#based on green valley events which i can only half remember so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[doctors-star]

Can you stay still for the next 20 min? (If this was meant as a prompt ask 😅)

“Okay - have you got it?”

“Yeah, you can - shift it to the left a bit, yeah - is that right your end?”

“Looks good to me.” Peter leans back very carefully, eyeballing along the length of the beam with half of his face scrunched up in a squint. Alex resists the urge to fidget the cold, heavy wood between his hands; there is a strong likelihood that, in seeking a better grip on the slippery, paper-like bark of the skinny silver birch trunk they are using as a rafter, he will in fact fumble with numb fingers and drop it through their half-built structure. Peter straightens up and grins at him. “Right. Now, you just hold that there, perfectly still, while I drill and fix this end - shouldn’t take too long, anywhere between-” he tilts his hands mock-thoughtfully, “-two minutes and three days. All right?”

Alex sends him a withering look, somewhat weakened by the smile he is valiantly attempting to fight from his face. “You may have twenty minutes, maximum,” he says sternly.

“Why twenty?” Peter asks, casting about him for the auger they’re using to bore holes in the rafters and peg them together. “And - I mean you no offence, mate, but you keep shifting the beam - can you stay still for the next twenty minutes?”

Peter starts to descend his ladder to hunt down the drill and Alex takes pity. “You tucked it in your belt.”

“Ah! And you told me it was a bad idea,” Peter acknowledges with the point of a finger, scrambling back up and fidgeting the large, curling length of very sharp iron out from the small of his back.

Alex tilts his head slightly. “I meant because you might fall on it and die, but yes, fine, also because you have no object permanence and would lose it.”

Peter snorts and aligns the auger carefully over the crossed beams, perpendicular to their length, before beginning to twist the handles that form the T-shape of the drill. They’re down to their loose white shirts, despite the biting cold, what with the hauling and lifting and boring and pegging. Alex can see the muscles across Peter’s shoulders shift and pull under the thin linen.

“Anyway,” he says, dragging his eyes away and fixing them on the birch between his palms. The wood is scarred and knotted by the vagaries of Welsh weather but straight and sturdy; the bark is peeling in tight coils of ghostly parchment. It judders in his hands with every wrench of the auger, so he focusses on simply holding it still. “You can only have twenty minutes, because lunch is at one and that’s in about twenty minutes - whereupon I will abandon this whole project, because I’m hungry.”

Peter huffs a laugh, silver in the winter air. “Oh, right,” he says, as though this is quite reasonable, “I understand. Twenty minutes it is, then - although you’ll have to count it out in your head, what with us being Stuart farmers in rural Wales and therefore not having access to such newfangled things as watches.”

Peter looks at him out of the corner of his eye, biting his lip. Alex assumes a suitably innocent expression in the face of this challenge. “Mm,” he agrees.

“After all, I assume that’s how you know it’s twenty to one - you’ve been counting the minutes since dawn.”

“Oh, no, I can read the time in the sky.” Peter looks sceptically at the thick duvet of cloud overhead - the light has remained the same weak greyness since the sun technically rose, though they’ve not seen it. Alex shuffles the log into one hand, moving his foot up one ladder rung to support its weight on his thigh, and fumbles the other hand in the small leather pouch attached to his belt. He lifts the modern stainless steel watch up to the sky and makes a show of squinting at it against the clouds, and then puts it away. “Twelve forty-five,” he says decisively, slowly creasing into a smile when Peter abandons the auger to put his face in his hands and laugh.

“The director’ll have your head for that,” Peter points out, amused, as he goes back to the drill with a fond shake of his head.

Alex shrugs. He can, it turns out, do without most modern conveniences: he’s become used to candlelight and going to bed early, he likes the food, he honestly hasn’t thought about television for about three months. They’re allowed enough bits of their old lives to keep them all healthy and sane, like toothpaste and regular phone calls to friends and family, but other than that they’ve been keeping to the period fairly religiously and Alex wouldn’t have it any other way.

It’s just - it turns out that, like how an explorer might like to keep a compass on them to know which way is north, Alex likes to know what time it is. Not for any particularly rational reason. There’s just a sort of comfort in knowing where he stands, temporally.

“Should have got you a pocket sundial for Christmas,” Peter says wryly, jimmying the auger back out of the wood with effort.

“A sundial? In Wales?” Alex objects mildly. “Peter, be serious.”

“Hah. Well, Stuart Welshmen managed somehow,” Peter points out, trotting swiftly down the ladder and fishing about in a basket for a peg long enough to pin the beam to the apex.

Before Alex can respond, there is a call from the farmhouse, and Ruth is waving at them as she picks her way through the frosted garden towards them. “Hello, boys - oh, this is going up well.”

Peter smiles shyly at her and pats the nearest upright of the latrine. “It’s good, yeah,” he says, turning the peg in his fingers with the other hand. It’s terribly sweet, this nervous adoration Ruth seems to inspire in him when she catches Peter off-guard. Sweet, and slightly embarrassing on Peter’s behalf, and very slightly inspiring of jealousy, as though Alex were five years old and sulky over Ruth stealing his best friend. He doesn’t like to examine that much.

“Slightly roofless,” Alex points out.

Ruth smiles, tilting her head back to look up the ladder at him, and the niggling, uncomfortable envy fades somewhat. “It’s al fresco,” she corrects cheerfully, and he grins. “It’s got walls, anyway, and this looks like your last roof beam, so it’s only slightly roofless.”

“You won’t say that when it rains,” Alex foretells, and she laughs.

“All right. I came out to tell you lunch will be in a minute, so if it’s at a point where you can leave it-”

“I’m letting go of this beam,” Alex tells Peter firmly. “I’m doing it.”

“You said twenty minutes,” Peter corrects, scrambling up the ladder.

“I said until lunch,” he says, steadying the beam carefully so that Peter can jam the peg in and shove at it with the heel of his palm. “It is now lunch, and I am no longer holding this beam for you.”

“Two minutes,” Peter pleads, shoving at the peg and then looking around him, patting his belt and where pockets might be on jeans but definitely are not on breeches. “Where’s the - thank you, Ruth.”

Ruth’s eyes slide sideways to Alex in amusement as she passes Peter a sturdy wooden mallet. She’s always pleasingly entertained by their antics, even if Alex and Peter are being more than slightly unhelpful, and it absolutely encourages them to further bouts of silliness. “I shouldn’t have said anything,” she says warmly, folding her arms and looking delighted around the edges of a stern expression. Alex basks in her indulgence.

“Alex wouldn’t really abandon me for lunch,” Peter says, deliberately overwrought and self-pitying, as he secures the peg. “He wouldn’t destroy all our hard work just to eat, not after the hours we spent working on it - and the years we’ve been friends, and all the nice things I’ve done for him.” Ruth laughs and Peter, beam now secured, leans on it slightly to look plaintively in Alex’s direction. “You wouldn’t leave me just for food, would you?” he says, with his best puppyish eyes.

Alex looks back at him. He’s given up a lot to be here with Peter for this year - they’ve not been out of uni that long, all things considered, and are definitely in that stage of academia in which a person is supposed to work extremely hard and get all the funding available to become very specialised and useful - essentially, they are not supposed to be going on a year’s sabbatical to wrestle pigs and plough fields and become bizarrely knowledgeable about early seventeenth century agriculture, which is something neither of them are aiming to specialise in at all. He has no idea if this is a good career move, or a sure-fire way to never be taken seriously again. On top of that, he’s given up on all the comforts and joys of modern life, and on seeing his friends and family particularly often, and on starting or maintaining relationships with anyone other than Peter and Ruth and the rest of the cast and crew. He had been worried, when he and Peter had been discussing whether or not to go for this opportunity, that he would be constantly miserably cold and lonely - but Peter had promised him good company and all of Peter’s spare layers and blankets, and had reminded him of all of the things they would get the opportunity to do and try, and all the experiences they could have out in the valley that they might never have again. And Alex had allowed himself to be convinced, and had followed Peter onto the farm and into Stuart life. He is yet to have cause to regret it; he has loved it, and Peter and Ruth and all his new friends, to excesses.

He fixes Peter with an unimpressed look. “I would leave you in the mud for an unripe tomato.”