[center] [img]http://i.imgur.com/HeqywCY.jpg?1[/img] [h2][color=hotpink]Annabella Carlyle[/color] - [color=purple]Athena[/color][/h2] [/center] [color=hotpink]"Never Fight Out Of Fear... But Never Fear To Fight." What does fighting bring us? It brings us war with each other. It brings nothing by death and destruction upon the lowly souls of mankind. We should never fight in the first place. We can't. We mustn't. It is morally and spiritually wrong. If you fight, then you hurt those you love. There is no strategy to fighting. It just has many humans running at each other with guns, bullets, weapons... We can stop any war before it begins just by lowering out weapons and pausing to think. Every war can be fought by word of mouth only, not by guns… by swords and spears. A war is not about who was right… it’s about who is left. --- [i]The sound of a door opening. Quiet footsteps across a hardwood floor. A gentle caress of the shoulder.[/i] Suddenly someone shook her arm… Hard. It rocked her head back and forth and she jolted up, taking in a deep breath of air, as if she had suddenly come up from being underwater for many minutes. She jerked around, looking for the intruder as she gripped her pen tightly in her hand. Someone caught her wrists and held them together in one of their hands while the other hand tilted her chin to look up at the intruder. She took a deep breath and set down the pen, rubbing her face in her hands. “Jesse,” she murmured quietly, smiling up at the brown haired, brown eyed boy standing in front of her. Just as usual, he didn’t say a word. He instead dropped her hands away from her and stepped back, looking down at her curiously. She rubbed her eyes; the light stung her corneas like she had put hot peppers in them. Wet tears welled up at the corners of her unusual gold eyes and she blinked them away. She rubbed the back of her neck. It felt like she had been asleep for years. There was an extremely bad kink in her neck and her back. “How long was I out for?” Jesse gently helped her up and pointed to the top of her paper. She peered down close to it, checking out the date. She leaned back. “Yeah, so?” Jesse tapped the year before pulling out his phone and showing her the date. She peered at the phone, the bright light still stinging her eyes. “Yeah, it’s… 2019?!” Panic filling her mind and heart, she quickly grabbed her phone. It was completely dead, not charged in a year. “That can’t be possible, it can’t be!” She swooned suddenly, a wracking bolt of lightly of pain shooting through her forehead, and Jesse caught her quickly before she collapsed to the floor. “My… school… my job… my [i]apartment[/i].” Jesse pressed a finger to her lips after that last one. He lifted his hands and signed to her [i]Our apartment[/i]. “Our apartment?” she asked curiously. “What do you mean our apartment? And when did you learn sign language?” [i]Over in the West,[/i] he started. [i]When I didn’t get your every two months call, I got worried. I mean, you never miss that call. So I hopped on the first flight here and found you…[/i] He gestured his arms out wide. [i]…like this. Obviously I couldn’t stay here because of school. So I began paying your rent for you. Also, I explained to your university in writing and your jobs in writing that you had gone into some form of coma and that I didn’t know when you would be waiting up. Your university is still open to you whenever you want to come back, but your jobs aren’t…[/i] He frowned at this last part before signing, [i]Sorry.[/i] She stared at the ground in front of her, so many thoughts running through her mind. She turned to Jesse and gave him a hug. “Thank you.” She suddenly felt very fatigued, after all of this that she had gone through within the past twenty minutes and she yawned. Jesse cocked an eyebrow at her and she shook her head. “It’s just too much at the moment. I mean, I have an extremely bad headache, plus waking up from a coma for the past year… I think I need a real nap.” Jesse nodded and shifted off her bed. Her back and neck cracked and popped as she shifted underneath the covers. “Wake me up in twenty minutes, okay?” He nodded, giving her a thumbs up before she sank into the pillow and fell into a normal sleep, for the first time in a year. --- “Do you fear war, dear child? Do you fear the fighting? The blood? The anger?” “I don’t fear it. I just don’t like it. My father drove me toward it.” “And was he so wrong?” “War destroys nations…” “But it can also unify them.” “...” “Who are you? Why am I here?” “I should be asking you the same questions. And why do you speak of war so much?” [/color] [color=purple]“War does not scare me as much as it does you.”[/color]