[Classes over! Done driving! Back to the RP!]
Keeran laughs softly at the Ginger's puppy-like pose that quickly develops across his stomach, peering up at him from his chest with round glistening pools of beige as she nestles tightly against him. He exhales through the intermittent laughter, softening his face into a gentle smile as one of his hands across Ginger's back reaches up a nestles itself affectionately into her hair.
The young man toys with the soft curls absent-mindedly, the movements of his hands flipping between long petting strokes across her scalp with the tips of his fingers and a short tight handful of tuggings at a her roots. The action seems to calm him, as if simply distributing affection to this infatuating young woman clung so tightly around him was more relaxing than anything else in the world.
"No, it's okay Ginger." Keeran says, peering back down at her as he continues to stroke her hair, listening to the calm ambiance of the woods the girl was being so careful not to interrupt. He had no problem unsheathing this part of himself to her. Those eyes that looked back at his had never once flashed the slightest hint of judgment.
Keeran had always had this persona which he felt hopelessly dedicated to maintaining- this idea that he always had to be the pillar of strength for the people around him. It was certainly something he was good at, something that he enjoyed being, and something that was in many cases necessary, to serve the role of the protector. But the problem with it, the most continuously stressful component, was the fact that it meant the exposure of weakness, however brief... devalued him. It was something he had to dedicate most of his life to avoiding or hiding outright.
"So, you've shot my gun now." Keeran begins, glancing up through the folds of the hammock into the gently swaying treeline above. "Do you know why I have a weapon like that? Why I have dedicated my efforts to fighting how I do, from as far away as possible?" He poses the question rhetorically, his voice staying clear and even as he scans the branches above, watching the pale white light softly trickle through their jagged brown brambles. He's quiet for a few moments, stirring the contents of his head as his hand falls still against Ginger's scalp.
"When I first starting training at Signal, I was not on the route to becoming a sniper. I was actually planning on specializing in close combat, and was trained thusly for my whole first year... but during my final combat exam of my freshman year, I had an accident." The boy's lip purse together slightly as a long trailing breath streams out from his nostrils. His eyes stay slackened but glued forward, looking upwards through the clouds into some old projector screen, playing back the scene as he described it on a movie reel.
"Another of the higher ranked students and I had been paired to do battle for our position in the class. We were very evenly matched, and the fight had gone on for far longer than it should have... We were both tired, my opponent and I. We had both pulled out all of our moves, all the stops, and still neither of us had managed to land a hit on the other. It's all leading up to one last clash, winner takes the match." The tone of Keeran's voice drops ever so slightly, becomes less filtered, as if speaking his memories into existence out of his own inner depths.
"We charge at each other. I feint going for a swipe at his sides with my axes as we are about to collide. At the last second, I jump up into a barrel roll and rotate, spinning the horizontal attack around into a vertical one and dumping the last of my aura into the attack." Keeran's voice stops suddenly, as if the entirety of him had collectively cringed in a single gruesome recollection. His mouth sits parted, slightly agape as a balanced resolved tone eventually starts to force its way back through.
"...The kid's aura was unarmored." Keeran says grimly, his inflection starting to slow, and deepen as he is sucked more and more tightly into his own memory. "...I still remember the feeling... of my blades lodging into his chest as I crashed into him. The way his face slowly changed as I landed on top of him, morphing from this determined war-glare... into this cringeing look of complete agony as we collapsed to the floor together covered in his blood, my hands still gripping the handles of the weapons carving into his sternum. I could see his mouth moving, shaping words in the most painful possible way as his back smacked into the pavement, but I couldn't hear a thing he said. Everything had stopped moving, stopped making sound. As if God himself wanted me to live forever in that single moment, stretched end to end across time." Keeran's voice continues to drone softly, himself no longer even present in the hammock with Ginger.
"I watched for hours as that boy's face shifted again, out of that cringing mask of pain. I saw every neuron fire, as he looked up at me. I watched him slowly realize what I had just done to him, and I watched as that agony, and that anger, broke apart in his eyes. Every aspect of him fell apart in slow motion right there... and collapsed into this broken look of complete pleading and fear as he laid there gasping on the ground beneath me, hands folded over mine, as if he were trying to convince himself that the axes weren't really there, that this was all just a dream."
Keeran's flow slams to a halt as his lips slowly pool into silence. It hangs heavily in the air, even the forest seems still now, as the boy is slowly transported back to his own body. At a crawling pace, his head tilts down from its skyward angle, and levels down back towards Ginger. His eyes are unreddened, but filled with a deep solemn backwash that is quickly blinked away as the boy reassumes control.
"The boy survived. But I didn't touch an ax for two years after that." Keeran explains, as his hand slowly begins to play with Ginger's hair again. "After that day, I could never view blood the same way. It all just became sickening to me... I was rabid to remove myself from it as immediately as possible. So..." The boy's voice halts, interspersing a single light chuckle as he rolls his eyes somewhat at himself, "instead, I became a sniper. Exclusively so I could stay as far away from the people I was hurting as possible, so that I would not have to see them bleed. Over time I developed a taste for it, and had a good deal of natural talent. Quick, painless, immediate death for my enemies with no suffering involved. Just an instantaneous shift to the afterlife. I found a lot of comfort in that, and eventually was able to start wielding my axes again... but to be honest, I'm still afraid." The young man admits, as his voice draws to an audible close, now having mostly returned to its previous state. His chest however, feels noticeably lighter, having finally been able to reveal this to someone.
"Even today, every time I have to switch Crux into ax form, somewhere inside I get a pang of anxiety, and that kid's pleading face flashes through my mind again. It's something that I've learned to deal with... but I can't say it's not a factor." The boy looks down at Ginger, having finally gotten everything he needed to say off his chest. His voice has returned to its calm accepting tone as he can't help but hold Ginger just a little bit tighter. "If you think about it, to this day I fight the way that I do- from as far away as possible- because deep down, I'm really just afraid."