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Once again Locke was caught off guard. Apparently his attempts at chivalry would have been useless because he was in a mud fight with the most flexible person he had ever met. Elise was doing something that Locke had only seen happen on TV shows about circuses and acrobats. He was, to say the least, impressed. Although Locke could not remember the names of them, he was aware of just how many muscles she had to be using. It was a reminder of just how far he was from perfection with Fluffy. Some things he knew he’d never be able to do. A working eye would always be impossible and ears probably weren’t a reality either. But who was to say that he couldn’t try to make something more soft, like mud, bend and twist in a more realistic way.

“Ayemm,” he started stretching out the words ‘I’ and ‘am’ until they became one long and odd sounding word. Part of it was that he was still in awe of Elise being able to bend over backwards like that. He wouldn’t be able to do that forwards, at least not to that extreme, and certainly not for as long as she was holding herself up. His leg would give out on him quickly. A second reason why he was unable to speak clearly was that his mind was still in that hazy state from the earth work. So he just nodded his head and shifted his weight so that he could fall back onto the ground and not onto Elise. It made for a terrific splash.

“First law in the art of war blah blah blah,”. Oh the temptation was so strong to just throw his mind into the glorious mud and just make it leap out at Elise. She was getting him pretty well and he did have some level of pride. He had told her he was an earth manipulator and they were in his element. Literally. Elise had gotten his face even more muddy then he had when he face palmed. It wouldn’t make a difference all the time that he spent practicing or the hours spent trying to learn the different muscles in the body if he got little more than a splatter on her. Besides which she might take offence at him going so easy on her. Locke shook his head once quickly to get the worst of the mud off, but his mind was someplace else.

With his palms and bare feet in direct contact with the ground, along with his butt, Locke was getting a nice ‘view’ of where Elise was in comparison to himself. Water, he had learned, tend to blur the images that he saw. More contact, especially skin to stone, made for a clearer, sharper image. Like he had done months ago in the Danger Room Locke made nothing more of Fluffy than hands to keep Elise from getting too far away. His attention still in the earth Locke scooped up two handfuls of mud and flung them towards Elise. His depth perception usually sucked, but it was not like she was a mile away and in a bizarre way he could see her position better than had he had his mind out of the dirt.

Locke’s jaw slackened and his mind momentarily shut down as Elise smeared mud on his nose. It was the closest anyone had gotten to his dead eye without eye drops or a glass jar filled with tongue depressors someplace in the room, and to be perfectly frank, it scared the snot out of him. For the last five years he had been growing his bangs out to hide behind them, and one’s nose is never very far from their eye. Things were waaay to nice right now for him to freak Elise out with his biggest insecurity. Should her finger move just slightly more to the side she’d see the scar. He had to do something before she saw anything. Well, I wouldn’t say any earth-manipulator. I did say you, didn‘t I?[/i] the small smile and the blush increased. Would this constitute as flirting? Even if it didn’t Locke would take it. His flirting skills were subpar, and it was hard to tell for sure if a girl was making a move on him for real or for whatever other reasons a girl might do so. In any case he now had mud on his face again and the mud fight had begun.

One hand went slowly up to his nose to wipe it clean, which might seem really stupid given that the point of a mud fight is to get muddy. But it really was meant only to be a distraction while his other hand smacked the puddle, making it splash up like water would in a pool. He already made up his mind not to use his powers excessively in this fight. He already had the advantage of height, though a couple of inches isn’t all that impressive. Besides which Locke wasn’t as competitive as others and really didn’t see why he should have to slaughter Elise. A hug from Fluffy would leave her more caked in mud than an ATV in a swamp.

"Here's mud in your eye," he couldn't resist saying, even if it was such a tired saying.

Again Locke winced. The guilt of hitting someone who apparently had to do laundry as much as he did with mud resurfaced when Elise mentioned it. “I am so sorry about that,” he reinstated, not that it made any difference now. Saying sorry at this point was a bit like saying “my bad” after throwing red paint onto a fur coat. It was done and unless Locke somehow mutated into a time traveler or gained a sudden understanding of theories of dimensional travel there was no way that he could prevent it from happening. The best that he could do is try not to be such an idiot from this point on and keep from splattering Elise again.

She was sort of gliding towards her shoes now, which Locke took to mean that he had done his usual thing and become the least interesting thing in a five mile radius, so he knew that he could not be blamed for what occurred next. It was only when a girl was looking at him did Locke’s brain suddenly seize up until a cheese clamp incident occurred. When Elise tried and failed at defying gravity Locke had been scratching his head trying to think of what he did wrong this time. Well one good turn deserves another, and while he was too late to catch her, the Californian at least was nice enough not to laugh at what had been a rather humorous sight. He slid his way over as fast as possible, holding his hands out to keep from falling yet again. She was red in the face now and he offered her his hands. “I didn’t do it,” was his rushed response, wrongfully assuming that the tint on her face was because somehow he had enraged Elise. After all girls didn’t usually blush around Locke unless something had been said by him that was incredibly awkward. But then Elise started to laugh, and Locke was caught off guard. In trying to pull her off he lost his own footing and this time nothing lurched from the ground to catch him.

“No, no, I got it,” Locke rushed to say, having to balance himself quickly before he fell completely into the mud. He couldn’t deny the fact that he was feeling jittery and nervous as was usually the case around girls his age, even if there was a tiny smile on his face. The mud that he was crouched in was shaking near his feet; his nerves making him unconsciously use his powers. Until he got calmed down there was a risk of yet another mud explosion. If she actually were to try and help him get the mud off things would be disastrous. In spite of his mud covered hands Locke adjusted his hair. “You’ll just make it more excited.” Locke chewed his lower lip as he focused on his little friend giving him a hug in the shape of his hand. Ok, time to get off of me,[/i] he commanded it, giving his head a slight shake. The mud reluctantly sluffed off of his face and his hair, and back into the puddle it had come from. The clothes he wasn’t worried about. After all he had a tendency to attract dirt, and more often then not there was a layer to get rid of with his laundry. It was the reason why his dirty clothes had to be washed separately back when he was still living in San Francisco.

“Dude,” Idiot, she’s not a dude, “I’m so, so sorry. I was falling and I just… acted out of instincts. Don’t worry, it’s just mud, it’s not clay. So it will come off pretty easily and the dust isn’t hard to get rid of.” Locke considered offering to get the mud off of her. It was after all the least he could do, and who better to get mud off of you then the Earthwalker? But that quickly got abandoned when he realized it meant that he’d have to ask her if he could grab onto her arm. The mud wasn’t going to listen to him when it was on someone else. There had to be a plus side to this somewhere, though Locke wasn’t looking for it other than the ease in which one would be able to clean themselves off. Had he been slightly optimistic Locke would have pointed out that now they didn’t have to ask the cliché question of what he did. Still, beneath his tan there was a red tint to Locke’s skin as he looked down at their bare toes.

Is she still looking at me? he wondered, daring a glance up. Oh crap she is![/i] And instantly his eyes went down.

For about nine months out of the year Locke armed himself for the day with a long sleeve undershirt, a t-shirt, some button up shirt, and the a pair of jeans. More often then not he also had a hoodie jacket on him as well. He simply could not stand the slightest cool breeze on his skin. For those other three months Locke showed some skin. Meaning that in the summer Locke would forgo the long sleeves and one of the shirts, sometimes kicking off his shoes. Today was a particularly nice day, which meant that Locke was outside, absorbing as much of the sun’s warmth as he could. In a past life he would have been a lizard. It had rained earlier in the day, one of those nice summer showers that even Locke didn’t mind getting caught in, so there were patches of mud scattered about the grounds.

And the mud felt as good as the sun to the Californian. It was soft and warm, cradling his bare feet. Locke had to smile, this was just one of those moments in life where everything felt… perfect. His struggles with math and science were temporarily put on hold, and finally the weather was decent. The palms of his hands itched. Strange as it might sound the mud was talking to him, saying that it wanted to move, that it wanted him to work with it. “Alright, alright,” he said. Mud was pretty good to work with, and this was more than he’d worked with in the laundry room. Locke slid his mind into the mud and gave it a little nudge, it lurched and burped, making him slip where he stood.