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"I thought I did."

Dani was forgotten, though she was fine with it this time. She was looking between the two of them, confusion as plain on her face as the frown, but Grayson only had eyes for Jude. His own features were becoming more somber, his mouth tighter as he thought about his time at Barren Pines. How long had it been, really? He'd thought he could remember being there for quite some time, but his only real memories didn't span that great a time. It was frustrating to know there were pieces of his mind and life that were tampered with, blurred out, or just plain lost.

He brought his hand up, fingertips first on his chin, then sliding up over his lips. Almost as though he wanted to stop himself from speaking before he was ready.

He'd thought he spoke to his parents, but he'd been dead a year. Lost an entire year of his life. He obviously couldn't have called them, been called by them... it must have been part of the illusion of Barren Pines. How that was even possible, he didn't know. That kind of magic was powerful, too powerful, and it frightened him. Rightfully so, he thought.

Eyes catching Jude's, holding, he finally dropped his hand. "I have memories of several conversations that I know didn't happen. Talking about going to prom with Benny." A dull ache. "Hearing how Tristan was doing in school. Being scolded about doing my laundry," he laughed here, but it was short and a bit pained.

"It sounded like them. But, I came home, and they said.. a yeah, I'd been gone a year. Dead a year." He rubbed his forehead, frustrated. "But I know I called them, Jude. I know I did. So it had to be some kind of magic."

Grayson didn't like magic. He didn't believe in magic, as a general rule, except what he witnessed with his own eyes. Barren Pines was something elusive, something confusing, something he might never understand the full implications of.

And it was frustrating.

Grayson watched Jude struggle through his own reasoning, never interrupting, his own frown deepening as the conversation continued. Jude had clearly given this much more thought than Grayson, though that was to be expected; he'd only spoken of Barren Pines to Jude, and even then, it had been the bare minimum. He hadn't wanted to cloud it with extraneous details, what he'd thought and felt, though the more he mulled over it, he realized those things could be important. He'd been right in the middle of it, and he had precious little information to hand over.

The barrier... his eyes went distant, and he tried to remember when it had come up. He'd been a zombie -- a youma, he thought? -- and the sky had turned back. "The barrier... I don't know a lot about."

He shifted his weight, draping one arm around his waist, bringing the other hand up to his neck. Circling his own neck, feeling his own pulse there, steadily beating. "It came up unexpectedly. I was a youma then, well -- I thought I was a zombie. But I think youma is more appropriate." Zombies weren't real, after all. "The sky darkened, and it was like... night, from that point onward."

He pursed his lips, tried to remember. He'd spent so much time forgetting it lately that it was a little difficult. Damn, if only he'd written in his journal about Barren Pines.

"I didn't wander around too long like that. My spine was broken," he recalled, and it horrified him a little bit to do so. "Serenity and Zue found me. I was with another human, Remi. He made it out, too, I think." Why didn't he remember? He couldn't even blame this on the magic, this was his own fault. "After that, I was... healed. And the barrier was still there, and we gathered in the gym, then we went out."

His eyes were definitely blurred now, though his voice remained steady. "We couldn't get out, I remember them saying that. I didn't try. We let Scorpio in, all of us -- do you remember, Jude? I can't remember if you were there." There was frustration in his tone now. He was disappointed in himself. "We cracked it, just a bit, to let her in. And then we took it down, by praying."

It seemed ridiculous. Ludicrous. A magical barrier that wouldn't let any of them in or out, over a school that had never properly existed, full of people who were already dead -- at least some of them, at least the Zodiac -- and they'd prayed to remove the barrier?

He raised his hand to the side of his head, held it there. He was missing something.

"We could barely break it." At this point, he couldn't even remember if he'd been helping break the barrier, or if it had all been Serenity. The more he thought about that day, the fuzzier the details became. "I don't even know..."

He massaged his temples, chewed the inside of his cheek. "I think it was split just enough to let Scorpio in, and it couldn't be done again. After we took down the barrier, all of us passed out. We all woke up in the hospital. I think we're lucky we didn't die."

But all of it was conjecture, he didn't have any proof for his theories. Just a feeling, and what he could remember being told along the way.

He sighed. "I'm sorry, Jude. I don't know much more, either." And he was more confused than when they'd begun the conversation.

Grayson's head hurt, and he was glad to dismiss the topic for a time. He wanted to mull over things on his own, see if he could remember anything else, though he was beginning to doubt it. More importantly, he wanted to sort through the memories he did have and decide if any of the ones he'd held back were important enough after all to share with Jude. He couldn't do that just then, though, not with his thoughts swirling as they were.

"All right, Jude." He massaged his temple some more, dropped his hand. Looked at Jude, then Dani, who had a distinctly distasteful look on her face, but was keeping quiet. Sighed. "I've been meaning to learn how to fight properly, anyhow. Kind of."

It was Grayson, so meaning to learn how to fight was the same thing as saying he would do it eventually. Eventually, when someone grabbed him and drug him out to lessons. He attended Saturday Morning Fight Club regularly, though he was often late and tired when he arrived, and he tried. He did. But he felt like he wasn't making much progress.

That was probably his fault, though.

His lips twitched at not today. "Everything has its own pace, Jude."

Thoughtfully, annoyingly, Dani provided, "People are really cranky when they quit smoking. That probably won't help your temper problem."

Grayson looked between them, thinking for a moment that Dani and Jude were actually rather similar. No filtering system.

Dani didn't like dwelling on the negative aspects of her personality. It wasn't that she didn't recognize she had them, because everyone had flaws, duh, but she didn't see that hers were so very bad. Whether she was ready to admit it or not, she was due for a humbling.

She cast a quick glance around, wanting to be certain no one was looking, before pulling out her henshin pen. Holding it at arm's length, she said clearly, "Magellan Power, Make-Up!"

Beside her, Grayson did the same, though his lacked her energy and verve. "Leo Zodiac Power, Make-Up!"

Standing side by side in henshin, they looked at one another, and a smile passed between them. It only lasted a few moments, however, as Leo turned an aggrieved look to Sagittarius.

"Your jungle is going to be the death of me." He had no proof of this fact, just that the only time he could recall he'd been in it he had nearly been killed, and that was enough for him.

Idly, Dani wondered, "Did my powder go away? I'm pretty sure it would because, like, it disappears out here. But this is like, magic in magic, so who knows."

Grayson didn't know how he felt about Jude having a connection to an apparently female jungle, but he would go with it. He knew he'd never felt like his light was anything but a manifestation of magic, but he supposed it was different having something enormous and alive all around you as opposed to lighting up like the sun. It was a little strange, but then, there was something a little strange about all of them.

He looked around, feeling uncomfortably warm in the humid atmosphere, and tugged on his shawl. He had to spend how long in the jungle? Memorize it? Well, at least he was good with directions.

"Hopefully your jungle never catches on fire," Leo mused, reaching out and lightly touching the trunk of a tree. Last time he'd been in here, he might have slammed into a tree. He couldn't remember. He knew he'd hit the ground pretty hard, and nearly fallen off a cliff.

The same cliff Jude had fallen off.

His expression tightened a little, but he didn't say anything.

Magellan, for her part, was already poking around curiously. She seemed to have forgotten the tiger business, which was probably for the best. "You know, I didn't really look around when I was in here last time. But this is kind of cool." She knelt by a big fanned leaf, ran her hands over it. "So how big is it?"

Magellan was still occupied by the leaf, so she didn't see Leo turn back toward their other partner, his eyes go a little wide, then a little soft. The seconds passed, and a small smile lingered at the corners of his mouth before he turned, hands on his hips, and tried to view a path through the jungle.

It looked like a maze to him. "It'll definitely take practice, but you're right, Sagittarius. If we can all use your jungle to our advantage, we'll be that much more equipped to fight even when separated inside of it."

The powder bluenette rose, flipping her pigtails over her shoulders. She glanced between the two of them, finally settling on Sagittarius, and asked, "Are we splitting up, then, or are you going to show us around?"