. Maybe Simon didn’t want to see reason. Maybe he knew that if he did, he wouldn’t want to join anymore. All Simon ever wanted to do was make his father proud. He wanted to make the main who raised him grin with tears in his eyes as he said ‘That’s Simon. That’s my boy.’ But that could never happen now with Benjamin Crane dead and gone decades past. Still, he wanted to carry on his goal. So nothing Brianna could say would change that. “Maybe being a weapon isn’t so bad. Maybe I’m suited for it.” 

“Dance? Well, I used too.” Simon said, kicking the mud underneath his feet, mucking up the tips of his shoes. His clothes were entirely soaked through, his hair hanging in straight lines in front of his face, plastered to his grey eyes and blinding them. Simon’s eyes were as grey as the sky, and just as stormy. “But it seems like your idea of dancing isn’t what my idea of dancing is, so in answer to your question, Brianna, I’d say no.” 

Simon Crane had never, when it came to his looks, been paid a compliment. He grew up in a society in which affection was shown at the late stages of a relationship, the little corner in-between significant other and marriage, where you gushed out your feelings as if they were late night drunken whispers, meant for your ears only. Simon’s sister and father had never told him that his eyes were nice. He himself never thought they were nice. Grey orbs that were like gunmetal, dull and glassy like a marble. They weren’t anything special, just like he wasn’t anything special. Nothing made Simon Crane stand out, and yet Brianna, this girl, this girl he was supposed to despise because of her non-conservative ways, had thought they were nice. “Er… I mean, they aren’t really. They’re just sort of… grey.” Because how was Simon supposed to react when a girl who dressed less than modestly supposed to react?

And the dancing. Back in his day, his time, the years in which he flourished, was all the rave. He often got permission from his father to go to the local village dances, where all the girls dressed up in their nicest dresses, pinned their hair up for one night only, and put on the minimalist amount of makeup. The girls were dazzling, and so were the men. They were dashing, with their coal black suits that hadn’t been stained by the years of farm work. Simon loved those dances. He craved them almost as much as war. So naturally, he was very good at dancing. He didn’t think this girl was.”No. It isn’t proper to dance with a girl you just met. Talking is fine, but physical contact is saved for later.” 

Simon wiped the sopping hair out of his eyes, water droplets spraying to the side. “Show me what you can do. Dancing wise."

Simon stared at her as if she was an idiot. He knew, of course, she wasn’t. In many ways, Brianna was smarter than him. She knew how to count money, how to talk to people and not sound like you were a freak, how to gain people’s hard-won and easily-lost favor. Brianna had been at camp longer than Simon, and yet, despite probably being very smart, she sound very dumb. All of Simon’s half siblings had grey eyes. Grey eyes and blonde hair, just like him. The shades of the eyes and the hair varied, from storm to stone grey, from wheat to golden hair. But they all had the same striking appearance. “Clearly you haven’t seen the other Athena campers around here, then. My eyes are nothing special.” Even so, Simon couldn’t help but to wonder if they really were nice. The boy had always thought they were somewhat dull, and he had always envied Tessa’s eyes. One of the reason why he despised her so much, among many other reasons. 

When Brianna asked him what era he was from, Simon felt a pang of homesickness. His mouth went dry as the memories flooded back to him. Father teaching him how to ride a horse. Their nanny teaching Simon how to read and teaching Tessa how to embroider. The farm, with its sweet scent of clovers and dew. Simon could feel the english dirt between his bare toes again, could feel the soft summer wind blowing through his hair. It made the demigod quite nostalgic. The states were nothing like home, even back then. America always had a stench of grease to it no matter how far away from the cities you got. The people here were rude and loud, and they enjoyed fireworks above anything else. Of course, that had always been Simon’s opinion.

“1900’s. The Great War.” And then thunder crashed and the rain pelted harder down on his skin like bullets. Simon wondered if he was ever going to be dry again, and then he thought about war, and life in the trenches. Those men knew what it was like to truly be wet, because during the entirety of their service to Queen and country they stood knee high in dirty, rat infested water. “I don’t hate it. I’m not used to it."

Simon understood, despite not having even a year of camp under his belt, that some cabins just didn’t mix. Ares and Demeter, Hades and Zeus, but it wasn’t like they didn’t hang out with each other. Friendships could still form even in the most toughest of situations and the most hated of families. It was a Romeo-Juliet thing, essentially, though more platonic with less deaths in the period of three days. So it didn’t matter if Brianna hadn’t liked the Athenians, or the Athenians hadn’t liked her. She still saw them around camp, and she still should have noticed their eyes. But Simon didn’t say anything about it. “You’re not as bad as my sister.” Coming from someone like Simon, that meant a lot. Well, actually, coming from Simon, it didn’t. He thought it did, but he hated his sister. He hated Tessa. He found her to be dull and boring and annoying, only born into the world to squash his dreams. 

World War I. God, how Simon hated when people used that term. He never lived through the second one firsthand, so to him, that never existed. Hitler’s reign never existed. Pearl harbor never existed. All those deaths never existed. To Simon, there was only one world war, though history liked to say otherwise. “World war one, yes.” The great war. The war to end all wars. Except it didn’t. Every country went to war even after that, and then came world war II. Tessa would probably bring up the point that it would have been completely pointless for Simon to fight in the first one, because he would have died in vain anyways. But Simon just wanted to make his father proud.

The rain felt good on his skin, sizzling off any anger and impurities he may have had from weeks prior. Cleansing. But Brianna suggested that they go inside. “Yes, that sounds good.” Except Simon wanted to stay outside until he was one with nature; a wild boy whose home was the forest. But he went inside anyways, shaking his head like a dog and spraying droplets of water everywhere. The big house had always smelled like mildew to Simon, but now more so than ever because of the rain. He scrunched up his nose, and then sneezed. "We should continue with the lessons."