AN

Poster of Grimm on the side.

*

" And what a sight he makes

Mocking man's best friend. "

- "The Lion and the Wolf", Thrice

It starts out as a normal day for Jay Collins- it's the usual daily routine that has been driving him past madness for the last three years.

5:45 A.M.: Alarm clock goes off, he stares at it for exactly thirty-two seconds, on his bareback, his ten year old pug is snoring beside him, moving at the sound. His dog, Clarence, is almost telling him to stay into the warm comfort of his full-sized mattress for another ten seconds, or twelve minutes, or an hour. The warm dog breath of Clarence is hot on his bareback and a snort is released from man's best friend. He goes back to sleep.

6:45 A.M.: This time, Jay really does get his ass out of bed. He goes to his closet, sets out a shirt that was on the side of casual, and goes to the single bathroom inside his apartment. As usual, the water is steaming hot- he doesn't flinch when the cuts on his thighs become ruddy red beneath the steam.

7:00 A.M.: Now he's opened his door and put Clarence on a leash, a cup of coffee is beneath his lips, letting his nose hover over the dark blend and smell the beans as he lets the pug do his business. The coffee is bitter; he used to like sweet things.

7:15 A.M.: He's pushing up his glasses back to the bridge of his nose, his hazel eyes blinking as the world goes from a blur to slightly less hazy. He's legally blind in both eyes, half of the reason why he walks to work is because of his tendency to not see anything but blobs of passing cars and little sticks as people walking across the streets like ants.

The walk to his place of employment, Lincoln Lower Elementary, is two minutes by car and ten minutes by Jay's long strides. His mom always said his legs would be good for something, which seemed to only be for walking. In high school he tried out for track and basketball- he got his mom's height and his dad's two left feet.

His glasses keep on sliding off of his face, and he makes sure that his shirt, the one that isn't tucked in, stays over his flat stomach. He doesn't need another one of his students looking up at him with big doe eyes and asking why he has so many 'little white things- whaddya call that, Mr. Collins?'

One foot is stepping infront of the other, walking down mainstreet of downtown big-town with crowds of other human beings shoving, tripping and jerking all around him. He hates this- being in such big crowds, fearing that if he makes a wrong step that he'll find himself getting screamed at or cursed about.

It's his anxiety that makes him do this- it creates an unsettling swirl into the pit of the stomach or burns the back of his throat or makes his breath quicken every time he leaves his apartment to go to his favorite place in the world: a class room of toothless five year-olds that think having a strangely tall man as their teacher means he's second, or maybe even first, to Superman.

They don't care that sometimes his hands shake when he holds up an Expo marker to the whiteboard. They all pat him on the back when his principle screams at him, or they come to school the next day and give him a painted picture of a tall stick figure with a mop of brown hair holding hands with a midget-of-a-stick-figure. When Jay is having a bad day, they can see it- maybe it's a kid's sixth sense or maybe it's because it's always so bluntly obvious on his features when his dimples are real or when they're only showing because he doesn't want them to worry.

He can say that his mental illnesses, the depression, the anxiety, the PTSD- because he can't get those cruel words and hard inflictions out of his mind- is something he can forget about when he's teaching kids the ABCs and the months of the year.

It still tugs in his chest, he still bites the bottom half of his lips and his nails still draw blood when he feels like peeling himself out of his skin- sometimes he was so sick of the taut, tight skin of his that wrapped around him like a vise. Need to get out, he'd think, he needed to get out.

He has two minutes until entering the school's gates, where he'd greet his students with a dimpled grin. He'd say thank you when Dolly Rosenbaum would give him a painting she made him over the weekend. He'd compliment Jeremy Barton on his light-up shoes that he's been stomping around with for three weeks. He'd push John Kole's wheelchair into his classroom and sit him beside Gregory Barton, Jeremy's twin brother, because they're best friends. He'd bend down to the floor by his metal desk and pin Dolly's painting next to the others he's collected from various students.

Then he'd teach them how to say red in spanish, laugh along with the giggles as twenty kids tried to roll their tongues to say 'rojo', and the spanish kindergarteners would become frustrated as they tried to teach their classmates how to pronounce something so easy for them.

Jay would say goodbye to all of them at three o'clock, smile at them as they waved all the down the school's parking lot to him or stuck their faces to the windows of the buses. Then he'd walk back home after staying an hour after school, he'd have his satchel full of papers with slopply just-learning-to-write handwriting, and grade every page with a grin on his face as he laughed at their quirkness only a kid seemed to have.

He never made it to school.

*

Deep beneath our feet, in every crevice of the Earth that isn't touched by light- is not the Underworld.

Contrary to popular belief, Hades does not hide out deep within the soil and molten lava as a free time- but because he's a God, and he does as Gods do, he didn't just create another universe for the living souls of the dead, but several. One for each religion because he is a God that not only holds the souls of the Earth, but almost infinite free-time. He learned the billions of souls that'd stream through his Underworld wouldn't fit comfortably beneath Earth's crust.

There are portals that lead to Earth's surface, different doors to the world in different places- and one that Persephone never expected- beneath a bush of roses in the massive garden she strolled in for her free-time.

Many times she had searched the garden of Hades for even the smallest crevice to the human world- the one where she could take a deep breath and instead of dry air that made her lungs feel like they were inhaling dirt, moist sucks of breath that she'd whistle between her lips.

The smallest nick to a portal could be pried apart or sealed- but this wasn't a small portal.

This was an escape, one where the fair goddess could slip her sandalled feet into the lucid violet haze of the door and let herself become enveloped into the wormhole and find herself on Earth's surface- not the living corridors for the dead.

She pushed the roses away, not caring about the thorns pricking into her soft flesh, drawing dark blood, or her golden silk hair catching dirt onto her scalp. This was an escape.

This was a beginning.

*

Jay takes a short-cut.

It's simple, a cut through an alley-way.

The slice of the crevice of building is between Joe's Barber Shop and Stanely and Son's. Both of the businesses are the opposite of shady- and Stanely himself has told Jay that if anyone rubs him the wrong way, just shout and he'd be out with his son in less than a minute.

Which is quite nice of the man, but Jay is sure he can take care of himself- he knows he is a skinny thing made of more bones than muscle, but he is tall, with arms that resemble long slender branches and broad shoulders that hunch over because his dad used to tell him...he doesn't want to think about what his dad would tell him.

His satchel, the leather pleated bag that his mother bought him two years Christmases ago, is hanging on the side of his hip, but he still clutches it as if he'd break into a run within a second's notice.

The alley is forty something feet across, hardly two feet in width- which makes his nails itch as either side of his shoulders scrape on the two opposite brick walls. It feels like they'll close up on him if he isn't careful, if he steps on a wrong block of sidewalk or presses on a brick too hard, it'll snap shut and incase him forever into Joe's Barber Shop and Stanely and Son's.

But it's easier now, better when he stares at his oxfords as he walks. Instead of a blurry vision of the alley in front of him, the up and down motion of his feet spin in his mind as he walks down the alley- almost running, but not quite- he'd just fall on his two left feet.

He goes fast, strides fleeting as Jay wants nothing more than to get across the half-point of the alley-way, where Joe's Barbershop and Stanely and Son's meets Haven: The Boutique and 21st Century Clothes.

He's counted the seconds to go down the alley-way, it's forty-three seconds if he goes in a careful gait, thirty-seven seconds if he's in his usual pace, and twenty-two if he's more timid.

Now, the threshold, where the alley-way goes from the barbershop and Stanely and Son's ugly chipping green colors, is repainted with a more expensive paint and a cleaner hue of brown and gray.

Jay smiles, grins as his oxford covered left foot goes over the threshold marked by paint. He's halfway across, with less than fifteen second to g- and his six foot stature plumpts down as a body from- above? Below? He doesn't know where the girl came from- forced him into the dirty concrete.

He's spitting out a moutful of loose pebbles and wiping blood off his nose with the back of his sleeve, eyes searching for what caused his downfall until his chest haults and the heavy feeling of a someone- someone alive and breathing- is dead weight on his back.

Aphephobia: The fear of touch, or in his case, the fear of being touched by anything other than kindergarteners.

He can feel the girl's hands, grasping greedily over his back as she tries to steady herself. Her ankles lock beneath his torso and he can feel her bareskin on his own. Pebbles are grounding into his stomach, giving him a carpet burn from rocks as he tries to remember how to breathe.

Touch. Touching- too much touching that isn't welcomed, touch that he can't bare, human touch and warm skin and rough callouses and grabby hands and- no, no there soft, they aren't callouses, they aren't grasping and demanding and hitting and marring.

He catches his breath, and he remembers how to scream.

AN

Jay has had a rough life, can you tell?

And he has Aphephobia because I feel like that'd go well with his character.

Persephone fell on him from the portal if you didn't catch that.

Tell me whatcha think lovelies.

What can I improve on?