Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

Persi was fairly sure by now that the way everything was constantly stuck in his head had something to do with whatever had happened with Isabel on his birthday. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down. The headaches might be blamed on it too, or they might just be because having something stuck in his head all the time was annoying, and being annoyed gave him headaches. Even if they'd never been as bad as these could get.

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

They seemed to be getting better, anyway; now whatever was stuck in Persi's head tended to just nudge his thoughts in general directions, instead of completely replacing them. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down. And the headaches... well, either they weren't as bad as often, or Persi was just getting used to them. He didn't really care which it was, as long as he could go near light again.

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

Of course, nudging his thoughts in directions wasn't necessarily that much of an improvement. At least not when the direction was a bad one. Like now. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down. Persi wasn't sure exactly where his thoughts would end up from ashes and falling (or he was trying very hard not to think about it, anyway), but it wasn't anywhere good. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down. The headaches were a more certain improvement; a few weeks ago he wouldn't have been able to sit in the living room and draw for more than ten minutes, and now he'd already been here half an hour.

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

Really though, that ashes thing had to stop. It had been going on for the last two days, and Persi was already on his seventh sketch of shading the entire page gray and then drawing with his eraser. He was also on his second eraser.

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

It wasn't stopping, though. Probably because willing it to stop was thinking about it. He'd tried distracting himself before though, in the last month, and all that ever seemed to work was replacing the stuck thought with another, stickier one.

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

Well, he might as well try. Persi started humming.

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

That accomplished nothing. Persi started singing instead.

Ashes, ashes,

"Twinkle twinkle little star...."

we all fall down.

Clyde had gone to the living room, only trying to find a quiet place to do his homework, when...

>>“Twinkle twinkle little star....”

The song... it was a popular child's song. Other than the singer, he was the only person in the room. The person singing?

It was none other than Weird-Haired Artist Jerk.

As soon as Clyde saw him, his expression turned to a scowl, and he dropped the stack of books he was carrying. He had it hard enough already trying to deal with his mutation. Maybe if it had been someone else, it would have been only a coincidence. But this was that jerk who'd always call him a brat, the jerk who refused to recognize him as a teen despite knowing about his power. Singing that as soon as he came in the room HAD to be an attempt to MOCK him.

“Do you HAVE to be a jerk every time you see me?!” Clyde yelled, his hands in fists. The teasing wasn't funny. It wasn't funny AT ALL.

Ashes, ashes we all--

...Well that was a distraction.

Persi blinked, looked up, and turned. It took another blink to figure out who the kid was. Or, once figured, the brat. "Do you have to bother me the second you walk into the room?"

--fall down.

Not that that response was going to do any good at all, but then the brat was apparently incapable of getting along with Persi anyway. So it didn't particularly matter what Persi said. Besides, the sooner he got the brat angry enough to leave, the sooner he could go back to drawing.

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

Weird-Haired Artist Jerk was being completely non-compliant with his responses, as per usual. He could have turned around and left, but that would mean this guy would get what he wanted. Clyde couldn't allow that.

“Oh, yo going to act like you didn't do anything, ahn't you?” Clyde growled. He walked up to where WHAJ was sitting and straightened his posture as much as possible. He glared at the teen. “Figahs you'd mock me and try to tell me it's my imagination. If you have to be rude whenevah I'm around, go ahead, say you have to.” In fact, Clyde dared him to.

A lot of people weren't nice to him, but something about this particular person just made Clyde's blood boil.

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

"No, I'm going to act like I've done plenty of things. Most recently, been interrupted again by a brat who apparently can't ever keep his mouth shut."

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

"Also, that's really not very effective." Even while Persi was sitting, the brat was not tall enough to be intimidating. Not without a Kaitlyn-like mutation, anyway; she could be a three inch tall glittery fairy and she'd still be scary. The brat, however, was just a brat, not humanized TNT. And babbling on about... whatever it was he thought was going on, apparently. Persi didn't particularly care. "I don't have to. But if you keep annoying me every time you show up, yeah, I'm going to."

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

Brats: less than effective distractions, it turned out. Persi started humming Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, since he didn't particularly feel like singing in front of the brat.

Ugh! WHAJ called him that particular B-word again! Clyde hated hated HATED that word! “I told you to stop calling me that! My name's Clyde!”

It was already clear that Clyde was not going to get respect from WHAJ any time soon. Clyde gave WHAJ the death glare as he insulted him again and again. He called him annoying, but this guy was the annoying one. Seriously, why did he even bother staying in his presence? Walking away would have been better.

Clyde was just about to do so when heard the tune a second time. He clinched his teeth. The teasing was no accident. The jerk knew exactly what he was doing by humming that tune.

Clyde practically exploded. “Stop doing that! Why do you have to treat me that way?”

"And I don't care, brat." Ashes, ashes, we all fall down. "I'll stop calling you that when you stop living up to the name." The comments wouldn't, of course, lead to any improvement in the brat; Persi knew that much. They should, the logical thing when a flaw was pointed out was to either fix the flaw or accept that people wouldn't like you, like Persi did. But the brat was a brat, and brats tended not to believe that they could be anything less than perfect. "Glaring might work better if you weren't half my age and size, by the way, brat."

The humming stopped, and was replaced by an eye roll. "I just said, I'll stop calling you a brat when you stop acting like one. So, you know, probably in about ten years."

Clyde was not happy with WHAJ's response at all. Obviously. Even when he mentioned his name, WHAJ refused to stop calling him a brat. Of course WHAJ didn't care. Clyde didn't know what he did to deserve the behavior, but it bothered him a lot. Maybe if this guy stopped calling him that, he'd show more respect in return. He didn't stop glaring, either. Clyde's glaring wasn't so much an attempt at intimidation as it was a way of expressing emotion. One that continued the whole time WHAJ spoke. How DARE he say he was acting like a brat!

“Ten yeahs?! How rock-headed ah you?” He still hadn't accepted the fact that Clyde was and thought just like any other teenager. Nothing he could say seemed to make this guy think any differently.

"That depends on the moment. Less than I'd like, right now." Seriously, even the worst rock song had to be better than nursery rhymes. At the very least, they were longer. Which was, of course, not at all what the brat had meant, but Persi didn't particularly care. Maybe he'd go away if he was confused, since annoying him clearly wasn't working. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

Persi gave up. If he was stuck humming nursery rhymes, he might as well hum the one that was actually stuck in his head. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

Clyde raised an eyebrow at WHAJ's response. He wanted to be rock-headed? That made no sense. Was that supposed to be an insult? If it was, it wasn't a very good one.

But to Clyde, there was no mistake as to what the humming was. The tune was different, but it fulfilled the same purpose. “I told you to stop doing that!” Clyde shouted. “Do you evah listen to people?” Jerk, did he have to continue making him feel even worse?

Persi stopped humming in order to answer the brat. Again. He also turned out to be giving the brat a mildly annoyed glare, but really, he was surprised he'd taken this long. "Sometimes, when I actually care what they say, and they have some purpose to talking other than annoying me for the sake of it." He picked the eraser back up, and returned to picking lines out of gray. "If you mind my existence that much, you could always walk away. I'm sure you're capable of it."

Clyde's face was red with fury. The most infuriating part about this was that Clyde still couldn't figure out why this guy treated him the way he did. What was he gaining? Why did he continue drawing as if the argument meant nothing?

“Sounds like yo too enthralled in yo stupid ahtwork to give a damn about what people think,” Clyde growled, his hands clinched tighter than ever. The only thing preventing him from punching WHAJ in the face was the fact that a fistfight between them would be heavily one-sided. “I happen to mind it when people insult me. A lot of othah people do to, but you must be dumb enough to not figuh it out.”

"Why should I? People are idiots." People in general, really, but if the brat chose to interpret it as referring to himself, that was fine too. "I don't care what they think, and they don't care what I think. Why should I bother talking to them?" A little more detail than he'd normally give the brat, but whatever; it was all pretty obvious anyway.

"What I can't figure out is why you keep showing up and annoying me. It's not like I'm going to follow you if you just go away like I've been saying." Admittedly, Persi probably could keep annoying the brag without technically following him with his mutation, but he didn't care enough to bother. Who knew if whatever the brat was thinking was even annoying anyway? "Most people figure out fairly quickly that if they don't like a person, it's possible to not follow that person around."

“I know people can be idiots. Seems yo one of them,” Clyde responded. He didn't need anyone to tell him how dumb members of the human race could be; he'd seen a lot of evidence already. The news, the streets, the politics... society was riddled with morons.

Why WHAJ considered him annoying was beyond him. “I didn't show up to annoy you. I just stick around to defend myself,” he corrected him. “I don't like being walked all ovah.” It was the truth; being considered inferior could make one feel inferior. He was fighting back because he didn't like the label. Could he make his point any clearer?

Whether that interpretation was deliberate or not Persi couldn't quite tell, but either way it wasn't a particularly clever comeback. Not as bad as the actual words 'I know you are but what am I,' but anything with the same meaning was automatically disqualified from cleverness, in Persi's opinion. Of course, the brat was pretty young, so he got a little more credit for it than usual. "Whatever you want to think, brat." Bad comeback or not, Persi could hardly deny being an idiot. If he wasn't, he'd be doing math or politics or something, not wasting his time on art.

"Well you annoyed me anyway, so it doesn't actually matter whether you wanted to or not. And clearly you don't mind annoying me either, or you wouldn't keep doing it." Not that Persi couldn't understand continuing to do something that wasn't fun out of pure stubbornness; the first several lessons with Cafas came to mind. But he was hardly going to explain that to the brat; he might go complain about Persi to Cafas and get him punched again it something.