Always Sinking Down • •

[braden cole remmington]

Braden enjoyed the practical side of his courses more than he liked the essay writing side of it. He was always better at being hands on than he was sitting around and putting words onto paper. He occasionally asked for extra credit assignments in lab classes just so he had something of a safety net in case he ruined an essay and ended up with a pathetic grade that threatened his average for the semester. Braden knew his weaknesses and his strengths and he liked to work them to his advantage. He didn’t care so much about being the best student in his class, but he didn’t want to flunk out when he had moved so far from home to attend college in the first place. He wanted to make something of himself and not have to go home and admit to being a failure. He was already the only boy in the family, he didn’t want to have to be the only screw up, too.

He had classes all morning that day, but the afternoon was free and he had an assignment to work on. It was his final one of the semester, but it was one that needed some lab hours before he could put his findings down onto paper and turn them into an actual paper that could be graded by his professor. He scoffed a tuna sandwich on the way down to the labs since he was going to be skipping lunch. His plan was always to head down to the labs while everyone else busied themselves with lunch, making the excuse to head down that way after they had some food in their stomachs. The difference an hour could make was the difference between the good equipment and the good space and being forced onto the end of a bench with equipment Braden was certain the school had owned since the department had opened. Three years at the school had taught him a few tricks and this was just one of them.

Popping a stick of gum into his mouth to rid the taste (and smell) of the tuna, Braden set his bag down on a stool and set about finding what he needed in the cupboard beneath the bench. The rest he grabbed from the back of the room and set it up exactly how he needed it to be on the table. Braden pulled his binder out from his bag along with his notebook to record any and all of his findings, just in case they came in use later when he was typing all of this up. Braden snapped on his goggles and then turned back to what he needed to do. There was a lot. He was probably going to be here for the rest of the afternoon, if not into the evening. Now he was definitely glad he had come down to the lab while most of the other students were grabbing their lunch. Especially since three seconds later he went and dropped a test tube which shattered completely onto the floor, shards and dusts shooting out around his sneakers. “This is going to be a long afternoon.” He sighed to himself, moving to grab a brush and pan to clean up his mess.

• • •

TAGGED! Aisling Sable Wood
WORDS! 584!
OUTFIT! Bored Biomedic!
LYRICS! New Demons - - - I See Stars
NOTES!

[Aisling Sable Wood]

Aisling was well aware she didn't look like she could possibly be either of her majors. She knew the stereotypes of pretty girls not being very smart and bustier girls not becoming professional dancers. The norms of both had never been so black and white though and Aisling liked not being what everyone expected of her. She liked physics, the study intrigued her and thanks to her mother she had a gift for it. But she had always been a bit of a flake. And her running off to the fields to play with the butterflies and dance around in the tall grass meant dance lessons. But she was good, good enough to really make it if she wanted to. Aisling didn't know if she really wanted to do that yet or if she wanted to jump headlong into the sciences. Or if she wanted to take the exact road as her mother and return to the family bakery. Of course, no one expected that last one. As much as Aisling loved her family and the bakery, she loved it more from afar. Her parents had always said that was perfectly fine. Her father disliked the place that kept his wife away from him when he wanted her close and though there was constant teasing about how needy her father was, it was sweet how they were.

No, she was determined to finish out her school with her double major, shock the world and maybe then really decide if she wanted to dance professionally for as long as she could before taking up the sciences again or flipping the world on it's axis again and picking up something else entirely. Nothing was ever set in stone and Aisling loved that about life. Nothing was ever quite like it seemed and that was thrilling. Life was exciting when you didn't know what was really going to happen from one day to the next. Who really knew? Maybe in the next few years she would royally fuck up her knees or ankles or something and be totally unable to dance again and have to fall back on her physics degree. She hoped not, she loved dancing but it was a definite possibility. She didn't know the exact probability of that but she also didn't want to know it either. It was all part of the fun, right? Despite having a crazy awkward schedule, Aisling made it all work. It meant sometimes she was doing her laps during her free time, something she had been known to do just to make sure she was up with the rest of her class. Sometimes it meant a few twenty minute catnaps here and there between one thing and the next. And sometimes it meant she was so exhausted she slept longer than she intended and missed something. She tried hard but keeping up on it all wasn't always easy.

Luckily for her, her boss at least took pity on her and didn't fret too much if a shift was missed or she got her timetable mixed up and showed up at the end of her regular shift thinking it was the start of it. It had happened a few times now and though there was a laugh about it, Aisling still felt bad. She was trying hard though, which was why she was spending her lunch in a lab. She grabbed a couple of things from the café, no point in having the meal plan card if she wasn't going to use it, and headed up. Technically, she didn't really need the lab but people seemed to take her science coursework more seriously, or at least believed she was a sciences student when she was in one and answering inquisitive people's annoying as hell questions just wasn't something she wanted to do! She pushed the door open just in time to hear glass shatter. "And another one bites the dust." She said before she even registered opening her mouth.

♦ ♦ ♦

Tag || braden cole remmington
Words || 664
Clothes || Surprising Nerd
Music || Something More --Scotty McCreery
Notes || <3

[braden cole remmington]

Braden didn’t even notice how he stood out now. He noticed it at first when he first came to New York. People would blink at him, or smile politely when they were surprised by his thick accent, or when they couldn’t understand the Manx dialect he used without even thinking about it. A few years later he remembered to use fewer island terms when he was in the city, but sometimes they still slipped through when he wasn’t thinking about it. Plus, not that many people knew of the TT unless they were avid racers. Things he liked and had grown up with were foreign here. Mainland Britain seemed to at least know what the Isle of Man was about, but to the rest of the world they might as well be an ancient tribe with unique rituals and strange traditions that never spread beyond their shores. Braden was a little bored of explaining some of it now, if he was completely honest. Most of the time people only joked about it, or teased him about the entire lifestyle he was from and loved. Just because he had come to New York to study, it didn’t mean he was running away from it or looking for an escape. All he had wanted was to go to the best place for his major and find a place where he could spread his wings and travel at the same time. New York had won out, and it was simple as that.

That wasn’t to say he disliked to New York. He loved the city, jut for entirely different reasons that he loved his home. He thrived with the nightlife and the bars that they didn’t have back on the Isle of Man, and Braden oddly liked the noise, despite coming from such a quiet rural home. It had taken him a while to get used to it, but he liked the background noise of construction and sirens, and the traffic lulled him to sleep most nights when he did turn in early. Other nights he came home late after closing up the student union with his co-workers and by then it was the distant sound of the city clubs that carried him off to the land of dreams, along with the noises of drunken people down on the streets below. He had heard so many dramatic arguments happening outside his bedroom window that could have been scripted for a television soap opera they were so surreal.

Of course, Braden had to remember his real reason for being in the city; college. Once this assignment was done he would have a bit of breathing room before his exams. Not a lot, but a little, and that was better than having none at all, and stressing out right up until the deadline on this piece. He looked over at the door when he heard the voice, and managed a boyish smile. He wasn’t an unfriendly guy, just a socially clumsy one who often put his foot in his mouth after a short time. “Aye, good thing it’s end of the year, right?” He bent down and quickly began to clean up the mess he had made while there was still no one else in the lab. The quicker he had it dealt with the better it would be.

• • •

TAGGED! Aisling Sable Wood
WORDS! 556!
OUTFIT! Bored Biomedic!
LYRICS! New Demons - - - I See Stars
NOTES!

[Aisling Sable Wood]

Aisling had missed Scotland for the first few months she'd been in New York. It had been her home her entire life. She had never really been away from it for longer than a couple weeks holiday. But the entire family had known that she couldn't stay in her hometown and do what she wanted. Of course, her parents had also hoped that she would attend a local university so she could return on holidays and weekends every once in a while but Aisling was made of different stuff and knew her mind well. She hadn't thought, however, that she would get so absolutely homesick within the first month that she genuinely considered going home with her tail between her legs. She was made of tougher stuff and after confiding in one of her supervisors about her emotional and mental state, he'd helped her through it to see that she wasn't really alone in the city. Ace might have been a bit of a scoundrel but Aisling adored the ginger linguist very much. For all the trouble he could get into, he'd been a good friend to her when she'd needed someone the most. Now that she was nearly finished her second year at university, Aisling was doing so much better.

She went home for the major holidays and the summer, but she returned at the beginning of the school year refreshed and ready to fight for her finish line. She took on a lot as a double major, especially with them being polar opposites on the academic spectrum but she wouldn't have had it any other way. What was the point in chasing dreams if you couldn't chase them all? She loved the sciences, wanted to put her clever brain to good use, eventually and she loved to dance. There had been a time when her fellow dancers would tease her, say she was "too fat" to be a ballerina. She told them the number on the scale meant little to her. And in fact, it did. Her parents had raised her with a very real sense of self-worth. She wasn't a number on a scale, she was a person with a brilliant mind, clever tongue and keen ability to make people feel what she wanted when she danced. She had never given up and in fact, became the lead dancer for their summer recital.

Now in New York, she wasn't giving up any of that though her drive had switched gears from becoming a ballerina, something she hadn't actually wanted in the first place, to becoming the best damn dancer she could be. She had an innate talent and wanted to turn it into a skill she could turn into a career. The truth was, and she was happy to explain it to get permission for the strange double major, Physics and dancing went hand in hand. Dancing was an ingenious way of studying physics, the study of matter in motion and behaviour through space, relating to energy and force. It was brilliant and she had apparently gotten her professors to agree with her and sign off on it because she was where she was. It was difficult and it oddly meant she needed quite a bit of lab time but since she could merge the two, it was worth it for the Scot. "Aye. No time left at all and then we'll be left with a summer home or working for experience." Aisling had one more lab project to get done before she could breathe a little easier. Though she recognised the lilt most notable in her part of the world from the man in the room, she couldn't place it exactly. That wasn't anything out of the usual since she had rarely left Scotland before moving to the other side of the world for school and when she did, they tended to go somewhere exotic and return with a tan.

♦ ♦ ♦

Tag || braden cole remmington
Words || 654
Clothes || Surprising Nerd
Music || Something More --Scotty McCreery
Notes || <3

[braden cole remmington]

There were times when Braden wished he could go home when he simply couldn’t. Like every other place in the world, there were events and traditions that were unique to the Isle of Man. They sounded completely ridiculous to some people who weren’t from there, but Braden had grown up with them. It was embedded into him like sand into stone. It was like his knowledge of fish; what was fresh, what tasted best with different meals, and when best to catch particular types. He was a biomedicine major living in a city so he wasn’t “supposed” to have an in-depth knowledge of all things angling. Yet he did because it was what he had grown up with. It was bonding time with his dad and pops. It was how the whole island sustained itself. You didn’t live on the Isle of Man and simply not know a thing or two about the fish and the waters around them. It was as innate to Braden as walking and talking. He knew it like he knew how to breathe. It was an unconscious sort of thing that just blossomed out when he had a relevant anecdote or was shopping at the markets. Some things were better at home and fish seemed to be one of them for Braden. Maybe it was the different oceans or maybe it was the way his mother cooked it. Still, it was probably the one thing that could make him feel homesick and reach for his laptop so he could Skype his family.

He didn’t think he’d ever not miss the island. Even if he stayed in America and found the career he currently only dreamed of having, Braden knew he would frequently want to return home. He’d miss the people and the atmosphere. Nowhere he had visited in America had come close to being like Manx. It didn’t even bear similarities to the people or the places he had grown up with. Some looked as though they tried to replicate it; the little pubs that wanted to be less America and more European. They were always missing that finishing touch to make it feel authentic though. Whether it was a regular in the corner who everyone knew, or a carpet that people guessed had been there as long as the original building. The little things had made the pub back home so warm and welcoming, and Braden was sure that everyone who had been in there had left their mark on the place in some way. For him, it was a chip in a particular table that was perpendicular to the bar. He had ran smack bang into it when he was a kid and the wood had splintered. In the end, for health and safety reasons, the cob of wood where it had splintered had been removed. The owners didn’t get rid of the table though; they had just repainted and varnished it, teasing Braden when he was older about it.

At least there was no professor in the class to tease him about breaking the test tube. His old science teacher was the type who would have brought it up at every given opportunity. Although he had been seen by another student, he didn’t think anyone would care enough to hold it over him; they all broke something or spilt something eventually. He felt like it was a given with any of the science majors. “I haven’t gotten as far as figuring out what I’m doing yet. I’m barely as far as next week!” Braden often felt like too many plans for the future was overwhelming. People nagged, or things felt like they just had to be done. It was all unwanted - and unneeded – pressure for a college student with a moderate to heavy workload.

• • •

TAGGED! Aisling Sable Wood
WORDS! 635!
OUTFIT! Bored Biomedic!
LYRICS! New Demons - - - I See Stars
NOTES!