The Depths Were Accepting • •

[caius jason keaulana]

Caius often used the campus gym. It fitted in nicely with his daily routine. He could squeeze in a workout around his classes or before he started teaching in the morning. It saved him having to try to race across the city to some overpriced gym that had the exact same equipment as the college. He never ended his day with a session down in the sports centre, purely because the end of the day was his social time. Caius grabbed dinner or drinks with friends, hung out with the people he had become pals with since landing in New York and generally just switched off from everything he had to worry about. He needed to in order to keep his own sanity. New York was very different to life in Hawaii. However, NYU had headhunted him for the position he now held at the campus. They had offered him pretty much whatever he wanted to take up the teaching role. He’d have been the biggest fool to turn it down. He had taken it for the experience more than anything else. He could always return back to the island he called home at the end of the contract he had signed with the school if he didn’t feel like he had anything promising in his future.

Caius did an intense cardio workout and then moved onto the weights. He already looked like he lifted a dozen times a day, but the truth was simply that he had been a very active youth. He worked out from college onwards, but even then his build was mostly down to just being athletic with his friends, surfing a lot and participating in a lot of activities during the years he travelled for his research. It was so very different now and the gym was really all Caius had if he wanted to keep in shape. He didn’t have the waves or the same kind of adventures that he could tell stories about over a cold one. It was an entirely different world, but one that Caius was still glad he had come to. He liked teaching, and his classes were filled with more personalised touches than many students were expecting which made it more surprising and energetic, which kept Caius grinning as the months ticked by. He wasn’t born to be a teacher, and he was a little different in his methods, but they worked. Students passed his classes and they seemed intrigued by what he taught. He considered it an all-round win.

He wrapped up his workout and headed for a quick shower and got changed. Caius wasn’t teaching until the afternoon, but he had the plan to grab some food and then maybe check his e-mails. He was terrible at doing it and had missed a meeting or two in the past because he had failed to catch up on the overflowing inbox on his computer. He slung his gym bag over his shoulder and left the room with his hair still damp and hanging around his face. It would dry soon enough, but he was used to it after his upbringing. Caius was making his way out of the gym when he bumped into someone. He didn’t know what quite happened, but he assumed they stepped back when he stepped forward; one of those unavoidable collisions because it happened right at the last second. “Man, I’m sorry!”

• • •

TAGGED! Shay Clarissa Mycroft
WORDS! 570!
OUTFIT! Manly Man!
LYRICS! Thirty One & Sevens - - - I Killed The Prom Queen
NOTES!

[Shay Clarissa Mycroft]

Shay had definitely thought her life would have turned out a little differently. More like what it had been back in California and not so much what it was in New York. But she had been pleasantly surprised that she found she liked it. It wasn't someone else schedule she had to live by; not exactly anyway. She made her own hours and took the holidays that she wanted when she wanted. Admittedly, she had loved working with the Kings and doing what she had but the relationship had ruined that for her. And when she'd moved, she had thought, maybe she could get in with the Islanders or better, the Rangers but then she had thought better of it. It meant she would hardly see the apartment she called home through the season and though getting to travel would be great and seeing every game the team played for free, it was also a bit lonely; and very repetitive.

She had already seen all those places with her father when she had been small, and then her brothers when they were all drafted to the league. Being who she was, she got tickets to their games anyway. They were always waiting for her at the arena, a pair of box seat. It was always nice to hang out with the owners, the players who couldn't play that game and the occasional girlfriend or wife. So she really didn't need to be part of a team, even if the pay had her feeling faint! And maybe she would take it on. The Rangers had been willing to be a little more lax with their contract for her than they would have been for a stranger. But she was a Mycroft. She could probably play the game better than a couple of the actual team members! She had been trained by one of the best, scouted for a dozen or more colleges for their teams and was asked to be a part of the women's team for the country. You had to be good to get that honour and she was but she didn't want to flaunt it. She wasn't after fame and fortune. She was after a life.

For now though, she was quite content doing what she had been since she moved to the big apple. Being a personal trainer was rewarding and it meant she could put the degrees she had to good use with people who actually needed her help and not just the ones that asked for assistance to see her in her yoga pants. They needed her help, or she wouldn't have been brought onto the medical team but a few of them made sure she knew there were other reasons they asked for her and not the other two guys. Thankfully she'd had a couple of guys she had known since she was younger on her side. But it was a man's world and if she couldn't handle it, she shouldn't have been a part of it. She could handle herself and after a few tries, the guys had known it too. Shay wouldn't lie and say she didn't miss the life, it had been an adventure but she wanted to wake up in her own bed more than she would have. She had friends in every city with a hockey team in the country bur she wanted ones she could see regularly. It would probably sound insane to anyone who hadn't grown up that way but for Shay, being in one place for more than a week was a dream come true. Henley was an amazing client. She was so focused and stubborn. If she didn't get something, she kept doing it until she did. Shay wished all her clients were like that. But of course, some of them only hired her because they hoped to get stories about her father and brother's out of her. They hadn't all been completely wrong. She used those stories to motivate them, get them movies. But Henley didn't need them nor did she care who her family was. “Perfect. You’re all ready for that marathon, Hen. Keep it up and Saturday, you’ll be aces. See you next week.” She said, grinning. She took a step back to get out of the other blonde’s space and smack dab in the middle of someone else’s; or a solid wall that moved on her when she hadn’t been looking. She spun around meeting a solid chest and had to actually look up. That was a rarity for Shay who was three inches shy of six feet. “Uh, no, it’s my bad. Really. I should have been looking.” Shay admitted, apologising even as she reached up to scratch her shoulder. A habit she picked up as a child to shield herself from embarrassment that she’d caused herself. It was a habit she always thought she’d dropped back then as well but never had.

Tag || caius jason keaulana
Words || 823
Clothes || Coming Soon
Music || No Place Like You --Maddie & Tae
Notes || <3!

[caius jason keaulana]

It was being an Island Native that pushed Caius to look into his heritage and the history of his people and the place he called home. Hawaii was renowned for being a wonderful vacation and honeymoon hotspot, but it had a past that was as extraordinary as its beaches and sunsets. Caius wanted to share that with the world. That was why his classes focused on the Hawaiian history, as well as touching on the Natives that were extinct now, or the cultures that had died out as modern civilisations moved in and took over. He felt like he could talk more freely about certain things when they were something that affected him. There were hotel corporations back in Laie who were trying to cash in or make a cheap show out of something the local families took strong beliefs in. Caius mentioned it in class sometimes to show his students that a fashion statement or a new trend could actually be hurtful if not approached with a sensitive touch. Caius might have been living in the city, but he was still very much an Island Man.

He felt maybe he clung to it more because of his mom and puna. He missed them terribly even with regular calls to Laie to see how they were doing and to make sure everything was okay. His father had been a Hawaiian native, too, but the man had never known Caius existed. A summer fling, he was long gone before his mom even knew she was pregnant, and she had no way of tracing him to let him know that he was about to be a father. Caius himself had never felt the need to do it either. His mother and grandmother had done wonderful jobs at raising him, and while part of him felt that it would be a betrayal to them to seek out his father, another part knew he didn’t need to meet the man. Plus, there was the chance that his father was happy now. He could have a wife and a family of his own, having lived a life he had always dreamed of. Caius didn’t want to come barging in and spoil that. Besides, he knew from the old stories that a part of his mother’s heart still belonged to the man who had helped create him; if he truly was living a happy life elsewhere, then it would break his mother’s heart to know that, even if she was mostly happy for him and whatever life he had led without her. She was a romantic, much like her son, which was why he had always valued her opinion when it came to his own relationships.

Caius smiled a warm smile and shook his head. He felt the damp ends on his shoulders, but it didn’t bother him still. Water had always been his friend. “It’s one of those things. Can happen to anyone.” He said, waving it off as he shouldered his gym bag. “No one got hurt.” He added, smiling again. In a gym it was fairly easy for someone to injure themselves and Caius hated seeing people doing the wrong thing on the machines, mistreating equipment because they thought they knew better than the trainers who kept watch there. He couldn’t do it himself, just because with the way he had been raised and the type of people he’d be raised by, he’d be likely to hit people upside the head for being absolute idiots.

• • •

TAGGED! Shay Clarissa Mycroft
WORDS! 586!
OUTFIT! Manly Man!
LYRICS! Thirty One & Sevens - - - I Killed The Prom Queen
NOTES!

[Shay Clarissa Mycroft]

Shay wasn't normally a klutzy or forgetful person. She was usually very self aware and knew what was going on around her. It was part of her job to be aware! Even before it had become her job, she'd been aware. She really had no choice with the family she had. Her brothers had been evil little shits when she'd been small. It was something they had never grown out of even when they'd gotten taller and bulkier and even when they became professional athletes and family men of their own. It hadn't mattered that she'd made the women's national team herself, that she went on to play at the world's and the Olympic levels, she never actually wanted to play the sport in any sort of professional manner. She was still the baby of the family and the only girl so she was automatically the one picked on and teased. Of course, it didn't help that she had habitually threw herself into the fights that started in their house. And when she didn't want to be part of those fights, she had to watch and work her way through a room without being hit; which was something she had become an expert at doing.

So why she totally seemed to have spaced on where she was, was beyond her but it had happened. And though it probably wasn't the first time, she couldn't remember ever doing it before now. She didn't like doing things that embarrassed her, obviously no one really did but for Shay it was a whole thing. No doubt thanks to her brothers but she didn't want to delve that far into her psyche. She already knew she probably wouldn't like the results of that thanks to the single term of psychology she'd had to take for her sports medicine degree. She had wanted that degree so bad that she would have sat through years of psychology and everything else thrown her way to obtain it. Thank god she hadn't needed to do that! Chances were high that she would have fallen on her back up. Of course, for her to do that, she would have needed a back up and Shay had never wanted anything else from life. Sports had always been a big factor in her life, she was nothing without sports. She could skate before she could walk. Hell, she learned to walk on skates!

Playing hockey wasn't what she wanted but treating sports injuries, or helping those people who really wanted to get into a better physical shape get where they wanted to be. Or in Henley's case, get even better because that marathon she was running was one of the biggest she'd ever ran and she wanted to kick ass at it. Shay could get behind that and be there for a portion of the race to cheer her on. It wouldn't be much but Shay loved supporting her clients. They worked so hard for whatever reason and if it was something like this, she wanted to be there for them at some stage. "I don't know. I walked into you pretty hard. You might have a bruise." She said before snapping her mouth shut and looking anywhere but at the face of the man. She was not flirting right now! It was definitely not the time for flirty remarks and playful banter. And yet, she didn't regret the words that fell from her lips before she even had a thought what to say.

Tag || caius jason keaulana
Words || 584
Clothes || Coming Soon
Music || No Place Like You --Maddie & Tae
Notes || <3!

[caius jason keaulana]

Caius knew that he didn’t look the part of a professor. He couldn’t dress in a shirt and tie unless someone was getting married, and even then that was a style that lasted the ceremony and maybe five minutes more. His roots were too embedded in him. He liked the salt water in his hair and the Island life in his veins. He also liked seeing the shocked looks on the faces of the students when he appeared at the front of class, introducing himself as their professor when he was a towering giant complete with the type of muscles they probably only expected to see on a football star. His life had built him up, and he wasn’t going to be the stereotype people expected when they read his syllabus online, or had their presupposed ideas of anthropology from movies or television shows. He studied the place he came from, and the ancestors who he had to thank for making him who he was. His classes were authentic, full of speeches that came from the heart, and he taught with a conviction he couldn’t fake because he was simply telling a room of people about the man he was and the life he came from.

It was full of hard work and community spirit. Yes, it changed and was full of a rich cultural history, but Caius had rough hands because of how he had grown up fishing or working on the shores of the island. He had his scars from careless accidents that had all happened while sporting the biggest of boyish grins. He was tough, and a little rough around the edges for sure, but he was happy. Yes, he still had a long list of things he wanted to do before he found a place to relax for those golden years of retirement, but Caius couldn’t say that he had any major regrets. Sure, he might have wished he kissed a girl when he had a chance to, or maybe didn’t drink so much at that club that one time, but they were still things he said with a cheeky smile. They weren’t real regrets or things that changed his life in the worst way. They were funny moments, maybe embarrassing, but they were things he still laughed about.

He didn’t want to grow old with a list of ‘what ifs’, and Caius had no intentions of letting that happen. He wasn’t the type to let life go by while he watched from the sidelines. For now, he enjoyed teaching at NYU. If at any point that became dull and the classes lost their spark, he’d turn back to research, or look at doing something else with his life. There were always going to be endless options out there, and he’d rather try his hand at them then grow bored with the life he was living. Chuckling deeply, Caius found himself amused by the woman in front of him; something which happened often, but nothing much ever came from it usually. “I’m a pretty solid guy, in case you didn’t notice. It takes a little more than a knock to bruise me.” He said with lopsided smirk. “Besides, I’ve survived worse.” He added, flirting ever so slightly now. He knew he had some prominent scars, but often joked that they added to the allure of his character before he explained where they came from.

• • •

TAGGED! Shay Clarissa Mycroft
WORDS! 572!
OUTFIT! Manly Man!
LYRICS! Thirty One & Sevens - - - I Killed The Prom Queen
NOTES!