Sweat Like You Mean It [Open]

Melanie was not a runner.

She hated the way that running made her feel. She hated the feeling of her body making impact on the ground with every motion, she hated the way it made her lungs literally scream in protest. Melanie hated waking up early to attend gym and then showering as soon as she got back to the lockers because she could not walk around gooey and sweaty and gross. She had a reputation to uphold after all.

And to make matters the worst they could possibly be, she hated how her glasses would slide down her face when she started to sweat. The nightmare child considered taking them off and leaving them with her belongings in the locker, but that tended to mean that when gym class actually started that she could literally not tell her classmates from trees. More than once she'd tried to pass a ball to a tree who was just standing their minding its own business. Doing a thing that trees sometimes did.

Fuck trees.

Melanie Vesper ran and ran, and finally ran out of steam as she flopped over onto the grass and wheezed.

Her chest felt like it was on fire.

Melanie was convinced that anyone who genuinely enjoyed running was a masochistic psychopath with a pathological hatred of their own body, and anyone who said that running helped them relieve stress was lying through their teeth. She thought, as she lay in the grass, feeling her clothes become uncomfortably cold because of her sweat, that the first thing she was going to do after she took over the world, was banish everyone who genuinely thought running was a relaxing activity straight to the motherfucking moon, where those alien moon people belonged.

Lo and behold, one of the strange moon people approached her. If her literally everything wasn't on fire/aching, then she would have rolled her eyes at them. Yet somehow even her eyes managed to be tired.

Was it possible to strain your eyes?

"Shut........ up......" the nightmare witch wheezed.

"Shut up," She said. The girl saw the other person reaching for their water bottle and threw her hand out and grabbed it first, bringing it to her face and drinking deeply from it. Melanie drank enough that she was feeling a bit better, but she kept drinking from it out of spite, because they dared to offer her something and then tried to take it away. It made her stomach slosh uncomfortably though.

Eventually she had to pull it away though and take a few desperate lungfuls of air.

"I need to learn how to run," she wheezed. "I have plans you know. plans. Running is an important--" Harsh wheezing. "--crucial step."

Melanie was regretting drinking all that water. She was regretting it immensely. It wasn't too bad at the moment, but it felt like she couldn't move, as if she were an overful water balloon. Which she probably was--except she was skin instead of latex. Her wheezing was calming down, and she wiped her sweat from her forehead with her arm, letting it flop uselessly to her side.

"Running with people?" She scoffed and rolled her eyes. "Why would I do something like that? So they can taunt me for being a bad runner? Mm, I'll pass."

@"Bowen"

Melanie didn't want to admit that she didn't have any friends. She wasn't exactly the most popular kid on campus, not since she broke that kid's nose with a book for touching her sweater, and certainly not because she wasn't the most social person. Her stepdad was the kind of guy who ran and only drank natural spring water that came in expensive bottles, but she would sooner slit her own throat and write her autobiography in her own blood than bond with him.

The music thing was admittedly a pretty solid idea though.

"Yeah," she said, her breath starting to even. "Maybe I'll do that. I guess you turned out to be useful for something after all."

@"Bowen"