You sigh and settle down at your desk, hearing the chair creak, though this was no indication of your size or weight, merely the complaint too oft repeated from your aging chair. The creak merely adds to the soft headache that had been building slowly over the course of the day which is exacerbated by the glow of your laptop's screen. It glares balefully at you, lending your darkened room a hellish cast. Your source of frustration currently exists as the text prompt that lies open and you feel your hands clench with frustration, a hiss escaping. Typically, you'd decided to leave writing your essay till the last minute, which as anyone could tell you was a bad idea. Professor Xin, your lecturer, was expecting this essay on biological sequencing by the next week, with the warning that failure would lead to the university asking you to 'withdraw.' If you failed, the only way you'd stay in university would be on a sports scholarship. Pfft.
That thought almost has you smiling.
Almost.
What really drives you up the wall is the fact that it was very clearly midnight, both according to the darkness outside and by the helpful time display in the bottom right of your screen, and you can feel every second and every minute that you are losing to your frustration which only compounds this. In the end though, you throw your hands up in disgust and push away from the desk. Fuck it. You can't even sleep like this. You turn around, grab your coat and yank it on. Might as well try exercising a little, exhaust yourself to sleep.
You catch sight of yourself in the bathroom mirror as you leave the room and stop. Didn't seem fair did it? You were a long, an eastern dragon from antlers to your clawed feet, and it seemed the universe was content to make you kowtow to everyone you met. Dragons, everyone knew dragons were prime candidates for sports teams right? Instead, you looked at the kid that spend more time upside down in the arms of tormentors at school and at the adult he had become. It wasn't just that you were small, it wasn't just that you were barely five and a half feet tall, or weighed less than 110 pounds. It wasn't just that you were thin, it was the fact that this was highlighted by the university's current football players. Ok, to be fair, some of them, like Joshua Marsten, a real big dragon and one of the quarterbacks, weren't out to get you, but others... Your mind jumps straight to Thomas Emerson, a mouse who didn't have a single humble bone in his 6'2 body, and the mouse who seemed to believe that your normal state of being should be upside down in a toilet or grovelling. You thought that university would be different. The only difference you seemed to have was who was holding you.
You slam the door behind you and stalk out into the night, breaking into a run to escape your own pity party. You don't have the confidence to run during the day, nor the courage to go to the gym, despite what the images you saved on your laptop say about your desires in that regard, but you can do this. You can run. You can lose your mind in the comforting rhythm of movement, to push yourself till you fight for breath, till your legs grow shaky. Like you are now. You're so caught up in your run that you don't see the figure that suddenly leaps out at you as you run along the sidewalk. Not till it is too late anyway.
Belatedly, you see that it is:
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