#its sand like/a bunch of pebbles to me

[munsonsreputation]

THIS LOVE

steve harrington x fem!reader

word count: [2.3K]

warnings: no use of y/n, SOUL MATES / ONE TRUE LOVE (these fuckers are madly in love with each other), brief mention of breakup (literally they end up together so it's fine lollll), just a bunch of fluffiness!!!!!

summary: you used to think that summer was just three months out of the year, but with steve you realize that it's forever. and while you never really had him for forever in the past, you both come to realize how far you've come and why this love meant so much.

In the vastness of the water, there stands your boy, crowded in an expanse of clear blue water and surrounded by shades of tall green and oak in the distance. It’s been years since you’ve been to a beach with actual waves breaking the shore and fine sand getting lost between your toes, but this lake seems to make up for the lack of coasts in Hawkins.

The lake was always calm, never carrying your boy out too deep or coating his skin in the harsh film of salt when he came out. It welcomed him with a coldness that dissipated into warmth as he trekked in the water with the sun glowing against the surface, piercing through the reservoir.

You stood on land, pebbles and smooth rocks against your bare soles as you beamed broadly and watched him. His eyes set on the sky where clouds rolled on and on in blobs that he imagined as niche shapes and where the creatures flew over his head, chirping and fluttering soundly as they passed by.

But the most beautiful creature stood there watching him through the viewfinder of her polaroid camera not wanting to let the moment go to waste, capturing him like he was a scene that she needed to have engrained in her mind.

“You just gonna paparazzi me all day, or are you gonna get it, baby?” He exclaimed across the short distance from where he was from you.

You giggled, bringing the camera down as the soft whirring generated a fresh copy of the picture that you waved around in the air in hopes of it developing faster.

“Is it cold?” You sought out loud, letting your eyes tear away from his for a minute to see the photo developed perfectly, catching the scene that you would hang up on your bulletin board later tonight.

He swam closer to where you were, settling in the shallow where he stood in ankle deep water, letting the refreshing breeze brush over his damp skin.

“Just a little, but c’mon and I’ll warm you up.” He held out his arm, nodding with a promise that he wouldn’t let you freeze in the lake even if the sun was at its brightest, heating the water perfectly for you two.

“Okie dokie, Stevie.” You bubbled, crouching down to stuff the camera into the thick canvas bag and tucking the polaroid in the inner pocket to keep it protected.

He watched you straighten up, tugging at the waistband of your shorts and letting them fall next to the pile of his clothes. His t-shirt you were wearing was next, allowing your skin to breathe the fresh summer air and excitement as you strode over to him.

His cold hand clasped together with yours, giving you a half apologetic squeeze as you tip toed your way into the water, letting your feet get accustomed to the initial coolness before leading you in deeper until you were chest deep — for him just about near his ribcage.

“Feeling warm?” He proposed, looking down at where you had settled your cheek against his chest and wrapped your arms around his back.

You hummed pleasantly with your eyes closed. A light orange in your vision where the sunlight burned against your lids before it dulled out, having his hand land over your forehead, concealing you from the rays.

“Your gonna get sun burnt if you keep doing that.” He bantered, leaning down to place a kiss at the top of your head while his other hand stroked your back, occasionally twisting the strings of your swim top around his finger.

“At this rate, I’m sure I have sun damage,” you quipped followed by a grunt, and you could feel him shaking his head at you.

“That’s not possible. I make sure you’re coated in sunscreen and I make you reapply.” He assured you, looking back at the shore where the sunscreen bottle poked out of your bag having him smooth the contents all over your body just moments before he got in the water first.

You finally opened your eyes, grabbing at the wrist near your forehead and guiding it to join with yours, but not before pecking his fingertips sweetly. His heart skipped at the action despite it being something that you always did at some point in the day. A form of love and tenderness that was too difficult and sweet for him to word since it was his and his only.

“Thanks for looking out for my skin cells…they’re very thankful.” You smiled up at him as he chuckled and nodded earnestly.

“I’m sure they are, doll…wanna go out a little deeper?”

You don’t answer with words, just a simple smile, a little wider than the one you’re already wearing, and he gets his answer. You begin the retract from him, staying close enough where your legs rock against each other as you swim further into the lake, your feet no longer able to touch the ground beneath you, but thankfully Steve is there to let you wrap his legs around his hips as he settles back up.

He’s about neck deep now and with your arms around his, terrified that you weighing him down, but you aren’t. He wants to keep you afloat out here, and he’ll happily do so until you’re ready to head back to shore.

Summer has just begun, but it oftentimes leaves too swiftly for either of your likings. To you, summer used to be hot and sticky — uncomfortable to endure with the unforgiving Indiana fever that rolls through May and late August.

But your boy is summer personified.

A radiant sunrise and a glorious sunset.

Freshly picked fruit and artificial slurpees.

Wind sneaking through his bedroom window and sun beating down on his windshield.

Skipping rocks on the lake and climbing a tree to jump in it.

Thin white cotton tees and do-it-yourself cutoffs.

Elaborate picnics and impromptu diner dates.

Biking through town and driving with the windows down.

State fair rollercoasters and big teddy bear prizes.

A homemade fire pit to toast marshmallows and igniting fireworks.

Water balloon fights and lounging on pool floaties.

Heated make out sessions in the back of his car and ice cold showers.

Sleeping in half the day and going to bed at dawn.

Summer was Steve, and he was always going to be yours.

“What’re you thinking so hard about?” Steve poked at your quietness, drawing a hand up to your face, stroking the wet strands of hair behind your ear.

You shook your head, reassuring him with a smile, “Nothing important, just don’t want summer to end so soon.”

He chuckled lightly, tutting at your worry, “Honey, July just started. We still have a month and a half to go.”

More like forever.

“That’s not true,” you grinned shyly, tucking your face in the juncture of his jaw and neck, pressing kisses along his skin.

His fingertips pushed into the plush of your skin, holding you tighter as his chest bubbled with laughter and his mind wandered to curiosity.

“Hmm, really? Care to explain?”

You wished you could keep Steve a secret, just yours to admire with your own eyes, not wanting to give the world a glimpse at his sheer perfection — but that would be downright selfish. The people who he had in his life, including yourself, deserved to witness his authentic self, the one you really loved deeply.

And just like the lake you and Steve found yourselves in all summer long, it seemed that this was a place of sacredness for the both of you — a secret little oasis you two could run off to whenever you needed to get away from the hecticness.

But unlike the calmness of the lake, you and Steve weren’t always like this.

Madly in love, yes.

Peaceful and patient, no.

It took you both a while to get to this point in your love story that seemed to have started off as a tragedy to begin with. You and Steve carrying baggage from previous partners in which you both handed over to each other instead of leaving at the door. It resulted in restlessness and anxiety, scared that the other would do something similar that their past partners did to lose their trust.

Not that love was ever supposed to be easy, but you both knew your love couldn’t thrive in those conditions where the storm didn’t waiver and the darkness didn’t fade.

And so, as quickly as the tide brought Steve into your life, the current had swept him out again. You had to let him go because you knew you couldn’t love him the way he deserved and he couldn’t love you the way he wanted.

The sleepless nights filled with tossing and turning almost seemed relentless, as if it wouldn’t ever pass, but you both knew you weren’t supposed to just pass by each other’s lives like this.

It wasn’t how it was supposed to end.

“When I’m with you it feels like summer never really ends.” You settle for the short answer, whispering it in his ear before you move back to look at him.

He’s enamored and you can tell, yet you still find it surprising that he doesn’t believe someone could love him as much as you do. The way that your words that you mean with every ounce of your being still has an effect on him as if you wouldn’t drop everything for him.

“Yeah?” He asks stupidly like he believes you’re just making some bullshit up, but his grin lets you know he just wants to hear it again.

You roll your eyes playfully, nodding, “Yeah, Stevie. You’re my summer even when it’s fall or winter, and spring. You’re summer and mine.”

Like the hands that once let him go free, your arms dropped from around his body, swimming away deeper than you should. Yet this time he wasn’t gone and he was never going to be again. Wading closely behind you and showing up just in time as you bopped your head from underwater to take in a breath of crisp air.

His hands hooking under your arms and guiding you back to his chest where you giggled and hid your face. Your wet lips leaving dewy pecks over the patches of hair on his body and trailing up to his collarbone.

“You can’t get all shy on me after that, baby.” His voice is sickly sweet and teasing.

His fingernails faintly tickling your skin, making you thrash lightly in his grip, but not making any plans to move away from him because right here is where you want to stay forever. Every delicate touch he leaves upon your skin is a permanent mark that you never want to forget, similar to the kisses you leave on his fingertips and chest that he vows to memorize.

He holds you near with one arm supporting you as the other reaches behind your neck to keep you from hiding away in his skin because while he loves to feel your breathing so close; he loves seeing your face even more.

“You’re my wildest dream, you know that?” He reminds you like he doesn’t tell you all the time that he can’t believe that you're his.

You even find it hard to believe that he’s yours.

Like a sinking ship that was supposed to be doomed for worse that somehow rose above and made its way to its destination — that was the best way to describe the journey that you and Steve took to make it here.

Right where you two were wrapped in a sea of clear blue water that was serene and undisturbed. That while sometimes there was a ripple that passed by, it would ultimately settle and neither of you would have to be gone in order for it to simmer down.

“I know…and I love you so much. More than anything and anyone in this world.”

Your hands cradle his jaw and your lips place a kiss on his left cheek, landing them on the double freckles that lay side by side there. You’re pretty sure that while he has a million on his skin all over his body, these two are your favorite because they remind you of how far you both have come.

That at one point you kissed this same spot goodbye before you ran away thinking he was gone forever and nowadays you get to kiss it to remind yourself and him that you two were here for a reason.

He swallows before breaking out into a smile as big as his face would allow, a mirror of what you look like yet in his eyes more pleasing to him. He lets his hands tangle gently at the nape of your neck, tilting your face just right in order to slot his against yours, hovering over the silky skin where you can feel him whispering sweet words soft enough for only you to hear.

“I love you more than you could ever imagine.”

Your lips move in unison with his, never skipping a beat which is unlike your hearts that feel swarmed with so much love that they could combust right this instant. But instead, they stay in their cages, tethered and bound to each other because you both knew that you needed each other.

That even when the summer dwindled down and fall came to make the water colder, when winter froze over the lake, and spring finally began to defrost it — you still had your boy.

The never ending summer to your seasons. The sweetness to the autumn spice. The sun and warmth on the coldest days and nights. And the lush to the sprouting months.

So while you and Steve were never perfect, nor were ever going to be…

But the storm had passed.

It was glowing in the dark.

Back alive from the dead.

This love came back.

a/n: happy july and happy speak now tv month!!!! im feeling happier this summer and im also thinking a lot about the domesticity of summer (going to the lakes, beach dips, walks around the neighborhood, ect.) and i came up with this little thing. i hope you all enjoyed it and happy summer!!!!

let me know what you think: reblogs, tags, comments, and likes are greatly appreciated!!!

leave a comment and let me know if want to be added to my taglist!!

taglist: @translatemunson @kennedy-brooke @manda-panda-monium @tvserie-s-world @givemeth @steveharringtonswife @astolenkiss @loving-and-dreaming @awkotaco24 @engenelxver @elfiaaaa @pbs-theundeadmaggot

[sneasedtomeetyou]

:{ Hello!! It's been a while!! Things have been so boring lately!! A whole lot of paperwork and talking and talking louder and arguing which they insist is only talking louder. Weird bunch. ':3 Not to mention the fact that [My Tenshi] seems more interested in walking laps around the island than talking to anybody. Normally you can't get him to stop talking!! }:

:{ A video file is embedded. West Beach, Valencia Island, Orange Island Archipelago. 5/11/24 9:04 pm. }:

Night has fallen over Valencia island, the heat and humidity replaced with surprisingly cool breezes and calm warm waves that gently rush back and forth over the sand and smooth pebble beaches. It’s quiet out here by the water, as quiet as the ocean ever truly gets anyway, and the soft splashing sounds of Casimir’s footsteps through the surf seem louder than they would normally, the waves lapping around her ankles as she looks out to the sea. She looks bored, or thoughtful, or something in between, the exact expression as ever changing as the tide itself and just as hard to read. Whatever it is he doesn’t seem to be exactly present, his thoughts somewhere far off as he paces slowly up and down the beach, his footsteps washed away nearly as quickly as they’re formed. 

Behind him and a little to the left trails Sneaks, the weavile not quite knowing what to do with the swaying motion of the wash, following it out and then skittering back as if the waves were trying to grab him in a perfect clockwork, back and forth and back and forth and back. He seems to be trying to figure out how to get out to his trainer without getting wet and without another answer he shows no signs of giving up this game. 

With a sigh Casi stops, and seems to take inventory of his surroundings for a moment. He takes a few steps onto the beach, enough to run his hands through Sneaks’ feather crest, the pokemon leaning into the affection. “You know,” he says quietly, more to the air than the pokemon in front of him. “I’m beginning to understand why Aiko hated this place so much…” The moonlight casts stark shadows beneath him as he looks up to it. “I know why Rose is upset with me, but Miairu… Does she not recognise me?” It’s as if the words spoken awaken… something in the darkness. It’s barely there at first, more a ripple than a movement, shadow on shadow, almost impossible to make out if it was real or simply the video struggling to focus in the dimness if not for the reaction of Sneaks- his ears perking up and fur prickling down his back. If Casi notices this however she doesn’t seem to react, looking up at the sky even as her own shadow starts to shift around her feet, what at first seemed to be the rippling of the shallow water now morphing ambiguously, the faintest purple glow in the center of the new shape, like light cast through a dark glass.

Casi seems to take notice of Sneaks’ change in demeanor, his head tilting and his brows furrowing slightly at the sudden change. “What is it sweetheart? Alert for me.” He clearly was not expecting Sneaks to alert by gesturing directly behind him, a growl already in his throat as the deep purple shadow quivers, a clawed hand reaching up from the depths and pulling behind it a massive, thorned shape. Casi barely has time to turn around before deep red eyes open, the shadow splitting open to reveal a too-large toothy grin. 

Casi yelps, falling backwards into the shallow water, the small waves splashing around his small form. There’s a growl from the Weavile as he braves the water to get between the shadow and his trainer before… he stops. Sneaks blinks up at the still obscured shape in front of him and the shape blinks right back down at him for a moment, before simply picking up the smaller pokemon, grin slitting even wider as it seems to laugh in its successful scare. 

“...Miairu??” It takes a moment for the realization to fully dawn, but as it does the now soaked trainer starts laughing herself. “Ok, you win you win you got me. Where have you been? I’ve been looking everywhere for you!” The shape makes a few giggle-like vocalizations and shakes itself- the water flying and her color lightening as the gengar becomes more well defined when not completely drenched in ocean water; leaving both Casi and Sneaks sputtering and raising their arms to defend from the impromptu rainshower. 

“Ah! Ok ok, enough with the water." Despite her attempt at sternness she has trouble keeping the laughter out of her voice and the smile off her face. Sneaks wiggles, freeing himself from the gengar’s grasp only to clamber up onto her giant head. Miairu uses this opening to offer a hand to Casi, who pulls himself up and directly into a big hug. “I’ve missed you. …Let’s go find Aiko ,and dry off. I don't think any of us want salt in our hair.”

Miairu makes a happy noise and floats up a bit in the air, much to the irritation of the Weavile clinging desperately to her quills. He does not, however, attempt to get back down, and the three turn back inland as the video ends. 

:{ Transcription ends. }: :{ Seems like [My Tenshi] knows the [Shadow Creature] that's been creeping around!! That's sure lucky. Wish she told it to leave me alone. 3:' }:

[wafflehousec-137]

I’ve always wanted to be a writer or any sort of content creator lol so I’ve finally decided to write something that’s not for an assignment, I kinda feel like the assignment writings were better but idk what do you think? Do you like it? What’s good about it And what can I improve?

Untitled boat story Part -1

Oh come on it won't be that bad!” She said with a flirty overtone. I couldn't possibly go with her or any of them for that matter, they're all too chaotic and adventurous. “I'm sorry but I think it just won't be safe enough for all 5 of us to be in one boat, it could tip or eve-”, she cut me off with a punch to the shoulder. “Like i said it will be FINE, if Jamie or Chuck try anything ill tell them to stop and you know Keith is harmless.”. “Ugh okay ill go but you guys gotta be careful.'' I groaned.

When we all reached the pier I was confused, there was no boat or anything. Jamie, Keith, and she was with me at the pier but I started to wonder where Chuck could've been. I started to ask she and Jamie but before I could even get a single syllable out we all bolted in sporadic direction hoping to escape whatever hellish sound is barreling towards us. A roar that engulfed the entire sky came crashing out of the trees behind us and were faced with a possibly worth fate then death itself, Chuck. Not just Chuck, Chuck with a heavy ATV vehicle and a boat attached to the back. “AHH HAHA That was priceless you guys are a bunch of pussies!”. Chuck hollered at us like a overgrown school bully. Jamie started laughing with him as keith just started collecting shells it seemed like the introductions have been made and i might be started to reget my decision. “Yea Okay assholes try something like that when were off at sea and you'll be dancing with jack ketch!”. Chuck and Jamie didn't seem to care but when She actually stook up for me i felt as if i had a chance to survive in this word for once.

“Alight maties!” Chuck spouted out standing tip of the boat. “Hey Keith you got what you need?”, “Yea Chucky hut I got sea shells to sell by the sea shore for sure!”, “Oh stop it you two we’ve waisted enough time” Jamie grabbed her bag that was in the sand and threw it into the boat showering her in some ground up pebbles. Which was quite therapeutic for me. “Well is the guest of honor ready?” She said while giving me a loose side hug. “Well id like to say i was born ready but i was born prematurely so i don't know!”, “Oh well thats charming.” She grabbed my han and guided me until we were in the back of the boat sitting down on these rather uncomfortable seats. Its like someone took a off brand lunch cooler and flipped it upside down calling it revolutionary. I dint even have time to joke about them with her coz Chuck revved up the motor and sped off like we were being chased by a sea creature. “Chuck chill out! Were here for a while no need to rush!” keith said enderily. “Why are you even going so fast?” “coz were being chased by a sea monster jamie!!!” “WHAT?!” everyone exclaimed. Panic around in the air like a virus spreading faster then electric current i spun in every direction trying to see if there was nay clue as to what could be hunting us, the i saw… a tiger shark. “Uh guys is that the sea monster in question?” i asked a bit nervous to speak, “Oh my god chuck! Are you serious” she yelled, “ I told you guys before we got on here not to do stuff like this!” “Girl its fine you gotta back off”, “No its not fine jamie!, im trying to expanded out friend group and you guys are just scaring them away! Remember why we gotta have a new 6th member right?” after she said that everyone got quite, they all slowed down like they were in a trance of some kind. She let out a deep sigh and said sorry them she and i went back to sit as the other three talked about the sea together.

“Hey you guys wanna pet this crab i found?” “Ew Keith no”, “ha i kinda do just coz shes too scared doesnt mean i am”. “Hell yea homie nothing like 2 and half hours of dead single from you too to show some character development”. “Where did you even get this thing man?” “oh it was just walking around and i picked it up and now here we are.” OH MY GOD GUYS” jamie's voice shrieked almost making chuck tip the boat. “Whats wrong babe?” chuck asked threw his stupid frat guy slur. “Theres like like an STD in my bag right now guys!” we all chuckled a but, she asked condescendingly “Jamie what are you talking about?” “just look!” jamie kicked her bag over and some sand poured out to the side making an almost aesthetic like scene . “I don't thing sane is a STD james” keith said while petting his crab. “Ugh Keith you have one!” jamie squealed and kicked her bag more. Just as she did 3 more crabs came out of Jamie's bag, each one larger than the last. Jamie screaming her head off jumped into chucks arms causing chuck to steer the boat uncontrolably to the right pushing all of us to floor and cornering us with the crabs. As Chuck is fighting to get control of th boat and his girlfriend Keith just starts talking to the crabs. “Heyya little buddy, i bet i got your friend huh? No worries come here.’”. Keith gently picks up all 3 of them and slowly lowers them to the side of the boat, “run along now little fella we've had our time, till we meat again.” Keith watched as the crab family scurried down the said into the sea, as he looked up into the horizon a tear fell down his face as if he was seeing the amazing life they all live together. “You're a sweet guy keith” I told him as he was whipping his face. “Yea maybe over here i am” he responded rather bleakly. “Oh my days!” Chuck shouted out grabbing all of our attentions. “That was harder then passing the ASVAB test” we all just stared even jamie who is panting on the floor still shaken from the whole crab experience. Shrugging off what Chuck said it seemed like the vibes have gotten better and the night might be better than the day was.

[aiweirdness]

A 10,000 year warning

It isn’t every project that requires people to make plans for thousands or millions of years in the future. But some kinds of nuclear waste remain deadly for over 250,000 years, probably outliving all existing civilizations, languages, and possibly even humanity itself. So when people design nuclear waste storage facilities, they also have to think about what kinds of warnings might still be understandable so far in the future. People have proposed many approaches, from pictograms to carvings of horrified faces to genetically engineered cats or cacti that glow in the presence of radiation.

One class of proposals from a 1993 report would change the landscape itself to appear shunned, forbidding, or useless:

The report authors recommended “Menacing Earthworks”, but to me this seems unsatisfactory - it seems like future beings might find it interesting enough to investigate, with an inviting pre-prepared construction site at the center. There are even viewing platforms! So I gave a summary of a few of the designs to GPT-3 to complete, to see if it could suggest some scarier alternatives.

Some of its suggestions would fit right in with the human designs, about as likely to warn away/confuse/intrigue future civilizations.

Sphere of Gravity A large sphere of rammed earth or metal, so smooth and featureless that it gives the illusion that it would attract any object that came into contact with it.

Randomization A large circular area with random dips and peaks of various sizes, with alternating coloured layers of sand.

The Giant Hand: a tall, narrow, rectangular slit in the earth, with a huge hand protruding from the bottom.

Mountain of Empty Barrels A large artificial dune consisting of empty oil drums.

Cratering Large craters on the site, which would be visible from the air, and give an impression of a site which has been blasted and destroyed.

Dangerous Stairs An enormous set of crisscrossing, stair-like structures made of concrete, covering the site from view.

Upside Down Landscape A series of artificial hills constructed upside down in each corner of the site, which would still appear strange even after years of use by wildlife.

Horizontal Plinth of Cloudy Quartz and Bismuth A thin stone strip placed flat along the landscape, from which a series of large cloudy quartz crystals and bismuth balls will protrude.

Other neural net suggestions seem a lot less effective, mostly because they wouldn’t be even slightly forbidding:

Warning Stones: Tiny stone monuments, placed in the soil in the shape of a natural formation, which could be used to generate a narrative about the site's dangers.

Fairy Ring A large circular ring of mushrooms around the site, which after some time would grow together and form a continuous ring.

Speak No Evil Landscape Loudspeakers broadcasting sometimes false and sometimes true warnings from the landscape.

Disrupted Pollen Lines Certain native plant species such as junipers and yew could be planted to indicate that there is no farming or building allowed.

Robot Sculptures A series of very-large-scale sculptures of robots, which would be visually striking and memorable from a distance.

Another class of neural net result would probably be pretty darn noticeable, and pretty darn scary, if anyone could figure out how to actually make them.

Infinite Mountain A large decorative mountain that would continue to grow indefinitely at the center of the site or in its vicinity.

Distortion of Time and Space A massive device that would alter the flow of time and gravity in the vicinity.

Hydrothermal Alteration Zone (HAZ) A large geothermal area full of exploding geysers, boiling mud pools and a foul odor, sometime described as smelling like rotten eggs, sulfur, and chlorine. Such a place has a history of being less wanted by the local peoples, and will not be easily reclaimed.

Cosmic Rift A large opening at the site through which a small pebble might fall endlessly.

In the examples above I prompted GPT-3 with the sentence “Proposals for warning our descendants away from a nuclear waste storage site:” followed by a few of the forbidding landscapes that humans had proposed.

But could the landscapes get spookier if I raised the stakes? I tried changing to the prompt “Proposals for warning our descendants away from a place of utter cosmic horror, the nature of which we dare not whisper, and which may totally destroy any mortal foolish enough to linger at the site:” and YES they got MUCH scarier. Here was one of its first suggestions:

Giant Tube Worms A large cluster of enormous worms growing from a rocky surface, extruding bubbling fluid, and emitting audible chittering noises.

Subscribers get bonus content: A bunch more, including “Dam of Innards” and “Tulips of Shrieking Madness”.

My book on AI, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why it’s Making the World a Weirder Place, is available wherever books are sold: Amazon - Barnes & Noble - Indiebound - Tattered Cover - Powell’s - Boulder Bookstore

[raven-at-the-writing-desk]

Hello! This is my first time sending a request umm kinda nervous. May I request headcanons of first year gang spending summer holiday with MC/Yuu? Thank you very much!

🏖 Beach time...!! 🏝

Curiouser and Curiouser...

Ace is the kind of guy that’ll mercilessly splash you with water when you step in the sea. And if you refuse to? Well, that’s what water guns and water balloons are for, right? He’ll lure you close by claiming he has “something cool” he wants to show you, then attack when your guard is down!!

He brings along a beach ball, and the first years bop it around to see who can keep it in the air the longest! Ace cheats a bit by using his wind magic to send the ball afloat again just as it’s about to touch the sand—

Ace innocently buries his friends’ feet in sand for fun. He waits until Deuce has fallen asleep on his beach towel before burying his entire body (excluding the head!) in sand, all while snickering to himself.

Ace likes to make his own fun! He finds a few scallop shells, still intact, along with a shiny pebble or washed up pearl, and decides to make a guessing game out of it! He tucks the pebble or pearl under a shell and mixes the shells up, then asks you to try and find the pebble/pearl! If you do, you can keep it—and if not, you owe him lunch!

When he spots a wild crab at the beach, Ace will take a stick and try provoking it! “Why does Floyd even call me a crab anyway, I don’t get it,” he’ll grumble—until he screeches because that darn crab pinched him...!! Ace tries yanking the crab off, but it’s so stubborn! He eventually does, but he follows it up with a vow to hunt down all crabs and eat them to show them what for!

Hop onto Deuce’s Magical Wheel for a ride to the beach! (He drives kind of like a mad man, so hold on tight!!) As you race down the road and toward the sand and sparkling waters, the beachy breeze whips through your hair and welcomes you.

Despite how serious Deuce looks, all his beach gear is cute--especially his towel! It’s nice and fluffy, with a bunch of baby chicks on it. You can’t help but let Deuce know how fitting the design is for him.

He reminds the other first years (mainly Ace and Epel) to respect the rules of the beach! Every so often, you’ll see Deuce apologizing to the lifeguard for some minor thing he has done which might have violated the rules. Other times, you’ll see Deuce trying to copy the lifeguard’s gestures and mannerisms—after all, lifeguards are basically beach police! Now’s a good time to learn from them.

Deuce finds an anemone washed up to the shore and guiltily nudges it back into the sea. He’s eager to avoid any and all reminders of his unsavory deal with Octavinelle...!! Besides, Deuce is sure the anemone would be happier to be with its family again.

He loves lighting up sparklers! He’ll crouch on the sand and light them for hours on end with this amazed look on his face. Deuce just thinks there’s something really magical about how they burn. Someday, he wants to have strength like sparklers—magic that provide warmth and light in the darkness.

Jack enjoys being in the water! He’s the first to dive into the ocean to cool off. When the time comes to get out, it’s fun to see Jack shaking off water from his fluffy ears and tail! You can help him dry off the excess with a towel, too (but getting the sand out of his fur can be a hassle)!

He has the tendency to bark and chase off seagulls when they try to land nearby. Part of it is they give him “the same vibes as Rook-senpai”, and part of it is that the nice guy in him worries the seagulls might eat something they aren’t supposed to by accident. If you tell Jack he’s being so considerate, he’ll brush it off with an embarrassed blush.

He likes to take long walks along the beach and see what washes up! You’re free to join him, as long as you’re not disruptive. If Jack finds a cool shell, piece of glass, or rock, he’ll pocket it to use as a decorative piece for his cacti back in his dorm room.

Jack excels in watermelon smashing! He has the strength to crack them open in one swing, and the senses to locate the fruit’s location every time, even when blindfolded or with his eyes closed (Ace cries foul, but Jack can’t really help his heightened beastman senses)!

He acts like kind of the disappointed parent of the group, trying to keep everyone together and under control even though they’re hyped up on the excitement of being at the beach. It’s like Jack has invisible child leashes on the other first years!

Before Epel’s allowed to hang out with you, Vil has to make sure he has put on his sunscreen! Epel gets called away every few hours to reapply sunscreen, no matter what activity you’re in the middle of. He grumbles about Vil under his breath, but don’t let his Dorm Leader know!

He likes to make mounds of sand and then pretend he’s a big monster or an Overblot as he kicks the sand piles over. It’s even more fun when you or Deuce join in--more sand piles, and more stomping!

Leave the grilling to him! Epel’s not that skilled at making fancy food, but grilling’s quick and simple to grasp. He likes to use applewood to impart a slightly sweet, smoky flavor in everything he grills—meat, veggies, even marshmallows!

Epel drags everyone into a bunch of competitive games! Volleyball (Sebek and Jack aggressively spiking the ball back and forth, resulting in a tie), beach flag races (Deuce comes close, but Jack cinches the win) water basketball (Ace kills the competition)...!! Though Epel’s a little salty he won nothing, he ends up rolling in the sand with laughter by the end of it all.

Epel wears a swimming parka over himself (Vil’s orders to protect his delicate skin), so many other beachgoers mistake him as a girl covering up her swimsuit! He tries to contain his temper despite all the catcalls and whistles he gets, but Epel eventually blows up, strips his parka off to reveal his trunks, and shouts, “I’M A MAN, A M-A-N!!” to everyone, just to make it crystal clear.

If you ever lose Ace, Deuce, or Epel, you can count on Sebek to call out loud enough to part the beachgoing crowd for you to find your missing kids! He’ll nag them for going astray, too.

Sebek’s no artist, but he’ll happily take a stick and draw pictures in the sand while boasting about the young master’s accomplishments! He can throw in some stories about Lilia-sama’s triumphs in combat too, if you wish!!

He also tries his hand at making a sand sculpture in Malleus’s name, but almost has a heart attack when the tide comes in and attacks his monument for the young master (his words, not yours)! Sebek stands guard and shouts at the sea to ward it off when the tide returns.

Like an idiot, Sebek decides to inhale as much food as he can (he wants to enjoy this experience!!). Unfortunately, he also makes the poor choice of including shaved ice on the menu, so he ends up with a terrible brain freeze. Everyone consoles him as he recovers over time...

Sebek’s a huge dork when it comes to fireworks! He audibly “oohs”, “aahs”, and claps whenever colorful displays light up the night sky. When he sees a particularly impressive firework, he’ll point it out to you and the other first years, begging you guys to look at it too!

[pearlplusau]

Pearlplusau Chapter 7 part 2 - Familiar?

now available below:

Another option -> heres a link to part 2 posted in AO3!

Since the kindergarten was in constant darkness, Amethyst has never seen anything so… bright before. The brightest shade of light she’s ever experienced other than the warppad was that one open area where the dark, gloomy clouds would be drifted away from that are. It was the only ray of sunshine she has ever experienced. She had touched the little, but weak sunray, and felt warmth all around her hand. It was so different than the usual cold air of the kindergarten, but in a good way. But now, she’s travelling in a warp pad with the beautiful giant lady beside her. The light of the warp pad may be as bright as the little ray of sunshine, but it didn’t give out the warmth she experienced. As for the travelling, she never though she would be leaving the place she called home, what’s worse, there was this small little cloud of regret hanging around her, telling her leaving was a very bad idea. But the pink lady looked so sure, so kind and confident of what she’s doing, taking this new gem away from her home? That’s not how she thinks, that’s honestly how amethyst felt, being taken away from her own home, and be willing to do so just because this lady said so! The pink lady announced to her one audience, “We’re almost there! Oh you’re gonna love it!” Amethyst involuntarily felt a surge of excitement, but she wasn’t actually excited, she should be more nervous than the feeling she’s having now… When they finally landed in the new location, it was apparently early morning as the sun was rising into the sky. They appeared to be in a cave, surrounded by water, brief stairs up and down, neatly placed tiles and a huge door behind her. Rose held out her hand to the new gem, “Come, let me show you around first.” And led Amethyst down the several stairs, slowly and carefully making their way out of the cave and into the white grains and sand. The texture felt weird to amethyst as she was used to the solid hard dirt and rocks scattered around. But here, there was not a lot of rocks, just a bunch of white, tiny looking pebbles and water splashing onto the shore. It was the first time Amethyst left the kindergarten, and she’s already feeling rather uneasy with all these… new experiences. The duo circled around the pre-beach city land, where dozens of flowers and plants bloomed in the midst. Rose ran ahead, beckoning the purple gem to come along. She twirled around within the beautiful flowers, throwing her arms all around, showing how much she loves the planet and its beauty. “These here are called Flowers, they are all their own individuals, but ultimately, it takes more than one flower to bloom into a huge patch like this!” Amethyst walked up to a flower and noticed how its…glowing with health? Her fascination on the unusually strong and glowing little plant life caught Rose’s attention. The big gem slyly admitted, “I may have…used some of my abilities to grow a few missing patches here and there-” she said as she turned in embarrassment, awkwardly stroking her tuffs of hair. “Plants like these may not live long, as from our observation, they only live at most for one season, but they are all so very much worth it!” When she turned back, she noticed Amethyst laying within the flowers, as if she found herself a flowerbed to lie down after all this time. She was moving her arms and legs as if shes making a snow angle from the flower patch- Rose found that to be a very fun idea indeed and joined the small gem as they basked in the giant flower patches, each making a “flower angle” to commemorate the first every joy they had together. SWISH SWISH SWISH HEHEHE The duo had their fun for a while, playing in the patches, showering each other with flower petals, and playing hide and seek. Tho, Rose was a lot easier to find with her big fluffy hair and figure, while amethyst was just the right size to become invisible and be one within the flower patches. After a few losses for Rose, she suggested they move on to something else. She gave out her hand to the little gem, who was covered in flower petals, and gently pulled her out of the patches.

“Come on, there’s something else I would like to show you.” She led Amethyst into a beautiful forest, dotted with freshly grown oaks and little saplings covered in dirt. Leaves were fluttering around the atmosphere while also gliding around the rays of sunlight that shone through the little gaps and fissures. The two gems stopped at a flowing river, where the fresh, clear water streamed Living creatures, mostly animals like butterflies, lions, but also the mentions of humans “They kinda look like us, except they don’t live longer than a century and theyre very, very fragile. Us gems are very different from humans, so if you ever meet one, you have to be extremely careful not to hurt them, even if you don’t mean to. Amethyst tried to get close, but Rose stopped her before she took another step closer. The small gem turned her head back to see Rose carrying a worried expression, “Maybe we should start with observing them before we interact with them, they’ve never seen you before, so maybe we should start slow, alright?” Before Amethyst could say anything, the human at the distance got up and disappeared into the forest. The small gem sighed; she was so excited to meet other new people! Rose reassured she’ll be able to meet them soon enough. “We’ll get to know them sometime in the future, come on, let’s head back to the temple and I’ll introduce you to the gems!! The two gems held hands and started strolling back to the temple. There’s no awkward chemistry between the two, as they projected a simple mother daughter relationship, or even a sibling relationship, where one of them energetically leaped around the larger figure, while the figure in the middle giggled at the little ball of energy circling her and constantly made her laugh with great joy and longed snickers! They reached the temple. Rose asked Amethyst to stay behind so she can surprise them. Just then, Garnet, Pearl and Coral warped back from their mission Pearl reporting what happened as Coral and Garnet added on their own little details “Oh Rose, you should’ve seen Garnet’s new gauntlet rockets and Coral’s amazing strike on that gem, with those two final blows, the gem monster was poofed in an instant! Coral chimed in, “Well, we would’ve been able to throw in the final blow without your brilliant, strategic idea! Your plan made all the difference!” Pearl blushed at the complement, “Why thank you Coral!” While the two pearls were getting along well, the fusion stood behind and gleamed at the stronger friendship between the two pearls, looking very proud of both of them. And judging from the grin, it was pretty clear to Rose that, the mission somehow got the three of them closer together. As Rose slowly shuffled around, being suspiciously quiet, the gems noticed a little figure hiding behind her white dress. Pearl was the first to spoke.

P: uh, Rose…what do you have there? The small gem hid behind Rose while a smoothy suddenly appeared on her hand. R: A smoothy

Coral, who kept her eyes on the new gem, asked, “What’s a smoothy?” Before Rose could answer the definition of the contraption in hand, Garnet interrupted by stating, “The smoothy is not something we should be concerned about right now…” while eyeing on the new, yet unexpected little gem. “Garnet’s right.” Pearl agreed, “Rose, please tell me you didn’t bought that…thing with you?” Amethyst decided to hide behind Rose completely after hearing that statement. Rose slowly turned and calmed her down before she said more. “Pearl, you should think before you say, otherwise someone might get their feelings hurt you know?” Rose suggested while holding on to the small, frightened gem. Pearl was a quick thinker, and it seemed that Rose took a liking to the little gem, which was rather typical of the leader. She’s a kind gem that wouldn’t take no for an answer after spending a certain amount of time with the object, Pearl of all gems should know better than to refuse whatever Rose brought in. Coral and Garnet turned to Pearl, who sighed in desperation, “Rose, may we know where and how did you find…her?” The big gem slowly, and abruptly responded, “I…uh, was taking a stroll in the kindergarten until I noticed her hiding in one of the holes! Yeap! That’s how it happened! Totally not moping around the places we hurt and trying to bring justice by destroying those that caused it! Haha…ha…” Rose, looking embarrassed, tried very hard not to do or say anything more. The three gems were trying their best to interpret her words as positive statements, but from their time together, they pretty much got the idea of how things went down exactly. Coral stood a step forward, “Rose, are you sure about this? She’s not like the other Amethyst gems we know. I mean, compared to the other quartz friends we had, she’s small, she can barely speak, and probably doesn’t know anything about being a gem!” Rose took that information and digested it for a short while before she came up with ideas to counter those issues. “She can learn! While I was talking to her, I noticed she repeat whatever I said, just in a different way to convey another message! As for not knowing what being a gem is about, that’s okay too! We can teach her without having her go through any of those Homeworld stuff, wouldn’t that be great!?” Rose was gleaming at the idea of a gem with no prior knowledge to how gems are “supposed” to be and allowing themselves to be whatever they want to be! Amethyst came out just a little bit from her hiding and repeated the last word she heard, “Great!” before scuttling back. Coral still doesn’t look convinced as she turned to the fusion, “Garnet, what do you think?” “Hmmmm…” Garnet made a look that could only mean one thing, she’s trying to see the little gem’s future. Future vision can be tricky, but it’s good to see what could potentially happen when we add in another factor into the equation. Her shades shone as the possibilities were carefully drafted and narrowed down to the most likely events. “In the futures where we accept her, I see her adapting to our lifestyle, but nothing much on how it’s going to end. There’s a possibility of her being a great asset to us, but there’s also the possibility of her being a greater liability than we could ever imagine.” “I like those odds!” Rose gleamed at the wide range of unpredictability. Coral didn’t want to rain on Rose’s parade or be a wet blanket seeing her being so happy. But she’s also not completely on board with this…new gem appearing out of nowhere. Pearl was the first to speak, “It’s always been just the four of us, I don’t know about having that unproperly developed gem into the team. It’s rather suspicious that she suddenly shows up at the kindergarten when that place has been shut down centuries ago! She might be a spy from homeworld for all we know! Or worse!” Coral gasped in horror and whispered, “Ohno…There’s something worse than spies!?” “Coral please,” Garnet reminded, “focus.” It was up to that point where Rose finally realized why the gems were not on board with the idea of adding a

new member. Homeworld was still a threat, they’re never safe if they keep including new people they don’t know. It’s only been some time since the blinding light turned all the gems on Earth into corrupted monsters. A lot of them were still out there, alone, confused, and most importantly, scared. Those gems were once powerful individuals that were indestructible, but now, they’re terrified gem monsters running around, fleeing from who knows what, not knowing what to do in their current state. But this Amethyst, the sweet, innocent, and lonely gem, won’t be facing that kind of terror any longer when she has us. Rose took one more look at Amethyst, who was trying her best to be unnoticed by the other gems, and was determined to take her in. “Now Crystal gems, don’t you see this is our only chance to have a gem untainted with the rules of Homeworld?” Rose started her topic with the recollection of the crystal gem origin. “Wasn’t that what we were fighting for? To be free of Homeworld’s rules and to live without a care? To preserve the life on Earth instead of taking it, and leaving nothing behind?” Rose continued, “The earth, the rebellion-” “Its more than just that! It’s also for love! The love for ourselves, and the love we have for each other! We never get to show our love anywhere except here! And right now, we have Amethyst who has been living in an abandoned kindergarten, and has probably never been loved through her entire existence! If we neglect her, we’re going against everything we’ve worked so hard for. Besides, she’s a newcomer who had never experienced the horrible tragedy of Homeworld. I mean, isn’t this a good thing we found her right before any homeworld gems did?” She didn’t wait for a response and proceeded, “We can teach her everything about the earth and the crystal gems. Coral! You can teach her what being a Crystal Gem is all about! Pearl! You could teach her about speech and physical formation! Garnet! You could teach her about our current missions or even gem fusion! I know she’s different from us, but she can handle this! With us keeping her safe, she won’t have to face any of those linear rules like staying within your duty, or being cast away as off colours when you don’t fit in with the others?” “She can be a free gem right from the start, without facing the trauma we had. What do you say?” Rose’s words were being very persuasive and all, but none of the gems seemed to budge towards the ideas from their dear leader. “Rose, please, still this is a risk to take. Risks that could potentially have an impact on our freedom and the earth!” Garnet spoke with a hint of fear, perhaps took a glance towards the possibilities of the future. Pearl and Coral, each holding an arm, both stayed silent, but ultimately agreed with the fusion. “Come on you guys, give her a chance, if you get to actually talk to her it might change your minds!” Rose turned around, but failed to see the small gem that was hiding behind her mere seconds ago. “Uh…Amethyst?” Rose called out, but heard no response, nor saw the small figure behind her anywhere. But all she saw were footprints leading back to the temple, and noticed the warp pad was just activated. Amethyst went back home.

(A/N: Heyyyy so this is the second part of the newest chapter. As you may have known, i was pretty busy with the end of the University studies and internship, so i kinda had my hands full to do anything like writing for fun!

Now, this is the end of part 2, where i tried to keep things a bit more interesting, but not too complicated that it would go on for more than 3 parts.

And again, sorry for the lack of visuals. Some of you might prefer reading with the images, and unfortunately, i currently do not have the motivation to be drawing, even if most of them would be tracing from screenshots of the show itself.

When the chapter gets done, i might be doing some of the screenshot edits and reblog them under the written chapters. So theres that to look forward to.

Anyways, thanks for reading and liking this story i wrote. It's not as glamorous and interesting as the previous chapters, but it's still something i consider worth venturing into.

Thanks again and see ya next time! Bye!)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

* * * *

INTERVIEW: SAINT MISBEHAVIN’ WAVY GRAVY

by Richard Whittaker, Dec 21, 2010

One day I got a note from ServiceSpace founder, Nipun Mehta offering me tickets to a new documentary movie about Wavy Gravy. Would you like to go?

    I went. Although I was aware of Wavy Gravy as a cultural icon, I really knew very little about him. The film is a eye-opener. Michelle Esrick’s loving documentary, Saint Misbehavin’ - 10 years in the making - is a real introduction to this remarkable man. I'd never heard about Hugh Romney, the man who later became famous as Wavy Gravy. And what a story. I'll mention just one of its surprises: earlier in his life, Hugh Romney was Lenny Bruce's manager.

    A few weeks after seeing the film, at Mehta’s urging, I had the chance to interview Wavy Gravy himself.

Richard Whittaker:  How are you feeling about Saint Misbehavin’?

Wavy Gravy:  Oh, it’s a swell movie. I’m honored to be so well-documented, and the review in the New York Times was embarrassing. I’m not that good.

RW:  You said in the film that you’re an “intuitive clown.” Would you mind saying something about what that means?

WG:  I’m trained in the art of acting improvisation. That means acting on the spur of the moment rather than doing, say, the focused slow burn and all the traditional clown moves. I don’t do any of that.

RW:  So that would be about sensing the moment, what’s there, and taking in who you’re with.

WG:  Absolutely—and sensing what’s going on. I was, for a number of years, with The Committee in San Francisco. I taught improvisation at Columbia Pictures. Harrison Ford was one of my students and I’ve taught improvisation at Camp Winnarainbow for over thirty years.

RW:  I wanted to ask you about your history. For instance, in New York in Greenwich Village, you wrote poetry, right?

WG:  Yes I did.

RW:  Is any of it available? And is it something you’d want people to find?

WG:  There are a couple of slender volumes out there. I think you’d have to go to Amazon or eBay to find them. I don’t even have copies myself. But other people do and will lend them to me when I need them.

RW:  Do any titles stand out for you?

WG:  Kaleidoscope and there’s Joe’s Song, which is taught in a poetry class at the University of California at Berkeley. Would you like to hear it?

RW:  Please.

WG:  Okay. It goes like this:  “Once upon and ever since I was a child in a child’s world. I have wept a child’s tears and built a child’s wall of clay and stone and colored years of poems in paint and virgin gold. I sought to build a wall so tall from lion eggs from Gallilee, a brick of song among the dregs of silver nails and lesser men a mile long to kiss the sun and climb again. Once ago and ever now I stood a man on a child’s wall. I stopped and prayed to spider webs and roses of the sea. I spoke as one with all the earth and knew the pain of birth and death to be the same without my wall. Once upon and ever furled I stand alone with all the world.”

RW:  That’s beautiful.

WG:  I wrote it in 1960 or about then. I don’t write lyric poems very often. These days I mainly write haiku, usually when friends pass away, which is happening more and more frequently from natural causes. Also I’ve been having the good fortune to have my art exhibited, and I do a haiku to go with each piece.

RW:  I’m imagining that, as a younger man, you had certain visions and deep feelings that could have been a liability for living the conventional life.

WG:  I don’t think I ever had to contend with that one [laughs]. I live in the land of one thing after another. [speaking with an east Indian accent] “The sand only goes through the hourglass one grain at a time,” as some Hindu sage proclaimed. I’ve discovered that to be true.

RW:  Did you have mentors who supported you in Greenwich Village?

WG:  It was kind of amusing. I was going to theater school at Boston University, which was an amazing theater school. The finest directors in the world would come in and the whole college would read for a part. A freshman could get a lead. It was extraordinary. And if you weren’t cast in the production, you would be cast in the lighting crew or the costume crew or the stage crew. Then there was an upset about theater students not doing their social studies and the university attempted to move the campus of the theater school over to where the rest of the university was laid out. Just at that time, the teachers who had all been hired during the McCarthy blackball because they couldn’t work on Broadway, well, the blackball ended and they all quit. They went to work at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City, and they took me with them.

    But while I was at BU, I had read in Time Magazine about jazz and poetry in San Francisco. I thought, hey, I’ve written a couple of poems and I know some musicians. I can do that! So I got together with a bunch of artists from the museum school and we proceeded to take the basement of a bar called The Rock on Huntington Avenue. The place in the basement was called The Pebble in the Rock. We put in black tables and black clothes and mobiles and paintings and began doing jazz and poetry. It was the first jazz and poetry done on the East Coast. So I had the privilege of inaugurating the East Coast to jazz and poetry. I persisted in doing it for years in, of all places, Hartford Connecticut. On every Monday I would grab a bunch of musicians and go to Hartford and make substantial money. Otherwise I was going to the Neighborhood Playhouse and reading my poetry in the evenings at the Gaslight Café in Greenwich Village, as you saw in the movie.

RW:  That’s an amazing story. There was another thing you said in the film, “put your good where it can do the most.”

WG:  Which is the advice I gleaned from one of my mentors, the author and adventurer, Ken Kesey.

RW:  Did that kind of focus something for you?

WG:  Well, it lit up. It lit up. I had discovered that, somewhat. Whenever I would do a good thing, it made me feel good. I think I heard a preacher of color on television in the late fifties. He said, “It’s nice to be nice.” And that kind of hit a chord for me.

RW:  Do you think there’s a mix in what artists do? That in your poetry, part of it was trying to give something?

WG:  Hmmm, I don’t know. I was just trying to get out of the way and let whatever was inside of me come to the surface. In the early days, I was not all that consciously altruistic—although, in the early days of poetry, the poets were not paid. We used to pass a cornucopia around after an hour or so and people would put money in it. We made an embarrassing amount of money that way. Myself and Len Chandler, who was one of the first folk singers I brought into The Gaslight, he and I put on these capes with hoods—Len was an African-American and he had a motor scooter. And we would jump on the motor scooter at the end of the evening and drive down into the Bowery and find somebody passed out on the sidewalk. We’d stuff his pockets with money and drive off and find somebody else until we’d given away at least half of what we’d made in the course of the evening. It was a lot of fun.

RW:  That’s incredible. What do you think led you to do that?

WG:  I don’t know. It just seemed like a fun thing to do. We didn’t need all that money.

RW:  Do you remember the moment when Ken Kesey said “Put your good where it will do the most good”?

WG:  No.  But he told me a lot of stuff—like, “You should honor your mother and your father.” This comes out of the Bible. As soon as I learned that Kesey had written that, I forget how he worded it, I immediately called my mother and my father and honored them verbally as best I could. And it was illuminating for them and for me. Afterwards, I called Ken up to thank him. He said, “Well, it’s just so darn simple.”

RW:  I want to ask about giving and receiving. Do you have any thoughts in general, let’s say, about giving?

WG:  Giving seems to be easy for me. Receiving is the thing I’m just beginning to learn how to do with grace. It’s a work in progress, like the rest of me. Over the last thirty years I’ve experienced considerable physical difficulty, having had to receive a series of spinal surgeries and spending amounts of time in body casts. You have no alternative, or you starve. So it was necessary. I tell people I learned patience in the hospital. [there’s a pause] That’s a pun.

RW:   You’re right! [laughs]

WG:  And as my infirmities persisted, I learned to acquiesce to the moment and accept, with as much graciousness as I could muster, the assistance of people who offered it.

RW:  I bet this is true for lots of people, that it’s easier to give than to receive.

WG:  Right, but as I pointed out, I didn’t have much choice, as with a lot of the stuff that has happened to me in my life. Life situations have presented themselves and it was either sink or swim.

RW:  This reminds me of another part in the film. This is at Woodstock. You and the other members of The Hog Farm were brought there to be the police force for the whole event. You called yourselves “the please force.”

WG:  We were the Please Force. And we had also set up what we called the Trip Tent.

RW:  And there’s a part in the movie where you describe helping a young man who was having a bad acid trip.

WG:  As he came in ranting, this three-hundred pound Australian doctor laid on top of him and said, “Body contact. You need body contact” [said with an accent] and then a psychiatrist leaned in and said, [using another funny voice] “Just think of your third eye, man.”

   Then I figured it was time for me to make my move. I said, “Excuse me. I’d like to try something here.” And they all backed up. What’s this hippie going to do? That’s when I said, “What’s your name, man?”  

RW:  And he mumbled something…

WG:  I said, “No, your name.” He told me his name and I said it back to him. In fact, I said it back to him several times.

RW:  I noticed how very clear and emphatic you were when you got his name. “Okay, Bob. Bob, that’s your name.”

WG:  Your name is Bob.

RW:  Where did you get the knowledge of using that simple directness?

WG:  We’d spent some time on the psychotropic frontiers through the prankster days and beyond. It was not unfamiliar territory.

RW:  You knew something about being really concrete, and focused.

WG:  And through the greatest professor of them all, professor experience; and from courses at hard knocks university.

RW:  You’ve had a lot of hard knocks university experience, I think.

WG:  Yes. Well, that’s how you learn things.

RW:  You said in the film how you’d found you could get high without the psychotropic assistance. Could you say something about that again?

WG:  There are many ways to alter space. I do lots of breathing exercises, and I do mantras. Different people have different recipes to get to a space of consciousness and then to dwell in it for as long as you can, I guess. My own way is an amalgam of many different practices from many different lineages.

RW:  You evolved from Hugh Romney doing the poetry to where you were wearing a jester’s hat.

WG:  Between poems I used to talk about the bizarre things that happened to me during the day because it was really tedious just reading all these poems night after night after night.  Then a guy came along and said, look, skip the poetry. Just talk about your bizarre experiences. That’s how I got into doing stand-up.

    Lenny Bruce became my manager. I put out a couple of albums and toured the U.S. —and in fact, something of the world—doing stand-up before these other things came along.

RW:  Somewhere you left the jester’s hat and started dressing as a clown.

WG:  I was asked, when we had moved to Berkeley in the mid-seventies, to go the Children’s Hospital in Oakland and cheer up kids. On the way out the door of my house, someone handed me a red, rubber nose. I discovered it enabled me to get out of myself and be entertaining to the kids. After awhile, I began to paint my face up as a clown. Somebody gave me a costume, and a clown who was retiring from Ringling Brothers gave me his giant shoes. I worked with kids, with kids who were terminal, even, and did this almost every day for about seven years.

    At one point I had to go to a political rally at Peoples’ Park and I didn’t have time to take off my clown stuff. I discovered that the police didn’t want to hit me anymore. Clowns are safe.

RW:  Can you say more about what your experience at Children’s Hospital working with kids was like?

WG:  I discovered that not only was I helping the kids, I was helping myself. As I began to do this work, I’d gone through three major back surgeries and was in quite a bit of pain. But working with the kids I discovered that as I focused on the children and the pain they were in, I lost track of my own pain.

RW:  Is the clown an archetype you can inhabit?

WG:   Sure.

RW:  Do you think, “I’m a clown?”

WG:  I don’t know. I can’t see you.

RW:  [laughs] No. I have a long way to go. If I evolved, I might become a clown.

WG:  Well, you need to go to camp Winnarainbow. They’ll teach you to clown. It’d be good for you. I think John Townsend said it most brilliantly in The Book of the Clown, “A clown is a poet who is also an orangutan.” But clown comes from the word “clod” or bumpkin, and the red nose indicates they were drunk. But I found all this out later. Suddenly I have these big shoes on and [laughs] a nose and I’m painting my face up, and where does it all come from? I began to study it, and it’s very fascinating, the path of the clown and the jester.

RW:  What have you found out about being a clown? What has been revealed?

WG:  It enables me to go places I couldn’t go as a regular kind of guy. People feel challenged by people going where I go. But when I put on the patina of a clown I’m no challenge to them in any way.

RW:  What do you wish for people when you become a clown?

WG:  I wish that they would find joy in the moment. It’s like I expressed in the film, laughter is the valve on the pressure cooker of life. Either you laugh at stuff or you’re going to end up with your beans on the ceiling.

RW:  At camp Winnarainbow in the film it showed the labyrinth you have on the grounds…

WG:  It’s a unicursal Cretan labyrinth. The oldest one is 3000 years old and was found on the island of Sardinia. The more common labyrinth, like the one you see at Grace Cathedral came about during the 11th or 12th century when Europeans could not go to Jerusalem on pilgrimage. So they developed this other labyrinth, which is different from the Pagan labyrinth, which made it to Scandanavia, to India and somehow to Peru and to the sun temple at Mesa Verde. That’s where I first encountered it when I spent time living with the Hopi Indians for a few months.

RW:  How did that happen?

WG:  I was enamored of the Book of the Hopi by Frank Waters. And that’s where I first saw the labyrinth. According to the Hopi if there was a condition of planetary emergency the different races would gather on this mesa for instruction from the spirit world. So I showed up. They said, “You’re pretty early.” But they took pity on me and I got to hang out with them for a while.

RW:  Was anything given to you?

WG:  Not something that I would feel comfortable talking about, but yes—not so much from the people as from the geography.

RW:  So you brought this labyrinth to camp Winnarainbow, then?

WG:  Yes. I asked Minalanska, who was an elder, what that was. She said, “Oh Wavy Gravy, that’s just the master plan of the universe.” So I borrowed a pencil and wrote it down, and I’ve brought it everywhere I’ve gone ever since. I learned to draw it. Even with my first book, I’d sign it and draw that labyrinth.

RW:  Now how do you make use of the labyrinth at camp for the kids?

WG:  A teepee at a time, in the evening, the campers get to walk the labyrinth to beautiful music under the stars. If they do good things, they get strokes. If they do bad things they get strikes. Three strikes and you’re out. You can always work off strikes, but you can get enough strikes to be sent home, too. By doing things above and beyond the ordinary camper—for instance, if you get eight stokes in a two-week session, you get to walk into the center of the labyrinth. In the center, there’s also these crystals. You get to take a crystal out of the labyrinth and take it home.

RW:  Do you talk to the kids about the labyrinth?

WG:  Oh, sure.

RW:  What do you tell them?

WG:  I tell them that the labyrinth is not a maze. Mazes are designed to get you lost. Labyrinths are designed to get you found. And I ask them to think of each step as a prayer for peace. I tell them you go into the labyrinth and that there’s an energy in the center that I call the spirit of Gaia, the earth mother. I say that if you have cares or problems you can leave them in the labyrinth and come out perhaps lighter than when you went in. And that is sometimes helpful to young people.

RW:  In the film you made a comment to one kid that the labyrinth is inside of you.

WG:  Oh, I tell all the kids that. The true labyrinth is inside you.

RW:  That’s powerful. From the film, I see that your life has been a journey. Do you feel it that way?

WG:  Absolutely. It’s been a great adventure.

RW:  What are some of the changes from where you were and where you are today?

WG:  The things that are the most significant for me in my life are the circus and performing arts camp that I’ve run with my wife Jahanara for over thirty years. We do nine weeks for kids and one week for grown-ups. And the Seva Foundation is another. Through it I’m able to raise funds to help the blind regain their sight. Eighty percent of the blind people in the world don’t need to be—they can get their sight back.

    When we first started doing the work it was about five dollars for a cataract operation. Now it’s close to fifty dollars for the operation in third world countries. If you go to SEVA.org you can find out all about us. We’ve helped to orchestrate—it’s going on three million sight-saving operations. I get to put on concerts to raise funds to do that. I’m going to be seventy-five years old in May and I’m looking forward to doing a concert in the Bay Area at the Craneway Pavillion in Richmond and in New York City at the Beacon Theater. And also I’m facing another basic spinal surgery in January. So I’ve got a lot of stuff on my plate.

RW:  I know we don’t have much more time, but …

WG:  Eternity now, I always say.  That’s one of my favorite quotes. And we’re all the same person trying to shakes hands with our self. I think that’s a good one, too.

RW:  I like those quotes. It’s clear that you’ve spent a lot of time doing forms of service. Camp Winnarainbow seems to be a service.

WG:  Well, my greatest legacy is the children that have come out of camp over the last thirty years. Lots of the kids who started camp when they were seven are now running the camp. And I’m sure it will go on long after I’m gone.

RW:  Is that something one begins to learn, that the deepest gifts come when one can look beyond personal wants to take in the needs of others?

WG:  That is my want! [laughs] Put your good where it will do the most. I can’t say it any better.

[WORKS AND CONVERSATIONS]

[unicyclehippo]

I'd love to see 31 in that prompt list you just reblogged with beaujester!

oh i bet u would What A Surprise

31. “Can I kiss you?”

//

she’s been thinking about it for a long time. since it happened, really, and constantly for a while after that. and then, at some point she can’t quite place...she had thought less and less about fjord kissing her.

saving her life?

saving her life via kiss.

the thought had come back in a big way for reasons she’s not ready to think about yet so here she is—standing with burning cheeks and trembling hands in fjord’s room, waiting for his answer.

he was clearly polishing his sword—not a euphemism, though now that she thinks about it she giggles. the laugh takes on a hysterical note and that’s what gets fjord up on his feet, breaking out of the stunned fish look. with a flick of his wrist, the new sword is gone and he crosses the room in a few long strides. hesitates for a second before settling his hands on her shoulders.

‘hey,’ he says, so gently, so kind, in the way he always is when it is just the two of them, ‘what’s wrong?’

she shakes her head. ‘nothing. just—you can say no, if you want, i just thought—‘

‘jester,’ why does he sound sorry? pitying? is she pitiful for asking? his hands are calloused, warm, as he lifts them to her cheeks. ‘you have to give me a second to catch up. you want—‘ he flushed a little. ‘you want me to kiss you?’

‘i—‘ she leans forward until her forehead knocks against his sternum. enjoys the way his arms settle around her shoulders, hug her. there’s something not quite right about it, he’s being too careful about it like he’s not sure he’s doing it right, or that he should be, and it makes jester itch all over. is it too much to ask that she can be held? hugged? kissed? why does it never feel right? ‘you saved me,’ she says. it’s easier when she can’t see his face. ‘you kissed me.’

‘i—yeah. i did.’

‘were you just saving my life? or were you kissing me?’

she can almost hear his heart, beating away steadily beneath new muscles. maybe that’s why it feels wrong. she knew him, met him, when he was slimmer, less muscular, and she wonders if that’s why it doesn’t feel quite right. if it’s something she has to get used to again.

‘i was saving you,’ fjord says. ‘i couldn’t let you drown. you—we’ve been a team from the start, jes, i couldn’t.’

jester nods.

fjord’s hold lightens a little as though he expects her to leave. when she doesn’t, he hugs her a little tighter and that feels better. more comfortable. she shifts so her cheek is pillowed on his shoulder and sighs.

‘i think...i knew that.’

‘are you upset?’ he asks quietly.

‘a little, maybe.’

‘okay. can i...do something?’

‘answer a question?’

fjord’s hold tightens a moment, then relaxes. ‘yeah. anything,’ he says, and he sounds like he means it. really means it. it can be hard to tell with fjord but even as jester thinks that, she realises that she trusts him with the deep, unshakeable faith she allows for very few people.

‘do you want to kiss me? do you want—‘

‘do i want you?’ fjord asks. she knows what the wildmother sees in him; the warm, the gentleness of the waves on the beach. the sting of salt in a wound. ‘not like that. i love you, jester, i—i hope you know that, i hope i’ve done well enough to show that. but no. i’m sorry.’

she has a lot of questions but mostly they boil down to: do you want someone else? or do you just not want me? but she hasn’t the energy to ask it, hasn’t the fortitude now to hear the answer. it isn’t that she’s upset that fjord doesn’t want her—which is new and novel of a thought, because she was sure, sure that she loved fjord in those big grand romantic ways and to feel very little more than disappointment is...confusing. she’s just tired. tired of not being wanted.

‘okay,’ she says, and hugs him tighter.

‘okay?’

‘yeah. okay.’

it takes a little while but eventually the tension runs out of fjord like a tide, pulling away bit by bit until it reveals the covered shore and she thinks despite the faint hurt and disappointment she might be happy with what she has found in its place. happy with the fjord that hugs her tight and presses a kiss to her hairline, gentle and full of a love jester thinks she’ll always need.

eventually, she steps back. wipes at her cheeks where a few tears have spilled over. fjord offers her a handkerchief—‘such a gentleman,’ she teases, and accepts it.

‘you want...tea? or a nap? or...’

jester smiles, not quite her typical brilliant smile but a good one nonetheless. ‘no, it’s okay. i’m gonna...i’m gonna go read under the tree or something. draw something for the traveller.’

‘okay.’ fjord opens the door for her, walks her out to the landing. he starts down, toward the kitchen, before stopping a few steps lower than her. ‘jes?’

‘mhm?’

‘what—made you come to me? and ask?’

can i kiss you? jester remembers saying to him, almost frantic with the request. it had felt like life or death in that moment, like she was chasing after something vital, something she needed.

jester’s eyes slide down past him, down to the room where she had been before. the training room, packed down hard with sand, and the training dummies. where she had been watching beau fight with potent focus, where she had sat beside her friend, and where they had somehow been drawn closer and closer on the bench as they spoke and plotted how to prank nott or maybe caduceus, he’s a solid good sort, in an effort to get yasha to laugh—or maybe smile, jessie, beau had said, with an awkward tilt of her head, seeing as laughter might be like a second step or something. break the proverbial emotional ice with some light smiles first. the smile beau had offered up was small and sweet and ripe with mischief as she talked about what a really bad fucking idea it’d be to prank caleb, and jester hadn’t been able to look away. how had she not noticed—

‘jes? did something happen?’

jester’s attention darts back to fjord, looking like he’s about to climb back up to her.

‘nothing bad,’ she tells him. ‘i don’t think.’

‘do you wanna talk about it?’ he offers, scratching at the back of his neck. ‘i don’t know if i’m the right person for it but—‘

‘would you be upset if i asked someone else?’

fjord’s expression shifts quickly—the concern washed away by surprise, and then a momentary dark glimpse of something she can’t place, so quick that jester thinks it hardly belonged to him at all. finally, calm settles and she can see nothing but curiosity glinting in dark eyes, like light off capped waves. he smiles a crooked smile, the tip of a tusk peeking above his lip.

‘someone got you in a tizzy,’ he deduces. ‘and you came to me.’

guilt hits her like a tidal wave and jester grips onto the bannister, pulls her bottom lip into her mouth to worry at it.

‘i—yes, but i didnt know, i didn’t realise—i wasn’t using you, fjord, i wasn’t—‘

‘jester,’ he cuts her off, ‘i know.’ he loves her too. she can see it. the deep affection, the adoration, has never been more obvious. ‘i don’t think you’re capable of that. nah, that’s not true. you could do anything you wanted. but i reckon you’d never do it.’ he appraises her silently, then adds, ‘i’m here for you. whatever happens.’

jester smiles, this one trembling. ‘thanks,’ she says, a little choked.

//

she gets a peaceful half hour or so in the garden before someone raps on the door, presses it slowly open. she’s only a little surprised to find that it is beau peeking into the space, blue eyes lighting up when she spies jester seated by the traveller’s shrine cad had made for her.

‘hey. missed you at dinner. fjord told us you were up here, didn’t want to be disturbed.’ she steps in cautiously, ready to leave the instant jester asks her to. ‘i brought up something—just some stew, it’s weirdly good, cad’s a great cook. and,’ with a flourish she produces something that looks like a blueberry but is the size of an eyeball. ‘xhorhassian sweet. it’s a berry, i think.’ she looks at it a little nervously, before shrugging. ‘i’d offer to try it first, but i’m immune to poison and shit like that. i can make nott eat one first, if you want.’

jester laughs. ‘i’ll risk it,’ she says, and beckons beau over. it only occurs to her when beau is approaching that maybe it isn’t a good idea when everything is so close to the surface of her thoughts. but beau is already sitting and handing her the bowl. she lays down next to jester, easy and relaxed, folds her hands behind her head and stretches her legs out long, sighs happily.

‘i love these lights,’ she admits. ‘they’re beautiful. and not just because everyone else around here can’t figure out what the fuck we were on when we grew a tree outta the top of the house.’

jester grins. ‘yeah.’ she glances down, eyes flicking over the play of the light over beau, over her oddly serene face, over her lovely brown skin, the shining flicks of brocade to her new uniform. ‘beautiful.’

beau tenses.

jester lifts her eyes to see her friend watching her intently, but though the tension doesn’t ease, beau says nothing.

jester eats. pretends to doodle in her journal, trying to decipher the warmth in her gut at feeling beau beside her, the warmth of her skin, the slow even breathing, the occasional odd murmur as she shifts, pulls an annoying pebble out from under her back.

‘can i kiss you?’ jester blurts out after she has finished her dinner and set it aside.

beau’s knee jerks in her surprise and then her abs are bunching and she’s sitting bolt upright. she opens and closes her mouth a few times and then says simply, ‘yeah.’

‘yeah?’

‘if that’s what you want.’

jester frowns. ‘what do you want?’

beau looks like she doesn’t know what to say again. her shoulders press back—less of a shrug than a nervous shift. ‘i want...you to be happy.’

‘beau.’

‘i’m serious. i’d—do a lot to make you happy, jes.’

jester ducks her head, unsure of what exactly she’s feeling. happy that she got a yes, but everything else beau says makes her wary of taking it. it isn’t quite appeasement, but...

‘i’m not good at talking,’ beau says. shifts not closer but so she’s turned toward jester. ‘i’m—not great with wanting things. i’m kinda...a selfish asshole.’

‘beau, that is not true,’

‘i mean, it kinda is though.’ beau puts her hand over jester’s mouth so she can’t disagree. it’s silly but all jester can think is that even this small contact is right, is good, is terrifying but in this weird, nice, bigger-than-nice, fizzing, and did she mention terrifying kind of way. ‘hold on, i’m trying,’ she continues, and jester forces herself to settle. beau kinda looks like she’s going to puke, or maybe panic. ‘i’m—fuck, okay, i guess we’re doing this—i’m into you, jes. in a big way. and i’m okay with having that in, in whatever way you want. i’ll be your best friend, your roommate, your—protector,’ she says in an oddly stilted, awkward way jester realises is shy. it makes jester want to scream all of a sudden because she doesnt know what this is, where all of this is coming from, how she didn’t know that beau could be like this, be so endearing and warm and noble. she wants to scream because it feels like too much and too little all at once—beau is right there but it feels like she’s too far away, like there is this great yawning chasm between them and jester doesn’t know how to close it, how to cross it.

jester reaches up, slowly, and peels beau’s hand from over her mouth. turns so they’re seated alike, cross legged, knees to knees.

beau looks like she’d rather be anywhere else, holding herself so firmly in place that she’s buzzing with the effort of it. she looks peaceful and terrified, and it’s strange to see her own feelings reflected in beau, who sometimes seems entirely alien—brave and strong and brash and, and lovely.

‘i don’t know everything i’m feeling,’ jester whispers.

beau nods quickly. ‘yeah, yeah, of course, it’s fine, i’m okay with—‘

jester doesn’t know what she’s okay with because she sets her own hand over beau’s mouth. ‘i’m not finished.’

beau rolls her eyes. settles. ‘that’s fair,’ she says, words muffled.

‘i don’t want—‘ jester gulps. ‘to ruin anything.’ she thinks about the chaos crew and girls night and late nights with beau in their room and reading her romance novels together and shopping and thinks about fjord and— ‘can i kiss you anyway?’ she asks, feeling the bite of being selfish instantly, and beau’s eyes lose that little bit of tension in the corners, go sky blue with warmth.

jester’s breath catches in her throat as beau lifts a hand and instead of taking jester’s hand away as she had done, beau holds it close for a moment, kissing jester’s palm before she lifts it away. the touch of it feels like a burning brand, like somehow her hand is buzzing with life, with energy, like beau has made it—jester’s brain stutters over the analogy for a second, because it’s too big and too much, surely, but the words come anyway. beau’s kiss makes her feel divine, worshipped.

jester is still trying to wrap her head around that when beau leans in, traces her fingers down jester’s cheek.

‘yeah?’ she asks, holding back.

jester nods. closes the distance. so that’s how she does it, she thinks, and then she is kissing beau—beau is kissing her—and this, this feels... this feels. she can’t say right, she can’t say too much, she has nothing to compare it to, the way her heart feels to beat too fast and stop altogether, both at the same time. the way she goes hot and cold, and all her world closes down into where she is touching beau and being touched by beau. a hand on her cheek, the still-burning kiss on her hand, her own hand on beau’s neck, the skin so soft and the short wispy hairs that escape from her top knot tickling against her fingers, and beau is kissing her.

[the-no-name-system]

So I Have Auditory-Tactile Synesthesia...

...And I’m a big fan of @thatsthat24, especially of Sanders Sides and Cartoon Therapy, but I love everything he and his friends put out. But I realized today, thinking about the different sides in Sanders Sides, that they have different tactile associations for me, despite them all being Thomas. They all have the same base texture, but there’s something different about all of them.

Thomas himself has the texture of a bunch of small pebbles warmed by the sun

Roman has the same bumpiness of the pebbles, but its buffered by the feeling of silk/maybe satin(? sorta velvet-y but I can’t find the right word)

Virgil feels like the pebbles are covered by sand, and are less warm than Thomas’ regular voice

Patton feels like the pebbles are wet, though not with specific warm or cold water exactly, they just feel wet and slightly cooler than normal

Logan’s voice sounds almost the most like Thomas, with those same pebbles and the only difference is the temperature, as Logan’s don’t feel warmed by the sun, and they’re marginally cooler than Patton’s

Deceit might be the furthest away from Thomas’ voice, as it has no bumpiness, and just feels like one cool, smooth rock

Remus, predictably, is kinda disgusting: he feels like the pebbles were stuck in petroleum jelly (Vaseline)

BONUS: Remy/Sleep feels like the pebbles were warmed with an electric blanket, and are warmer than Thomas

BONUS TWO: Picani (from Cartoon Therapy) has Virgil’s feeling of sand on pebbles but also has Thomas’ level of warmth

I don’t know if anyone will see this, but I found it really interesting that while his voice was undeniably his voice in each instance, it sounds slightly different with each role he plays. It’s a sign of exceptional acting when it takes me a moment to realize that a voice belongs to a specific person because the texture is off to me, and I think, “It can’t be them!”

Anyway, that’s all I wanted to say, really. Thanks to Thomas for putting himself out there with his series and his shorts and music. The texture of his voice is one I’ve learned to love!

[be-dazzled]

#SIYC

Gray Fullbuster, Juvia Lockser FFnet: click here Tumblr: explore here Genre: Multi-Chapter, Romance, Comedy Rating: M for sensitive language and content

Summary: Gray Fullbuster is a player both in love and in life. He plays Professional Basketball and is being groomed to be in line with Basketball Legends Michael Jordan, Lebron James, Kobe Bryant and Stephen Curry. There's just one problem, Gray Fullbuster is a play-ah. His life is a giant mess of crazy parties, waking up with random women and waking up in random women's apartments. Just living the life.

The opinion of the public on him is waning. To save the million-dollar endorsements in the verge of disappearing, Gray needs to change his image. Therefore, Gray Fullbuster, Fiore Knight's Team Captain and Most Valuable Player, will be in the next season of "My Star Can Dance".

There's another problem: it seems like his star isn't that bright since his partner, one of Fiore's prominent ballerinas, doesn't know him? His billboard is hanging in front of her dancing school! And it was a good billboard since all he was wearing was his six-pack and an Aztec bandana. How come she didn't notice?

…

Who knows where we're going And who knows what we'll find I want to see the world The way I see a world with you

– A World With You, Jason Mraz

…

The sound of waves crashing against the shore. The smell of fresh, afternoon breeze damping his skin. The feel of sand rushing past his bare feet. Gray took them all in and he couldn't remember a place more calm, peaceful and serene. Despite the crowd scattered around the beach lane, Hoopster felt at peace. But no matter how beautiful the place was, it held no candle to Juvia.

Down the famous beach lane, just a merely ten meters away from the Lockser Mansion, Gray and Juvia walked on foot with him carrying both his shoes and the ballerina's sandals. His free hand held hers, tightly enough to let her know that Gray wasn't letting go anytime soon. Their fingers intertwined, fitting the spaces perfectly like they always meant to be. They walked in bliss as the sun started to descend from its throne. In about a minute or two, the beautiful beachside would be dressed in the golden hour.

Gray looked around. As much as he loved the view in his apartment in the city, the beachside was something else. The boisterous laughters coming from a group of children playing in the water caught his attention. A part of him was screaming he wanted one, maybe two or a dozen, and he'd want them to have the freedom to run around and play at the expanse of that beach.

Not now. Not any time soon. With everything in his plate, that dream was to far for reach.

"It's unfair."

His girlfriend's complaint pulled him out of the thought of chasing little ones around the sand.

"I feel so exposed." Juvia pouted, having spent the day learning about herself and none about Gray.

"Well, I like it." He said, kissing the knuckle of the woman whom Gray had the pleasure of knowing her deeply.

"C'mon." She whined, walking ahead only to turn around and face the man. "Tell me something about you too."

Tit for tat.

Gray stopped in his tracks, pulling a pouting Juvia to a halt. He put two fingers under his chin, pretending to think about what to tell her.

"What do you want to know?"

"I wanna know…" she teased, "if Gray really is this elusive playboy the magazine claims him to be."

"By magazines you mean your collection?" A lone brow quirked up at Juvia's direction.

Blue eyes denied the accusation but there was no more hiding about her secret 'Gray-fanatic' era. Juvia's parents made sure of that. She frowned at him and when Gray pulled her into an apologetic embrace, Juvia couldn't keep the frown up anymore. She broke the hug first and returned to her interrogation as they continued the sandy trail along the beach.

Since her secret was already out in the open, the ballerina indulged her teenage fan-girl self whom she long have forgotten. She seized the opportunity and asked Gray about the scandals imputed to him.

"You fought with a fellow Knight because of a girl."

"False. I would never steal a brother's girl."

Juvia raised a questioning brow at him but Gray maintained his innocence.

"Club 413? End of the 88th NBA Season?" Juvia hinted, hoping it would jog Gray's memory and it did.

"Man, that guy could throw a punch." Gray massaged his left jaw as if receiving the hard knuckle yesterday.

"So?" Juvia tugged at him, asking for further explanation.

"First of all, Jenny gave me those cookies. I only punched him 'cause he ate all of 'em."

"So, you got into a fight with Natsu because of cookies?"

Juvia did a good summary of what went down on that fateful night the Fiore Knight's Team Captain and Vice Captain started a brawl outside the 8-Islands bar. Her judging tone and narrowed eyes made the whole story sound ridiculous.

"Hey! In my defense, her cookies were to die for. And don't give me that look. You haven't had a taste of Jenny's cookies."

Despite his warning, Juvia still rolled her eyes at him with palpable judgment. And here she thought Jenny was one of Gray's great loves.

"Anyways, she actually thought we were fighting over her." Gray kicked a scattered pebble and didn't even look to which direction it went. His boy's laugh mixing with the serine sound of waves crashing with the shore. "Like that would ever happen."

"I can't believe that the only thing that could make Gray Fullbuster abandon the 'Bro Code' is a bunch of cookies."

"Yeah." Gray admitted unabashedly, pausing for a while to do some reminiscing, face twisting in satisfaction. "Next question."

"You'll choose food over me."

"False. I like you more than food."

With Gray, that proclamation carried so much weight, it surprised even him. Unlike with the girls that came before Juvia, however, he didn't feel the sudden need to run away or sabotage whatever it was that was happening between them. He wasn't scared at the realization.

"Mirajane Strauss–"

"False. Never dated her. Although, I admit I did try."

"–I wasn't finished. Mirajane Strauss and her sister Lisanna?"

That was one scandal that got Gray some beating from his own mother.

"False!" He denied with conviction. "You've seen their brother, right? The giant wrestler?"

"But you tried?"

"True." Now he answered with regret. Whilst he tried to score one night at some club where the two supermodels frequented, Gray couldn't get pass through the brother-bouncer. But the twin blondes more than made up for it.

"The Vice President's daughter?"

"False. Although, she did try." The corner of his mouth tipped.

"Then what is real?"

"This," He answered, pulling Juvia against him, "this right here is real."

Gray brushed his lips against Juvia's, tasting salt at contact first before his favorite sweet taste of the ballerina's lips. Then, he tilted his head to deepen the kiss, cradling Juvia's small frame against his own. They got lost in the intimate act that they almost missed the reason why they were at the beach. It was Gray who broke the kiss, albeit repentantly, because he wanted to cherish the moment. He wanted to add that memory in the list of his firsts with Juvia – their first sunset.

He spun her around so that they were both facing the horizon. Gray enveloped Juvia in a gentle embrace, pulling her against his chest. Her back was pressed against him. The two stayed in quiet as the sun slowly disappeared.

"You know," he whispered into her ears, "can't help but notice that your questions were all about the girls I allegedly dated." He continued in a tone that teased the bluenette. "Are you asking for my number?"

Juvia swatted his head in denial without taking her eyes of the sunset.

"Don't ruin the moment." She warned. But if Juvia was being honest, Hoopster was right.

Gray planted a light peck on her cheeks before he rested his chin on her shoulders and basked in the beauty of their first sunset together. He heaved out a long sigh. For the first time in his life he wasn't afraid of how he thought he felt. He didn't think about running away from it. He was at peace.

Could it be the scenery? The beach? The cold breeze? Maybe a combination of everything. Despite the beauty around him, his eyes only recognized the bluenette in his arms, staring at the orange sky. Her hair rivaled the pristine waters. Her mellow smile was warmer than the golden hour. Gray was in awe. There was no other way to describe how he felt – happy. Gray was happy.

...

The night brought more revelations. All still about Juvia. It felt like some detective perusing her past and every single skeleton in the closet was being uncovered. She didn't mind watching Gray seated beside her at the dinner table, laughing and listening to her old man about every little information he let slip out.

After dinner, Julian still insisted she and Gray sleep in separate rooms. Juvia had no qualms about it. She hadn't quite figured out where they both stand in the relationship and it was too soon for that. They needed to have the talk but not any time soon. She was happy with how things were and if she was being a little honest, she was scared to tip the boat.

"Hey, hon."

Olivia suddenly appeared at her door, pulling Juvia's attention back to reality.

"Done unpacking?"

Juvia stood from the bed, heaved out a long sigh and as she abandoned the task at hand.

"Almost."

"Gray settling in alright?" Olivia walked up to her daughter.

"I'll check on him after I'm done here." Juvia informed, maneuvering the space in-between her scattered bags.

The older Lockser sauntered into the room and sat on the mattress, tapping on the space next to her as an invitation to Juvia. She gladly accepted.

"I went down the store yesterday to get these."

Olivia handed the young Lockser a paper bag. Juvia didn't notice it earlier when her mother entered the room.

"What is it?" Juvia almost dropped the bag when she realized what was or what were in it.

"I didn't know they had a lot of sizes and… types."

Juvia didn't hear her mother. She was busy fighting and controlling the wave of shame that suddenly hit her. Juvia didn't need to ask what was in the paper bag. She recognized it easily. And Olivia, apparently being the good mother that she was, got enough to last Juvia and Gray a week.

"Mother!" After Juvia recovered from the initial embarrassment, she picked her jaw from the floor and found her voice again. "I won't need these!" She shoved the paper bag back to the surprised Olivia.

It was too soon for that. They haven't even had the talk yet and Juvia wasn't sure if she was ready for it.

"We're not even there yet, mother." She confessed, to Olivia's surprise.

"Huh." Olivia mused. "That's quite surprising. When your dad and I were dating, we can't keep our hands off each other."

Juvia felt the second wave of embarrassment sweep her off her feet.

"The first night we–"

"–I don't really need to know about your first night, mother." Juvia cut Olivia off before she made a revelation that would haunt Juvia to her grave.

The uncomfortable daughter wasn't even sure why they were talking about it. There was nothing to talk about. Gray and Juvia were just not in that place in the relationship. Well, not yet. Juvia stood from the bed hoping her mother would get the idea and leave her alone. Why they were talking about first nights was beyond her.

"I guess your dad and I should just use them."

Good thing Juvia wasn't holding anything valuable and breakable.

"I didn't really have to hear that."

Olivia was just probably pulling her leg with the way she laughed at her daughter's reaction. Juvia had no plans on finding out if there was truth in it though. There were things better left unsaid.

Juvia returned to her unpacking when she heard the light tapping of heels against her floor. As she turned around, Olivia was at the door with the teasing laugh still on her red lips. She placed the paper bag on the tall lamp table near the door.

"I'll just put them here. In case the need arises."

Juvia cringed.

"Besides, I don't think your dad and I would be needing them."

Did she just hint at…

Juvia almost doubled flipped in embarrassment.

"Nobody needs to know what you do in your bedroom mother. My goodness." She shouted after her.

Whatever plans Juvia had to drop by at the guest room to say good night to Gray, she abandoned. This scene right here was going to haunt her for weeks like the 'dancing is like making love' shenanigans.

...

Writer's Corner: DID I JUST FORGOT TO POST CHAPTER 11 HERE?!?!?!!? Please forgive me. Anyways, Chapter 12 is up! #GruviaForever

[celticfeather]

Akatsuki Fic: Campfires

A brooding clan-killer and a man who prefers to see himself more shark than human are not the most likely, or friendly, of new partners. But hunted and hated, their backs on are the wall, and the Akatsuki starts to form a complex refuge for its members. Their missions blur the lines between men, beasts, and gods, and Itachi must either accept his complicity in evil, or contemplate revolt.

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13409132/1/Campfires

https://archiveofourown.org/works/21019778/chapters/49992863

-Chapter 1: Dawn

The tongues of flames danced against the stars like heathens frenzied before a war, springing into the night with a fibrous crackling. The one called Pain stood like a preacher, tall and black,  his shadow painted by the leaping blaze onto the rockface behind him. His voice was low and commanding, yet vibrant, like velvet over steel. From everywhere and nowhere it echoed around the chasm like the voice of a god. “And if you join us, Uchiha Itachi, make clear your mark.” Itachi raised his arm and the thick kunai glinted black and orange. The metal fang plunged down, and with a jumping spark, the knife slit a ragged slash across his headband’s gentle leaf. “You are damned to the world, Itachi. May you find refuge in our Dawn, and together we shall light the world in the rays of a new peace.” No devilish cheering welcomed their new member. There stood a half dozen of his new comrades in black robes with red clouds, their dark eyes peeking out from high collars. Among them he noted the bandages of a Mist swordsman, and he recognized the grinning snake eyes of Orochimaru.

Now at least, damned by his nation as he was, Itachi had no orders to follow but his own. He would protect the Leaf from the shadows. And from this Akatsuki, whatever it was. He was washed with a strange sense of peace. It was not relief. What was done was done. Compared to yours, our pain will be over in an instant, his father’s last words echoed through his mind. He was unsure if they were sympathetic or the curse of a dying man. But it mattered not. The deed was done.

He wondered what had happened to Sasuke. The Hokage himself must be consoling him now. Maybe the boy would be sent to live with another family, or an orphanage. No, probably not, unsavory types would be waiting to adopt the boy. “Hey, you.” Itachi looked over, his thoughts of family broken. A man older and taller than he had prodded him on the shoulder. “Name’s Kakuzu. Follow the rules, don’t be brash, and I won’t kill you.” He gave Itachi a small leather pouch. “What is this?” “Ten thousand yen.” An unexpected gift. But since his days in Anbu, Itachi was reticent to show surprise around people he wasn’t sure he liked. “That’s for the month. If you need food or an inn, buy it. Petty theft is beneath us, and attention costs money.” Ten thousand yen was hardly generous for a month’s travels. In fact, an ordinary human would die of exposure. The inflation rate had been such that fifty years ago one could travel a few weeks on 10,000 yen. Now it would suffice for only a few bowls of ramen. “Hey now, Kakuzu! Let him live a little bit! No one lives forever! Oh wait, you do, heheHAHA!”

Kakuzu narrowed his eyes hatefully at the interruption. The high pitched voice sounded like it belonged to a teenager. Itachi looked in its direction, and giggles simmered from the orange mask. Kakuzu growled, and ‘Tobi’ yelped and wilted. Finding the boy sufficiently scared, he did not press his advantage. Itachi suppressed his unease: the disguised, giggling, Madara was also alive far beyond a human lifespan. It unnerved him to see him manifest this boyish farce after they had worked together only hours prior to massacre their clan. But Itachi‘s face was an aloof, slightly irritated mask. “Rumor has it,” a woman’s cool voice uttered to him, “Kakuzu fought the first Hokage.” “Is that so,” Itachi echoed. If true, this Kakuzu would be eighty-five years old at minimum. He only looked forty. It seemed that Orochimaru and Madara were not unique among those who experimented with eternal youth. He would have to tread carefully here.

Itachi studied the woman. She was older than him, early twenties maybe. Her hair was bluish. He had only now seen her leave Pain’s side, and she was the only female member of the group. He wondered if she and pain were romantically involved. It was strangely like an academy clique: the one woman had chosen the highest ranking man of the group. “Konan is my name,” she told him. “I hope you can find a home here.” “Uchiha Itachi. A pleasure.” She did not seem terrible. The mist ninja with the executioner’s sword and red face paint stepped forward to Itachi. He smiled his mangled, filed, teeth at Itachi, and extended his bandaged hand. “Looks like you’re the only other shoe without a mate, kid. Biwa Juzo.”

“Now,” the gravelly voice of Pain claimed order. “Our organization needs to gather funds if we are to achieve our goals. You have your partners and your missions-- you are dismissed.” (keep reading)

A long time later, Juzo was dead.

Itachi did not know if the swordsman understood he would die when he jumped to shield Itachi from the Misukage’s strike, or if it had been an impulse he did not live to regret. The Kage’s blast had shattered his sword, and sated its iron-hungry blade in its owner’s abdomen. Not risking a burial, Itachi had returned the hilt to Juzo’s hand and fled the Land of Water for his life.

He wondered if he was still there— if the crows found him. He hoped they had. If it were him, he would prefer crows to the Mist intelligence corp-- and especially Zetsu.

Itachi’s newest partner introduced himself a few hours ago. The eyes that now walked beside his were white and devoid of mammalian emotion, and Itachi had not yet noticed Hoshigaki Kisame blink. The ex-mist ninja was of hulking stature, maybe two meters, which brought Itachi’s highest hairs up only to his jaw. He might have been thirty, but he had a strange face and it was hard to tell. His skin carried a faint bluish sheen, and his cheekbones were slashed with what could best be described as partial gills. Itachi had once pondered a similar thought with Orochimaru: Were you born looking like an animal?

Itachi found the Mist ninja’s desire to be partnered with him ignoble. By the end of the bizarre introduction speech involving live shark births, this Kisame seemed to advocate fratricidal cannibalism. Respecting Itachi because he killed his family was a poor way to gain his admiration.

“Isn’t this a mission for state ninja?” Kisame’s voice broke his thoughts. “A jounin could handle this.”

“The Land of Iron has no ninja village,” Itachi said. “The Ishikawa tiger, too, is an endangered species, and I do not think the neighboring waterfall ninja would agree to hunt it.”

Earlier, the pair had debriefed each other on their strengths and strategies. Kisame, as far as he had trusted to self-report, had massive stamina, lethal dexterity with water style, and was skilled with the chakra absorbing sword he carried. Itachi had listed fire style, shuriken, and genjutsu as his advantages. It seemed a profitable marriage of skills. 

“Hm. Now, how to find the poor sap?”

“My tracking skills are… above average,” Itachi said. Red gleamed out from under his high collar. 

“Right. I’ll let you lead.”

His world flared in the expanded spectrum of colors and avian detail of the sharingan. Itachi looked at the tree limbs above them, where a bird’s nest balanced lithely on a swaying branch. In the nest’s carefully woven lining was a tiny tuft of orange fibers: a mixture of orange guard hairs and slightly lighter whitish underfur. Among the orange was a single black hair of the same length.

A few minutes later he saw some twigs broken by a large quadruped. Then he saw a smeared paw print with retracted claws. They continued into a shallow ravine. Kisame followed quietly, but a crackle came from his direction: his living sword was excited.

Itachi peered from the bushes and signaled to Kisame. Through a leafy window they spied a massive cat, far larger than an ordinary animal, nearing the size of a horse carriage. Bunches of muscles rippled on its haunches as it lapped a sandpaper tongue at the creek. Facing profile to them, it yawned, and fangs longer than kunai flashed in the light. Itachi reached into his robe to draw a single knife. A strike to the brain would be sufficient. 

“Allow me,” Kisame said, unshouldering the huge, blunt, Samehada from his back. “Pity to let such nice chakra soak the sand.”

Itachi tipped his knife back into his robe in consent. More than he would like to see this over, he would like to observe how this Hoshigaki Kisame operated.

Kisame alighted before the beast in the clearing. Surely the tiger was unaccustomed to being approached by anything living, especially not something smaller than it. It sprang with coiled fury at the man that dared, but its front claws met only earth. Shiny brown river pebbles sprayed loudly into the air and clattered back down to the ground.

Brandishing the thirty-kilo sword, a grinning Kisame landed spritely five meters from the tiger’s impact. With the darting grace of a tropical fish, he danced away from the cat’s frustrated strikes, his sword carving the air around it, but never cutting it, until the cat grew weak. At last it stared at the two men, panting, black lips curled back over yellow teeth.  

Kisame had to turn his whole head to look at Itachi. For, perhaps like a shark, he was incapable of moving his eyes much in their sockets. “Can you sedate it, Itachi?”

The cat’s pupils, black slashes on yellow disks, dilated to wide spheres as Itachi set the animal under a genjutsu. It was always a strange procedure with beasts. Genjutsu involved manipulating chakra flow to the brain, and in a brain that was not human, it was a coarse process. Itachi could not communicate complex images like he could with humans, so instead he instilled it with feelings of darkness and warmth. 

Kisame approached the sleeping tiger and drew the broadside of Samehada along its jugular. The sword’s scales rippled, and Itachi knew the cat was dead. Itachi revealed his kunai. 

“Could probably get some gold for the pelt, too,” Kisame said, slinging the purring Samehada to his back.

Probably they could. But Itachi was not Kakuzu, and he did not desire to carry a bloody tiger pelt around for a few extra yen. Itachi crouched over the carcass, and with careful incisions he removed its teeth. They clattered against each other in his leather pouch. Whatever some royal leech would do with them to cure his presumed impotency, Itachi did not know. 

“Someone’s coming,” Kisame warned him.

“Just merchants,” Itachi said. The rogues sprang into the trees. They heard the surprise of the men to find the freshly killed tiger. They’d feed the village! Get drunk! They invoked the gods for their luck. Kisame smiled devilishly but Itachi was unamused. Soon enough, the two rouge ninja were over the border of the Land of Rice.

Obtain the teeth, the scroll, the real or metaphorical scalp-- the object was the only variable. Then he brought them to a collection office. He gave the reward to Kakuzu and awaited further orders. The string of missions seemed to be the only constant in Itachi's life since the Uchiha massacre.

The sun yellowed and sank as they traveled. Juzo, his senior, was usually the one to suggest respite. But now that Juzo was dead, Itachi supposed this responsibility fell to him now. He slowed, halted, and sprang down from the tree to the clayish earth. A shaded wood surrounded them, and willow boughs trailed gently on a narrow, clear river with a sandy bank. The sinking sun painted dappled golden strokes on the surface of the water, and fish tail slapped from the waves. Kisame alighted after him. 

“What do you say, Itachi? Fancy a fish dinner? We’ll see who can catch the most.” Kisame’s gently rough voice was surprisingly only baritone for a man his size. As many fish as two elite ninja could catch? “What a wanton slaughter.” “I can eat a lot of fish,” Kisame said. “We’ll do first to catch five,” Itachi decided. “Fine.” Kisame strode to the bank. With a blur of signs and motion of his arm, a sphere of water rose, and a wriggling green bass shimmered inside. He released it from the water prison jutsu and the first thrashing fish tumbled to the earth, and he removed its gills with a stomp. Kisame raised his hand to snare his next victim. Itachi slid kunai between his knuckles like bear claws, three in his right, two in his left. He ignited his sharingan, and like an osprey he saw through the water like glass. He pinpointed the motion of five adult fish, observed the current, and noted the water’s angle of refraction. He jumped high, extended his arms, and let the kunai fly. Easily as wooden targets, each knife struck its living mark. “Impressive,” Kisame said with restrained mirth, dispelling a ball of water and depositing a fish on the bank. “But in my book, fish don’t count as caught when they’re pinned to the bottom of a creek.” There may have been a flicker of perturbance on Itachi’s face. But it must have been a trick of the light. Itachi was not annoyed.

Itachi shed his robe and with a few launching steps he pierced the chilled water in a shallow dive. The fish were weighted by the knives to the riverbed, their eyes wide and mouths open. He snatched the knives by the handles and kicked hard towards the surface. When Itachi breached, he looked to the bank to see Kisame perched on a tree root, one elbow on his knee, grinning widely. His five fish were lined up in size-order at his feet, each about the length of a sandal. “A bit too slow, unfortunately,” Kisame grinned. “I knew I lost the moment I had to dive in,” Itachi said, stepping drenched to the bank. Having to retrieve the fish was a technicality— losing gracefully was not a skill Itachi had to often practice. “No, Itachi. You lost the moment you humored a shark to a fishing match.“ Doubtful, Itachi thought. But he said nothing as he removed the knives and placed his five fish on the bank. “Would you go find some sticks to spit them on?” the victor asked with a gesture to the forest. Itachi did so. Upon returning, Kisame had gathered kindling and larger branches, and arranged them into a conical shape

 “Be a pal and light us up?” Itachi wove a sign and blew a thin jet of flame at the base of the cone. Which, aerating nicely, set the tiny pyre ablaze. “We both have our fields Itachi. You’re not terrible... for a leaf ninja.” Kisame said. The two rogues speared their ten fish in a radial pattern around the flames. Perhaps a bit too soon, Kisame selected a fish and sank his huge teeth into its head. A wretched, wet, splintery sound crunched across the flames as Kisame ate his catch skull, spine, organs and all. Maybe he was doing it to see if it would bother Itachi. Kisame grinned. Or maybe that was just his face. Either way the mist ninja’s huge triangular teeth made quick work of the food. Itachi bit into the side of his fish, now especially careful not to eat its needle thin ribs. Its flesh was moist, hot and salty, and he felt strength flowing back into his body. He allowed his spine to sink against the tree trunk he leaned against. He was cold and tired, and it felt good to have a hot meal around a fire… Even with company as reptilian as Kisame.

At that moment, a sudden jab of pain split behind Itachi‘s eyes and he coughed into his hand. He discreetly curled his fingers into a fist to conceal the blood on his palm.

“Eat a bone?” Itachi cleared his throat and swallowed the blood. “No.” Kisame grunted, his eyes flashing from his soaked partner to the icy stream. “Do you drink, Itachi?” 

“Not alone.”

“You might as well start the fun kind of sinning. It’ll warm you up.” Kisame tossed the greasy stick into the forest and reached for the next largest fish. As he bit a steaming, flaky hunk out of it, he reached for a waterskin on his body. He removed the cap, and passed it to the young man. “Kakuzu would not be pleased to hear what you spend your allowance on,”  Itachi said. “That stinge gave me his speech. He can try to punish me.”

  “Kakuzu has already killed two members of the Akatsuki.” Kisame laughed. “You’re kidding!” “Afraid not.” “Did Pain punish him?”

“No. Our leader has many killers, but only one bookkeeper.”

“Hm. Better hope we develop new talents then, eh?”

Itachi took a few swallows of the sharp but sweet rice wine and returned it to Kisame. Kisame sniffed the lip of the waterskin: he closed his eyes but made no remark. 

The fire flickered lower. Itachi had gathered a little pile of fish bones at his feet. Fish were pretty animals, not frivolous, with graceful spines and streamlined skulls. He counted three heads in his pile. He was comfortably full. Kisame had eaten seven of them, bones and all.

“I learned something today. I wasn’t sure you could use genjutsu on a tiger,” Kisame said. He picked his huge teeth with a shard of rib, then chewed on it as if it were a stem of wheat. He did this until it was pliable, and then swallowed it.

“Men and beasts are very different,” Itachi said.

“Are they?” It was a challenge rather than a simple reaction. Kisame’s contracted eyes studied him.

“Unquestionably.” Itachi held his gaze.

Kisame grunted but said nothing. Instead of glancing down in defeat, his hard eyes swept deliberately and coolly to the side. Thus, Kisame postponed a conclusion to their discussion, at least until he was certain he could win it.  The mist ninja sat with his hands clasped over his stomach. They rested by the fire until it elapsed into smoke and the spirited flames sobered into glowing black and red coals. 

“So Itachi, how does this work? Do we sleep on the ground? Take watches?” “In peaceful conditions, I don’t watch. But I do sleep in a tree for concealment,” Itachi said. “Leaf ninja,” Kisame muttered. “Sleeping in trees like a bunch of monkeys.“ In a flicker, Itachi had climbed the oak above them to its lowest fork. Kisame covered the ashes with a kick and leapt to the limb opposite him. They faced each other for a moment, chins down, listening in the silence for possible observers. Sensing no one, Kisame turned his back and fastened Samehada to the underside of the branch. The weave of his robe was tight and warm, and Itachi tipped his chin inside its high collar. His breath filled the cavity with warm air, and it was not uncomfortable. Crickets chirped. Neither of them said good night. 

Day 2----

Dawn corded its cold light through the pine needles and onto Itachi’s eyelids. As he parted their red curtains, he saw a young crow. It stared for a moment, curious at the oddly placed human, then shuffled its wings and darted off. Rising gently, Itachi stepped to the other side of the trunk to rouse his new partner.

Round fish eyes opened on his approach. “Did you know, sharks never fully sleep?”

Great.  

“Let’s get these teeth to the collection point,” Itachi said.

He led the way until the building became visible from the forest. As was often the case, the underground bounty office had its cover as a mortician’s practice. Morticians had plenty of space for storing bodies, and arriving there from the country with a corpse on one’s shoulder was considered only slightly rude. 

“Who goes in?” Kisame asked.

“I’ll go. You watch.”

Itachi entered the building: he tipped his chin under his collar until only his coal black eyes peered out. Itachi was not an immediately intimidating man. He was of average height, average build, perhaps even thin. There was nothing special about his coloration. But the representative at the counter knew the red-clouded robes, and rising from his collar, Itachi’s eyes gleamed garnet.

The collection man’s knuckles tensed a tendinous white as he stared at the approaching Akatsuki. Itachi halted, and hailed him as stipulated:

 “What rings the Dawn, and shall bring Man to his haven?”

“Our world glimpses Death’s yawn: the hoarse call of the raven.”

Good. Itachi placed his pouch with the teeth on the counter. The man inspected the smooth oranged teeth and accepted them. He set a case of cash on the counter and displayed it to the Uchiha. Itachi did not count the money: no contractor had been foolish enough to short change the organization since a recent incident involving Kakuzu.  

One million yen. Not bad for a glorified pet hunt. Now they just had to deliver the money to the Akatsuki’s ancient master of coin or one of his henchmen. The zombie pair were conducting a mission some forty kilometers away; they could meet them in just a few hours.

“I’ll carry that,” Kisame said when Itachi emerged with the large briefcase. Itachi gave it to him and they set off north. They traveled a quiet hour before Kisame spoke.

“I smell blood.”

Itachi had sensed nothing unusual. Kisame’s strengths were complementary to his indeed. With a gesture of his hand, Itachi instructed Kisame to lead. The shark-ninja’s sense of smell was better than his, but not at the level of a ninja hound’s, because in just another few long leaps, Kisame had grounded himself on a dirt cart path.

Hung upside down on a tree was a human body. The victim’s feet were tied together with a strip of cloth and jabbed through with a stake into the trunk. Itachi thought the man was less than thirty minutes dead. Blood dripped down from his death wound, down his sternum, his throat, to collect on the jut of his jaw and dye maroon swirls in the muddy water of the cart treds. 

“Huh,” Kisame surmised, wrinkling his wide nose. He looked at Itachi.

“This is the Akatsuki’s doing. One of us makes such displays,” Itachi said. 

Itachi cut down the corpse. He strode powerfully, urgently, along the path. Between the trees appeared a traditional inn with the peaked roof of mountain tribes, dark wood paneling, and pale stucco walls. An inn of the piquant sort, judging by the oiran fan and floral carvings on the upper balconies. A familiar black robe with red clouds lay discarded on a bench outside. “Do Akatsuki go to brothels?” Kisame asked. Itachi didn’t answer. On the ground outside the brothel was a circle drawn in blood. “He’s going to kill those women.” “So?”

Itachi rushed forward. 

At the instance of his arrival, an individual strode out of the building’s door. He was young, zealous, handsome, and walked with his smooth chest bared bared. His muscled arm was wrapped around the thin waist of a pale woman with long black hair. Mid sentence, he recognized Itachi. 

“Hey hey, Itachi! Wouldn’t think I’d find you at a place like this. Where’s your new partner?” Hidan greeted.

Itachi’s voice was low. “You paid these people for a service. Their deaths were not part of that.” Like a friendly dog Hidan smiled. A friendly dog, who just in case the friend was a foe, smiled to remind him he had teeth. “Well! I haven’t paid anyone yet, and I think Lord Jashin will appreciate their talent!”

The woman’s smile faltered. No sooner had she realized the danger, Hidan threw her against the wall and held her by the throat. He drew his pike. 

That damn Kakuzu. Maybe if he wasn’t squeezing Hidan’s purse, the cultist would not have extra incentive settle his debts with death. Or maybe Hidan would just kill anyone weaker than him regardless. Itachi’s patience for negotiation had elapsed. Flickering, he grabbed the girl and deposited her next to Kisame in the yard. “What am I supposed to do with this?” Kisame said, but Itachi had already flickered back to Hidan some ten meters away. Now Hidan’s teeth flashed impatiently when he spoke. “You’re annoyingly noble for a member of an evil organization, you know that?”

“Where is Kakuzu,” Itachi asked, though as customary for his questions, his voice lacked a submissive rise pitch at the end. The bothersomely rational waterfall ninja would surely restrain his partner from this idiocy if he were around.

“Think I need him, huh?” 

“Idiots require supervision.”

Shrieking, Hidan raised his scythe and sprang at Itachi. 

Sharingan! Hidan froze. Inside the fictional realm, Hidan was tied to a tree trunk. Itachi created a replica of the retractable pike he tried to use on the prostitute, and with its sharp point, Itachi punctured the man’s intestines. Drawing it out, Hidan flexed his fingers in convulsing pain and howled like a jackal. Itachi felt a presence in his realm he did not invite. A hulking black monster lumbered out from behind the trunk, humanoid in shape with flesh of black fire revealing a white skeleton. It had a skull like a goat and its glowing pink eyes regarded Itachi hungrily. Hidan’s trembling lips parted in rapture as he beheld it. With a bony talon the monster pressed Hidan on his sweating forehead. The brothel, the forest, the yard had returned. The genjutsu was broken. Itachi seized a reactionary few steps back. Hidan was not skilled enough to break out of that on his own. What was that skeletal monster? Did he just witness his god? “You,” Hidan said breathily. Trembling and weakened, he leant on his scythe as he stood. "You'll pay for that!" he swore, swinging the blade at Itachi's throat Itachi would have to fight Hidan without genjutsu. His ninjutsu wouldn’t kill him. And close quarters taijutsu was risky, since one graze could make that blood ritual of his troublesome. He would have to incapacitate Hidan. Chop off a limb. That was how he would win.

Hidan swung at Itachi with the graceless zeal of a chunin, and each time, his weapon only met the air. Itachi drew his tanto blade. Hidan smashed his scythe into the earth on another missed strike, which grounded him. Placing all of his strength in the blow, Itachi cleaved through Hidan’s tibia, crushed his fibula, and Hidan was gracelessly grounded, separated from the bottom half of his leg. Bleeding heavily, Hidan’s severed shin spun to a halt a few meters away. 

“FUCK!”

In the corner of his vision Itachi was aware of Kisame standing tense: he had been ready to act, but must have decided it unwise. Itachi paced forward, shortsword swinging, and when he swung it through the air, the blood leapt off in a fine spray to speckle a tree in red. The blade had cracked beyond repair: he had been reckless to cleave the two bones in Hidan’s shin in one strike. To the music of Hidan’s curses, Itachi began to wipe the soiled blade in the grass. He would have to bury the thing, better children did not find it.

The toothed crown of a plant, like a venus fly trap, emerged from the grass nearby. Zetsu’s head had materialized from the dirt and Itachi’s hands stilled in surprise.

“Hello, Zetsu,“ Itachi greeted the head.  

“Hello.“ Then, “They’re here, Pain,” the strange plant ninja said.

Pain appeared. Robe billowing, he stood between Hidan and Itachi. His presence was magnetic and every head turned to him. “What,” Pain growled, “is the meaning of this infighting?” “I was just... behind on my sacrifices...” Hidan breathed from the ground, and struggled to prop himself up. “When this prick insulted me, gutted me in a genjutsu, and then. Lobbed. Off. My. Fucking. Leg.” “Hidan. Killing civilians and leaving witnesses awards you with the bounty of the five nations. We can not afford this attention.”

“Sorry about that, sir,” Hidan muttered, looking diffusively at the ground.

Pain’s attention swiveled to the next unruly young adult. “Itachi, we are no heroes. Never compromise our goals by attacking our members.”

Itachi dipped his chin in an acknowledgement that was not quite submission. Pain strolled forward to the wooden building. The brothel’s matron, three prostitutes, and a few men stared out at the colorful flock of S ranked ninja from the porch and balcony. Pain extended his right arm. “What are you doing?” Itachi demanded. Pain unfurled his fingers. “Shinra Tensei.” The wooden house exploded in a rain of splinters and structure. Wooden beams and ceramic roof tiles hailed down around them. Itachi searched Pain’s expression for a reason. Instead, Pain’s ringed eyes fixated at the surviving girl who stood shivering next to Kisame. “Kisame,” Pain ordered. Massive Kisame took the girl, placed either hand on the side of her face, framing it in a gesture that seemed almost intimate. But a ligament in Kisame’s forearms twitched, and she was dead before her corpse hit the ground. 

Fire erupted from the uprooted gas pipes and ravenous flames quickly devoured the wooden house. The black beams stood like a skeleton among a roaring, moaning fire that devoured the wood and paper structure. The intense dry heat prickled against the moisture of Itachi’s scleras, but despite it, he could not blink. Pain rounded on Itachi. Backlit by the flames, he saw his own face reflected in the rippling fog-colored eyes that locked him.

 “Our enemies hunt us as we speak. Because of you, Itachi, too many saw too much. If I decide that anyone is disloyal to the Akatsuki, I will kill him.” Itachi stared into eyes more ancient, more evolved, and more knowing than his own. He learned then he was not free in his outlawry. Even he must tread the line between light and dark as closely as he dared. Should his steps toward the light be too obvious, he would find his own neck on the rope, and dead men can protect no one. 

—

Author’s Note:

暁 Akatsuki = Dawn

A step away from my usual work, but I recently fell in love with Naruto Shippuden. I have chapter two, Cannibals, about finished and will post it soon.

*Special thanks to myochiikurin for her hard work beta reading this chapter and the next!

I thought the life of Itachi and the others members settling into their lives in the Akatsuki was the most compelling and underexplored aspect in the Naruto universe, and thought I’d give filling the gap of this organization my try.

Feedback is greatly appreciated,

Celtic

Next Chapter on Tumblr: https://celticfeather.tumblr.com/post/188589156066/akatsuki-fic-campfires-ch-2-cannibals

(Follow on FF or Ao3:

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13409132/1/Campfires

https://archiveofourown.org/works/21019778/chapters/49992863  )

[artificialqueens]

Beach (Branjie) - Peridot

A/N: a very very angsty ‘slightly too long to be a drabble’ kind of drabble that’s essentially a bunch of beach metaphors that I started writing at the actual beach. It’s a little stream of consciousness and a little rushed, so sorry if it’s not perfect. Let me know what you think either here or on my new sideblog @artificialperidot (because I’m a dumbass and locked myself out of my old one). Hope you enjoy!

Jose used to love the beach.

They would go to the beach together every time they were in Florida, back at Jose’s family home. Jose liked showing Brock little parts of where he grew up, spilling his jar of memories to share with the person who was so special to him.

He would hold Brock’s hand and walk along the shore as he recited his favourite stories, tales from his childhood that made him feel like a little kid again, Brock’s goofy smile setting his heart alight. He loved nothing more than to walk beside him on the beach, showing everyone that Brock was his, and that he loved him and no one else. Even when Brock’s glance would leave his eyes and land on someone else, just for a second, he wouldn’t change a thing. Sure, it hurt a little, but Jose didn’t care. He loved him too much.

They would walk along the sand, soft and warm beneath their bare feet, and waves would lap over their skin, tethering them to reality and reminding them that they were alive.

He felt alive when he was with Brock. All it took was for Brock to be near him and Jose would forget about every worry in the back of his mind.

It’s not that he didn’t feel alive now. It’s that he felt too alive.

Each breath and heartbeat and blink felt too much, too heavy, like a sledgehammer to his already fragile heart.

He couldn’t remember a time when his heart wasn’t in his throat. He couldn’t remember a time when there was no buzz in his ears. He couldn’t remember a time when life was full of sunshine and beaches and Brock.

He could only remember the way it ended.

This isn’t going to work.

I can’t keep doing this.

I don’t love you anymore.

The last one. That one stung the most.

The words played on a loop inside his head for months afterwards, his thoughts consumed by nothing but Brock’s voice, drowning out any rational thought that suggested it was for the best.

And, Jose wished he could say he hated him.

But he couldn’t.

Brock was the sea. Cool. Refreshing. Calm. The perfect icy cold when everything was too hot, when the days felt too long and Jose needed somewhere to feel safe. Leaving the taste of salt and sweat and passion on Jose’s lips. The water sparkling like his sea green eyes, eyes that drew him in and made him never want to look away. Bubbling white foam providing a glimpse of hope, swirling on its surface and reassuring Jose that it would all be okay. Jose could float and relax and feel weightless with him.

But, Brock was the sea. Icy cold. Black. Dangerous. Full of flaws, like jellyfish that sting or piranhas that bite or long glances at other men that make Jose’s heart drop. The sting of saltwater like the tears in his eyes. The burn of salt at the back of his nose and throat each time he said his name. Each crashing wave going over Jose’s head, reminding him of how it all came crashing down before his eyes.

Jose knew he was in too deep. He needed Brock too much. He was so easily submerged by thoughts of him, him, him.

But on stormy days, Jose knew that the relationship was in danger. He felt himself being pulled under, unable to breathe and no way to stop himself from spiralling down.

The breakup should’ve been a breath of fresh air. But it only pulled Jose under even deeper.

He was drowning.

But, that didn’t mean that Jose didn’t like the sea. It didn’t mean that he didn’t love Brock.

Brock used to love the beach, too.

Whilst it was a far cry from his familiar Canadian landscape, there was something about the seaside that made him feel at ease. He hadn’t gone much as a kid, so it was Jose that truly introduced him to it. Brock loved nothing more than interlocking his fingers with Jose’s and letting him drag him along the shore, hearing his rough voice recite tales of his childhood, creating his own memories by listening to his.

The feeling of the sun beating down on his shoulders and the breeze on his skin and his hand holding Jose’s was something that Brock wanted to feel forever. It felt like he was weightless. It felt like he was flying. But most of all, it felt freeing.

Brock wished that he had always felt so free. But, like all good things in life, it didn’t last.

Being with Jose felt like being trapped.

That’s not to say that he didn’t love Jose. He did. He adored him. Jose was his first boyfriend, the first person to love him back, the first person he’d committed himself to.

And that’s where the problem lay. The commitment.

As much as he loved and needed Jose, he couldn’t be loyal. He couldn’t stop himself from catching someone’s eye, even though he loved Jose more than anything in the world. The guilt he felt when he found another person attractive could have easily broken him, and the look on Jose’s face when he noticed was enough for him to crumble like chalk.

He felt like an asshole. As much as Jose would try and deny it, he could see how much he was hurting him. And, he had every right to be hurt. Brock would tell him every day how much he meant to him, how he was beautiful, wonderful, perfect - but, thanks to him, Brock knew that he would never believe him.

The trust was well and truly broken.

And that’s why Brock ended things.

He felt like he couldn’t be free to look at whoever he wanted. He wanted to go and explore new horizons without feeling tied down.

And, more than anything, he didn’t want to hurt Jose anymore.

He had really tried to end it on good terms. Really tried.

This isn’t going to work out the way we want it to.

I can’t keep doing this to you.

He’d tried to string words together to make Jose understand, but he was so afraid of hurting him that he couldn’t do it. With every sentence came Jose’s own, explaining that he loved him no matter what and that it was all okay and that they could fix it. That it wasn’t over.

Brock knew Jose was in too deep. He was blinded. He couldn’t see that Brock wasn’t good enough for him, that he deserved the world and that Brock could only give him heartbreak after heartbreak after heartbreak.

And he ended it the only way he thought would make Jose stop fighting.

I don’t love you anymore.

It was a lie. It was the biggest lie he had ever told. The words tasted of bitter lemon on his tongue. The words played on repeat in his head like a curse. The words felt like a stab to the chest. He felt like a monster.

He’d tried to not hurt Jose. But he couldn’t have hurt him more if he tried.

Jose was the sand. Soft and warm like his hand holding Brock’s. Golden like his skin. Scattered with pebbles and shells, treasures of his personality that Brock loved more than anything, the things that made him Jose. He could bury him so easily, surrounding him with nothing but warmth and laughter and love.

Real love. A love that Brock couldn’t reciprocate.

Jose was the sand. Too hot, burning Brock’s feet. Gritty and sharp against Brock’s skin and sticking to him like glue, making him feel irritated and trapped and guilty whenever another guy crossed his mind. And yet, so easily crushed under Brock’s feet. So easily kicked aside, so easily swept away by the sea and replaced.

The sand and the sea are insoluble.

Jose’s commitment and Brock’s openness didn’t mix.

They were the sun. Warm. Strong. Burning bright. They shone together. The fans loved them, and they loved each other.

It should have worked.

But it didn’t.

They were the sand and the sea. They were too different.

They were the sun. They were on fire. They were burning.

And before they knew it hey were burnt out, and all there was left was smoke and ashes and broken promises.

Because everything good must come to an end.

Everything is fine until it burns.

[ericahitshawaii]

Mantas and dolphins and whales, oh my!

Today I start my adventure on the big island!  The Big Island is probably most known for its active volcanoes and the recent eruption of Mount Kiluaea in 2018.  Because of the tectonic plates on earth, the Hawaiian island are actually moving Northwest over over a “hot spot” of volcanic activity.  Over 5 million years ago this hot spot formed the oldest of the Hawaiian islands, Kauai (at the north of the chain).  As the islands shift north, the volcanic activity slows and eventually stops and the surface begins to erode, which is why Kauai is smaller than the southern most island.  The Big Island, which is the most “southernly” island, is the youngest (One million years old) and the most volcanically active, due to its proximity to the hot spot.  Currently, another Hawaiian island is formed under the Pacific called Loini and if any of us live to be 10,000, we might be able to visit it.

I flew into Kona on Wednesday evening.  I am in love with the Kona airport.  If I thought the Kahului airport was “open air” then this airport is basically outside.  It is completely open air, with some roofage.  So amazing.

Kona Airport (KOA)

I very excitingly went to pick up my rental car, so no more bus adventures for me.  I forgot how luxurioius and freeing it is have a car.  I never did it in Australia because I was scared t drive on the wrong side, but not a problem here.  It’s also such a life upgrade to have a car that DOES NOT have a tape player.  Modern technology is awesome.  Thanks Kia Rio!

Ok, anyway, I checked into my hostel, aptly names “My Hawaii Hostel.”  If I thought the last one was halfway decent, then I will need to severely downgrade it compared to this one.  This hostel had furniture other than a bed, decorations on the walls, a rug and multiple pillows and blankets.  I know that sounds like a given in a hotel room, but not in a hostel.  Absolutely dreamy!  The hostel itself is absolutely charming with a little garden and an open aiir living room and lots of outdoor seating, just a few minutes walk from the beach.  I am living my best Hawaiian life, for real this time!

My Hawaii Hostel, Ali’i Road, Kona

Patio area outside my room.

My room.

Thursday morning I headed off for the next phase of the ocean part of my trip.  I signed up for a morning “Ocean encounters” tour and a Night “Manta Ray Swim” trip.  

Note: You are going to be disappointed again by the lack of photos, because I bought an underwater disposable camera for the trip, but some of you may remember, that you have to get those photos developed.  (I actually am unsure of how I’m going to do that in this modern age, but that is a future me problem.  Anyway, the tour company promises to post some photos in the next few days, so there will be another update post once I have those.  But keep reading, it still is exciting and there is a sweet video I took that you should see!)

The morning snorkeling tour started out with swimming with spinner dolphins!! So, wild dolphins are the best.  They are nocturnal, so we were visitng them during their daytime nap time.  Hilariously, while they are sleeping they still swim on the bottom in a big pack.  I have no idea how they do this.  How fascinating.  Anyway a few of them woke up and swam up ot the surface to say hi.  When we got into the water they headed down towards the bottom again.  It was amazing to snorkel right above big pods of dolphins.  There must have been at least 20 in some of the bigger pods and there were several pods around us.  Just as a few more of them were waking up and coming to the surface, our captain said we had to go.  I’ll be honest, I was pissed.  I had dreams of high-fiving a dolphin and Captain Taylor was ruining my dream.  But I’m glad he did,because what happened next was SOOO worth it!

Next we headed out to a site where whales had recently been spotted.  When we arrived, we discovered there were several large whales around and a BABY WHALE.  This whale was only about a month old and still absolutely gigantic.  The baby whale was splashing around in the water very close to us.  Just like a human toddler, it seemed to be having a blast splashing aorund, trying to breach (jump out of the water) and stick its head up.  It was still really floppy and uncoordinated in the water, which was absolutely adorable.  It was so funny to see a whale just playing around.  I don’t know how it had so much energy to do all that.

Eventually we saw the mam whale  pop up around the whale, apparently keeping her eye on it and maybe helping from below with its practice breaches.  While we were distracted by the baby whale someone yelled out that there was another whale further off that was breaching.  (Whales often will breach several time in a row, because they are communicating with other whales and trying to get their attention.)  I looked over just in time to see a huge whale breach completely out of the water.  It was one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen.  It was like it was happening in slow motion. It’s entire body was up in the air and it seemed like it just hung there until it crashed back into the ocean with a huge splash.  Just like on Animal Planet!  I thought I had really seen it all until we looked back over at the playing baby whale and realized Mama had surfaced on our side.

All of s sudden I see her huge humpback surface like it is facing us.  It is coming right for our boat.  Right in fron of us, she lifts her tail and dives right under the boat.  I was both incredible and a little scary!  Seeing her SO CLOSE to us, it is astonishing how huge they are.  Just her back was probably as tall as the deck of the boat and she was easily twice as long.  It was shocking to see her giant tail come out of the water right in front of us.  Despite my fear that she miht capsize the boat, the crew said that they are insanely spatially aware and can get within inches of a boat and not hit it.  They have sonar like bats.  When I say this was a bucket list activity, I would almost say this was better than what I imagined being on my bucket list.  Even the crew was freaking out and taking video and photos.  They said that never happens. I will remember that moment for as long as I live.  I do have a video of the encounter.  Honestly, it doesn’t do it justice, but you can kind of see what I’m talking about.  Watch here: 

https://photos.app.goo.gl/QTA9JieqQdEWPfag6

Now as if that wasn’t enough, we went to a third spot to find Manta Rays.   We made a quick pit stop at an amazing place along the coast known as the Grotto.  It’s the outlet to the sea for a large series of lava tubes that run miles underneath the island.  The waters were the most incredible aqua color and crystal clear.

The Grotto

To add to the incredible day, we ran into two huge manta rays (In case you are worried they are not sting rays...who killed the crocodile hunter.  They are harmless plankton eaters.  One of our guides said we found his favorite manta named Amanda Ray.  She is the friendliest and has one bent fin.  Both mantas were about 10 feet long.  They can actually grow to have a to 15 foot wingspan.  They are beautiful to watch.  We hoppped in the water and snorkeled with them.  They looked like they were flying on the bottom of the ocean, completely gracefully.  This was preview for that evening.

After the snorkel adventure I decided to head to the beach.  I’m not really a beach person, but figured I should do it once.  I went to what they call a dark gray sand beach, which is half white sand and half black volcanic sand.  How do gray and black sand beaches form?  Well, when the hot lava hits the cool water it basically explodes and shatters like glass, spewing small particles of lava rock, which eventually breakdown into small pebbles and sand like particles.  The beach was very rough, but beautiful.  Its incredible to see the lava rock solidify in the form it was when it flowed into the ocean.  Very surreal.

Lava rocks at Kahalu’u Beach

After lunch and beach chill, I headed back to the marina for the night manta swim.  For this one, they take you out onto big boogie board looking things with lights.  Here’s a photo I did not take, that demonstrates this:

The lights on the bottom of the board attract plankton, which then attracts other fish and manta rays.  This was both an awesome and miserable experience.  The weather up to this point had been absolutely perfect.  *0m degrees and sunny everyday.  However, storms had come in that night and it was cold and raining.  The water was freezing, but the experience was still pretty great.  One of the coolest things that I didn't expect was that the lights also drew in tones of fish.  There were a bunch of fish that looked kind of like big sardines that swarmed around us in big schools, it was really interesting to be that close to so many fish.  The highlight of the trip was that a big manta swam right next to me and did a backflip to eat the plankton right under the board.  They have awesome white bellies and gills and huge gaping mouths.  Its really otherworldly.

After the manta show we headed back to the boat for the long and extremely rocky trip back to the marina.  I generally have a pretty good stomach for boat rides, but this was a rough one.  I had taken Dramamine earlier, just in case, and still feeling like I might lose my lunch.  It was close to a repeat of the Great Barrier Reef puke episode but disaster was avoided, thank goodness!

All in all, a dream of a day.  I am officially hooked on snorkeling and boating, in general.  Who knew I’d be such a water baby.  I spent most of my life avoiding getting my hair wet.  

Next stop:  Farm tour day in Southern Kona.

[sulevinblade]

(Talesfromthefade) things you said when you were drunk, for the DWC?

OH MY GOD this was a little idea that got away from me in a big big way but I’m still pretty happy with it. For this and for “cafune - the act of running your fingers through the hair of someone you love,” from @contreparry! For @dadrunkwriting!!

Alistair/Leohta Aeducan, T for language, dumb suggestive jokes, and alcohol use, 4k+ words (awaaaay from me, I wish I had time to edit it but uh I spent the entire time writing it instead). 

On the cusp of the party’s visit to Orzammar, Alistair learns what kind of drunk Leohta can be, and shares a little lesson of his own. Light angst, serious fluff.

He finds her standing on the rocky beach, well away from the dim glow provided by the Spoiled Princess’s small windows. It takes a moment for Alistair’s eyes to adjust to the complete dark–the night watch Templar doused all the torches at the dock, as clear an indication as anything that no one else would cross Lake Calenhad tonight–but even if he’d had to follow her blind he could’ve found her by the sound.

Bloop.

Normally finding Leohta by sound means the clank or grind of armour, the grunts or barks of Leon, or even her rare laughter at something Zevran said (it was always Zevran making her laugh), but tonight the sound is completely unfamiliar. It’s still enough to guide him, though.

Bloop.

Last he’d seen her, she was swapping some of the coin they’d made selling things to the Templar quartermaster for three large bottles of deep pink liquid. It seemed a bit of a racket to Alistair, that they should collect the mages’ items as they cleared the Tower only to sell them to the Templars who would then in turn sell them back to the Mages, but surely if that wasn’t how the economy of the Circle usually worked, Wynne would’ve said something. That was Alistair’s hope, anyway, as he’d watched Leohta count the coins before they left, then again at the tavern’s bar. She’d tossed the bag back to him before collecting the bottles and heading outside, and he in turn had left it with Zevran.

Bloop.

“You have known our illustrious leader the longest among any of us. Has this always been a habit of hers?” Alistair squinted across the table, trying to determine Zevran’s game, but succeeded only in giving up his own. “You think I see this as a weakness I can exploit, but I would think even you would see that if I were going to do so, I would have done it by now and certainly would not draw attention to my plans by involving you.” His eyes only narrowed further–how does Zevran make talking down to him still seem so seductive?–but Alistair did sit back in his chair.

“I haven’t known her all that long, really, but I don’t think so. Why d'you ask?”

“My Antiva makes the finest wines in Thedas, so it is not uncommon to see those there who overindulge, but there are many types. Leohta, she is young and exploring her limits, yes, but she is also trying to drown things she does not want to feel. Her limits are low and the things she seeks to kill are very large. It is a dangerous combination.”

Alistair glanced again toward the door. Of course she hadn’t come back inside, that’d be too much to ask for, but what was he supposed to do?

“If it is too much for you, I will go after her, but she should not be alone.” Both of their chairs scraped back at the same time but Alistair was the first to stand, something that for some reason brought a sad smile to Zevran’s face. Alistair could only look at it for a moment before looking away.  "I know you do not think much of me, Alistair, and while that is entirely your loss, I do know that one thing we have in common is how much we care for her. Go see to her, my friend, before her sorrows are not all she drowns. It is probably for the best; I am not much of a swimmer myself.“

Bloop.

So now here he is, approaching carefully, pretending to be taking in the constellations while Leohta hurls rocks at the water like she’s trying to knock the waves down before they can reach the shore. The night is perfectly clear; Kinloch Hold is merely a dark space in the sky where the stars are missing, but everything else is black sky and white twinkles. He clears his throat in case she somehow hasn’t noticed since he doesn’t fancy getting one of those stones thrown at him, but she only pauses for a moment before bending to search the area around her feet for another suitable candidate. One bottle is already empty, stuffed mouth down among the pebbles and into the sand underneath them, and as Alistair finishes closing the distance Leohta gives up her search and instead tips to land on her backside, legs out in front of her and a second bottle in her hand. He knows they’re not small but her stature makes them seem even larger; it makes the sight of her lifting one to her lips almost comical but the effect is spoiled by how long it stays there. Maker’s breath, Zevran was right when he talked about drowning.

"You planning on coming up for air any time soon?”

There’s a pop as she breaks the vacuum she’s created, then a dry laugh. She still isn’t looking at him. It makes his chest hurt, how badly he wants her to turn her head. “Breathe through your nose and you can use your mouth for whatever you want.”

“You’re spending too much time with Zevran, saying things like that.” Sighing, Alistair drops down crosslegged at her side and extends a hand. “What are you even drinking? I’ve never seen anything that color in a tavern before.”

“One of the Templars told me about it. I guess–” there’s a pause and she bunches up her eyebrows, apparently trying to put the pieces back together, “I guess the mother started making it as a tribute to her daughter and now of course it’s all very sad but the owner still makes it as a specialty. Sweet mead made with roses.” She passes over the open bottle, not bothering to wipe the top, and the expression on her face, like she’s sharing a secret, distracts him so much he can’t be bothered either. She wasn’t kidding when she said it was sweet but the roses are strong too, floral and delicate. He passes the bottle back after just one mouthful.

“I’ve never had a mead like that before. It’s very… different.” Leohta seems to accept that answer, nodding before lifting the bottle to her lips again.

“There’s nothing like this in Orzammar. Not even in the palace. Not even to make it. No honey, no roses, and when there is if you said you wanted to make something like this with it, you’d be laughed out of the kitchen.” She holds the bottle in front of her contemplatively, swishing the contents back and forth gently and tilting her head in time with the motion. Alistair’d almost think it was a contented sort of gesture but then she sighs and drops her head back, hair falling over her shoulders as she lifts the bottle skyward. “Nothing like that, either. No stars, no sky. Some of the caverns are so high the ceilings are invisible, but you still know they’re up there.” Slowly, she lowers the bottle but keeps her gaze fixed upward.

“Do you miss that?” It’s not something he’s given a lot of thought to but it’s hard to imagine. Even within the walls of the Chantry there were windows. The sky was always there, or not-there maybe, when compared to a ceiling of stone. Trying to imagine life without it or everything it held–the sun, the moons, the clouds and stars and birds–was virtually impossible, but here was Leohta not just imagining the opposite but living it.

“Dunno. I still don’t understand all this. What keeps it up there?” Her hand waves up at the stars but only briefly; even sitting down she’s unsteady without both hands to support her. “With the stone, you know that even if you can’t see the ceiling, it’s still held there by the stone. Nothing floats, nothing rises or sets.” Watching her profile, he can see the way it hardens as her train of thought jumps the track. “Nothing changes.”

He shifts a little, the pebbles grinding softly underneath him as he leans to try to catch her eye. “You changed.”

This time when she looks over at him, it gives him a chill. The stone she’s been so contemplative about has found a home in her eyes, the set of her mouth. They seem cold and stiff and almost lifeless, soft evening blue turned to lapis lazuli. Still beautiful but hard. “I left, and not by choice. You wouldn’t know how much I’ve changed, Alistair. You have no idea what I was like before we met.”

“I suppose not, but I do know you’ve changed in the time I’ve known you.” He keeps his voice softer now, speaking carefully to avoid that stony shift becoming somehow permanent. He hasn’t seen her look like that since before Ostagar, and to lose all the little ways she’s softened since then would be the greatest waste. “Do you miss that? Or her, I guess. Do you miss who you were before?”

Her laugh is a single humorless sound that moves her entire body, shaking her shoulders and flexing her stomach. “What does that matter? She’s dead. Worse than dead.” There’s venom in her voice but Alistair doesn’t flinch since for once he’s certain it’s not directed at him. He watches as Leohta stands, a wobbly process that involves repeated planting of hands and feet before she can push herself vertical. There’s a powerful temptation to offer her help but the set of her jaw makes him stay his hand, even if whatever effect she might be going for is already ruined by her own unsteadiness. “Nobody mourned her, nobody misses her, but it doesn’t change the fact that she’s dead. Bhelen killed her as sure as he killed Trian. The prince is dead, the princess is dead. Princess Aeducan is dead.” Her voice is raising, getting louder and more raw the longer she speaks, until finally she’s yelling out at the water. “Princess Leohta Aeducan, second born and best beloved daughter of House Aeducan, is dead!” She punctuates the last word by throwing the empty bottle into the water but it’s a bad throw, short and shallow. The bottle makes only a small splash then floats, reflecting the moonlight as it bobs its way back toward the shore.

Alistair rises, brushing at the back of his breeches, and makes his way up to stand beside her. He’s well within punching range, possibly a dangerous gamble, but if the way she’s carrying herself is any indication, it wouldn’t hurt very much right now. Plus, if she punched him, at least it’d prove she was feeling something. “I’d mourn her but like you said, I never did get to meet her. I’ve met Warden Aeducan, though, and I think she’s pretty great. Accomplished a lot, too.”

She’s bent back down and is sorting through the stones at her feet, tucking some in the bend of her other arm. Standing back up is a careful process but she’s shaking her head the entire time. “They’re not gonna think so.” Her voice is normal again but her profile is still stony.

Bloop.

Was this was he was like heading into Redcliffe? Of course, he hadn’t gotten drunk on sickly sweet mead to deal with it, but he’d had his turn as the prodigal royal-but-not-really. The main difference was he never wanted it, but she spoke so little of her life before the Grey Wardens. Was the crown of Orzammar what she’d really wanted? Not that it really mattered now. “Seems to me they had their chance to appreciate you and they blew it.”

“Oh, no. That’s the thing. Up until the end, they loved Princess Aeducan. That was the whole problem. She was too well-loved. Luckily, I’m not.” Leohta stares out at the ripples from her last throw but the fight’s going out of her. It ought to be a comfort, less risk of being punched, but instead it just hurts more. He curls his hands into fists at his sides to keep from reaching out, swallows the words that’d tell her just how deeply loved she is and not only by him, as much as he might wish it were so.

“We could go back to Denerim without going to Orzammar.” Aaaaaaaalistair, what’re you doooooooing? He ignores the voice in the back of his head, prepared to make an argument for mounting their assault without the help of the dwarves, but Leohta shakes her head. She’s drunk and she’s still got better sense than you.

“Just because I don’t want to go back doesn’t mean we don’t have to. Being a Grey Warden isn’t supposed to be fun, hasn’t been so far, why start now?” She seems to consider the matter closed as she turns her attention back to the rocks she’s holding, sorting through them as though looking for a particular one. They start to slip away and clack into the pebbles below and with a frustrated sigh she picks one, letting the remainder drop. “This is supposed to be, though. How the fuck do you do this?” Another windup, another bloop.

“Wait. What are you trying to do?”

“Make it…” She shakes her head, the word apparently lost, and instead makes a bouncing motion with her hand.

“You’re trying to skip stones… by heaving them at the surface of the water with all your might?” And there’s the punch he was waiting for, exactly as painless as expected. It’s not even hard enough to stop him laughing.

“I saw you and Zevran do it in Redcliffe before we left and it seemed to calm you down so I thought I’d try. You made it look easy, but if you’re just gonna laugh then forg–”

Alistair intercepts her before she can start to walk away. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. It’s just that I never would have guessed that’s what you were trying to do. I thought you were mad at the lake or something.” She’s looking up at him, wary, so he holds his hands up in innocence. “If you still want to try, I can show you.”

“No more laughing?”

“No more laughing. Warden’s honor.” When Leohta seems satisfied with his intentions, Alistair finally looks away from her, crouching down. “The first thing you need is the right kind of rock. It needs to be pretty flat and you want a triangle shape if you can find one, but flat will do for now.”

She’s crouching as well. “I thought it would be better with a round rock, like a ball.” She’s quiet, almost chastized, and Alistair has to duck his head and cough into his fist to hide the grin it conjures.

“No, that’ll break through the water and sink. A flat rock will bounce better. Something like these.” He shows her the three he’s found, all rounder still than he’d like but they should do the trick. She holds up a couple of her own and really, they’re no better, but they’re only for learning. “Yes, those will do. Now.” Alistair drops to his knees and crooks his fingers around one of the stones. “You have to hold it like this, because the important part is that you get it to spin. That’s what makes it skip.”

Leohta’s squinting at his hand, then she tries it out herself. Her hands are smaller so she can’t quite circle it the way he does, but Alistair hopes it’ll work out. “Like this?”

“Just like that. Now, the other trick is not to throw it up but to flick it. You want it to stay flat so you have to kind of–” He turns his arm out at the elbow and flicks the rock out onto the water. Four hops, not his best work but not bad.

When he looks back at Leohta, though, she’s entranced. She watches the ripples so long he has to clear his throat to get her attention back, but this time every trace of the stone is gone from her face. She looks eager, determined, but also a little embarrassed. Surprised to have been caught, probably, but it’s a charming expression nonetheless. She turns to face the water again, weighing the rock in her hand, then moves her arm and throws.

It splashes and sinks just like all her other attempts. Leohta curses softly and starts to turn away but Alistair catches her wrist.

“Hey, no way. You’re not giving up after one attempt. C'mon. We’ve got two more rocks, so two more tries, then I guess I can let you give up.” He starts to move before she can start to argue.

“It’s not giving up, Alistair, it’s accepting the inedible. Inedibibble. Ined… remind me to compliment the tavernkeeper tomorrow. His stuff is good.” Her voice gradually gets softer, a delayed reaction to where Alistair has taken up a position just behind her. It’s extremely convenient for him: she can’t see how his face is burning up from the presumptuousness of being so close to her, but it’s also the best position to show her how to move her arm. He wraps his hand around hers and lifts her arm into position.

“From here, you have to flick your hand out. Try to imagine the rock spinning out from the inside of your thumb and taking all that energy with it. The harder you can flick it, the more it’ll bounce and the more hops you’ll–all right, that’s it, you and Zevran are officially being separated because that’s not even dirty and now you’ve made it dirty. I hope you’re happy.” The woman in front of him is struggling to contain her laughter, he can tell, and as much as he wants to keep her focus on him, it’s hard to be genuinely upset. She doesn’t laugh nearly enough and especially not around him. The fact that whatever is so funny is lost on him is a far distant concern.

Alistair waits for her to compose herself then takes a moment to compose himself in turn when she settles back into a proper posture that puts her in contact with him from shoulder to hip. She’s nearly as tall as he is when he’s on his knees like this, a fact he’s thought about many times but never quite in this situation. Leohta gives herself a little shake, tossing her hair in his face as she does. He tries to blow it out of the way but there’s just too much. All right then, one thing at a time.

“Now. Just remember, angle your hand back and then flick. That word is ruined for me now, I think. You’ve ruined flicking.” In front of him Leohta snorts and Alistair make a private vow to forbid Zevran from using that word. He wants it to be their joke even if he doesn’t understand it. “Do you think you can manage?”

“To flick? I’ve done all right for the last few years anyway.” She giggles and clears her throat. “All right. Angle my hand back,” and her hand is moving inside of his so he loosens his grip, “then forward and flick!”

Alistair peers over her shoulder and sure enough. Blip, blip. One hop, but it’s one more than she’d managed before. He puts his hands on her shoulders and squeezes. “There you go! Well done, Warden Aeducan.” She lifts one hand to pat his but he can tell she’s still looking at the ripples.

After a moment, he releases her shoulders and, feeling a little bolder by the fact that she hasn’t elbowed him away yet, reaches forward to comb his fingers through her hair. It’s a practical gesture–even as he’s speaking, her hair is getting in his mouth–but hardly exclusively practical. Her hair is thick and her scalp surprisingly warm underneath it. In front of him she’s gone very still; he thinks she might even be holding her breath but then again, so is he. He focuses on his own hands until he’s gathered her hair at the back of her neck, but then the tension in it changes and oh.

Alistair looks up and she’s right there, her head turned to look at him. Maker’s breath but she’s close, her mouth gently open and her eyes searching his face. Her breath smells like honey and roses and his hand is still in her hair, it’d be so easy and it might be perfect but she’s been drinking and that’s not right. Or might it be OK, with her looking at him like that? The motion of her lips is so mesmerizing that it takes him a moment to realize she’s speaking to him.

“Alistair.” And like that, the moment is over, or at least set aside. “Would you do that again?”

“Of course.” She could ask him to fetch the moons from the sky right now and he’d say yes, but… “Wait, do what?” He didn’t do anything other than have a whole lot of thoughts in a very short span of time.

“Touch my hair. That was nice.” She’s leaning more of her weight against him now and it’s nice but also just starting to make him concerned. Still, he already said yes, so Alistair releases her hair from where he’s holding it and threads his fingers through it again, starting at her temple, mindful of and parallel to the little braid she’s so meticulous about. As he does it, her eyes drift closed but her face is relaxed. It’s not quite a smile but he’ll take it. “Again,” she murmurs as his hand comes to rest on the back of her neck.

Alistair laughs softly but he complies with her request, stroking his fingers through her hair again. And again, and once more, until she leans forward completely and drops her head onto his shoulder. Her breath is warm on his neck as he gives her one last stroke, then stops to reach out away from her. She grumbles softly in protest but he hushes her. “I’m just getting your other bottle. It’s bought and paid for, no sense leaving it here.”

“Why, where’re we going?”

“I don’t know yet about myself but you are doing to bed. Sleeping standing up is only good for horses and probably Sten, and sleeping on your knees is good for no one. Now, come on, up you get.” He hooks the hand holding the unopened bottle of rhodomel under Leohta’s knees, his other arm coming up behind her shoulders. She grumbles again as he starts to stand and he pauses before beginning to walk.

“You’re carrying me like a princess.” The humor in her voice warms him but now he feels a little more confident about deflecting it.

“I’m a Warden carrying another Warden like a Warden. No princesses here. Well, except for the tavern but I’m certainly not trying to pick that up. I could throw you over my shoulder if you wanted, but you have to promise not to throw up on my back.”

“No promises.” She slumps against his shoulder as he starts to walk. It’s only a few steps from the beach to the door but he takes his time. Who knows what Orzammar will do to her, or what she might do to Orzammar? The answer is liable to be complicated but this, for as unexpected as it is, feels strangely simple. She might not even remember it in the morning, but it’s not a feeling Alistair’s going to forget any time soon. “Alistair.”

“I don’t have a free hand to pet you, but if you can stay awake until we get inside, maybe I’ll give you scritches once I get you upstairs.” He’s trying to figure out how he’s going to open the door when she shakes her head and answers.

“Thank you for coming out tonight. I’m sorry I’m–”

“None of that now. You have nothing to be sorry for, and if anything I should say thank you for having me.” Alistair manages to hook the latch with his pinkie then wedge his foot into the gap, kicking the door open as he maneuvers her inside. “You may not have found it so, but I think being a Warden can be a little bit fun, if you’re with the right person. Or people,” he continues, scrambling to cover for himself while trying to ease the door’s closing with his foot. Once he’s got both feet back on the ground, he looks down at the woman in his arms. Fast asleep, looking as young as he’s ever seen her and more peaceful than she has possibly the entire time he’s known her. The inn’s main room is empty, the fire doused, and he’s almost loathe to speak again and interrupt the silence, but he does.

“Or person. Just the right person.”

[whereintheworldisleahjane]

The island grows myths like grass on its hills. They swish and whisper around you. Each one spurs you further into the island’s coves and up its cliffs. Here is a new story, they murmur. Here is where the land is fertile for your own myths.

--

It is impossible to visit and not plant new ones. If you are not careful their whispering will lead you deeper until you become lost in story. Everyone on the mainland warns you of this. “Be careful” they say, “or you may never come back.” And on the island is a little cemetery where memories of kings lay next to vagabonds.On its edges new tombstones dot the landscape. Here was someone’s third grade teacher. Here was the neighbor you grew up with. All disappeared in the island’s alluring mist.

The man that takes you out there is stoic. He is used to depositing people who never return. Time passes. The island grows more myths. “You learn not to get too connected to the visitors,” he says.

He is one of the few that came back. “Nine years later,” the mainlanders say. “With a  baby  girl swaddled in his arms.” The girl sits next to him to him now, her face turned to the wind. She leans over the boat as it skims the water and runs her fingers through the marbled foam. Her dog sits next to her, shaking its floppy ears and barking excitedly at the waves. It races past you all when you dock, too excited to chase the sheep and gnaw on the leaves of its favorite fern.

When you get there, you hike to the top of a hill and listen to the wind. You listen long and hard, but it doesn’t sound like anything to you. And you start to wonder why the mainlanders speak in such hushed tones, why they shutter their windows when the wind rolls off the island.

The girl stays near the beach. She digs her feet deep under pebbles, into the sand and watches the water ripple with  calm, hungry eyes.  The man stands by her for a while. He watches her then squints out across the channel, pretending she is looking at the other islands and not the sea.

Then as if freeing himself from some spell he turns. You watch him take one determined step after another. The wind buffets him, prodding and shouting in his ears but he just trudges onward to the lone house and slams the door behind him. The island would not distract him.

You think the man is superstitious when the sun sets and he stuffs earplugs in his ears. “None for her,” you ask, pointing to the girl who has curled up next to the window overlooking the beach.

“Not yet,” he says but doubt nudges at his words. He sighs. “Not that they’d help in the end anyhow.”

You do not know what he means so you change the subject.

“You like the water?” you ask the girl. She nods. And she looks at the water like it is brimming with all the magic you’d wished for when you were her age.  

“The water is nothing but danger,” the man snaps.

Then he tiptoes over to the girl, as if she could be easily startled by loud feet after his outburst. You watch his face go from tender to angry then back to tender again. The second time his expression is laced with a resigned, tired love.

The moon is bright that night. It wakes you, its beam calling you to the window. There, down below, is the girl. She walks, walks, walks down the hill. There is something eerie in her even pace.  Like maybe she is sleep walking or in some trance.

The dog whines softly behind you, but you do not hear it. Instead, you find yourself padding down the hill after her. By the time you’ve reached the beach, she has disappeared. You cannot explain why you do what you do next. But you grab a kayak, step into the chilled water and row. Maybe you are in a trance too but something around you seems to say ‘yes, this is where you should go’.

The moon gathers around the lake in bunches, casting everything in an otherworldly bright light. So bright you can see the weeds in the water reaching out like veins. It is transfixing. You sit, in the middle now, surrounded by calm quiet. It is just you and the moon out here. Minutes pass. No girl. No sound. A flush creeps over you, and you tense half embarrassed by your foolish imagination, half panicked that you hadn’t imagined it and the girl had swum into the deep and sunk under the briny water.

You paddle furiously for a few minutes. The weeds skitter away as you pass before returning to their sleepy undulation. Further and further out you go until the night mist-- had that been there when you left?-- has wrapped around you, obscuring the island. Still, there is nothing. The water is placid. The silence almost sings.

Just as quickly as the panic gripped you, it subsides. You let out a breath. [breathes] No. She would not be here. You had imagined her walking. You press your paddle into the water to turn back  but the wind nudges you forward. You imagine it saying ‘No, there is something here. Just one more corner. One more rocky dune.” Or, no, you don’t imagine anything. There is nothing to imagine. No wind speaks.

You tell yourself you are only going because it is so nice out. You tell yourself it is your choice. But you can feel some magic thrumming in your heart that says otherwise.You paddle for almost a minute, sprinkling cold waterfalls onto your legs, before you see something.

As you look around, navigating through the labyrinth of submerged rock, you notice a svelte dark figure ahead of you.  You paddle faster and the figure darts back out of sight. The wind is pressing now and you try to ignore how alive it feels.  The kayak rocks as you creep around the next barrier.

At first you think it is a buoy, stranded on the rocky shoal. Then it moves, inelegantly. A seal! .As you drift closer, you notice how its light grey pelt is speckled with faded brown.  It watches you with wary eyes,  before slipping into the water, sending little ripples through its face. The pressing wind is gone now and you ignore the satisfied hum in the air that says the island has hooked you in and this is only the beginning. “It’s just a seal,” you say aloud and you ignore the murmur of ‘no it isn’t’ that echoes around you.

There is a figure in the shallows when you get back. Curled over itself and shuddering. IThe seal again, you think. There is a flash of darkness ahead of you. You look up to see the man bolting down the hill and just as the figure pulls to the shoreline, he scoops it up. Then you realize it was not the seal in the water, but the girl, who, in some echo of the past, is once again swaddled in his arms.

“Haven’t you done enough?.” he says to the air and you think, but you’re not sure, he might be speaking to the island.

The man strokes the girl’s hair and murmurs all the relieved, comforting things parents do when their children return safe. You watch him put her down. He pushes her behind him as your kayak scrapes the gravelly beach.

“It’s just me,” you say, surprised by his sudden alarm. The girl peeks around him.  There is something strange about her. Her pupils have flooded her eyes with black.  Her fingers which curl around him are webbed.  You look away, frowning. It is late. You are seeing things. When you look again she looks like a girl, just a girl. But she is not, the myths say on the wind. She is the cold still water and the splashing waves. Only you do not realize it is the myths that say this. You think it is yourself.

In the morning, you pass her room and notice how the door has been rent open. Little chips of wood are strewn across the floor from the impact. The man notice how you look at it and grunts.

“Just another repair that needs doing” he says but you know he is lying.

The wind rattles the hinges of the window and he glares. He glares at everything on the island now and you wonder why he ever agreed to look after it.  After breakfast you set off for another walk. The grass swishes under your feet like a hundred tiny whispers.

The dog trails after you except every once in a while when it bursts past you toward some poor sheep. You find your kayak where you left it last night, too close to the tides to be safe. The girl is there, too. She crouches over the nearest ridge, her back to you. The dog darts ahead, sending sprays of stone up your legs and alerting the girl of your presence. You see her pull a smooth thing from the rocks. It gleams wet in her arms, little drops of water falling from it as she clutches it to her chest. The dog jumps next to her, trying to find treats hidden in its folds.. She shakes her head and moves it behind her back. Undeterred, he sits down next to her, one ear flopped over his head.

You do not see her for the rest of your walk but you cannot stop thinking about what you saw last night and how it might connect to the bundle in the girls arms. It is then that  a funny thought occurs to you, the bundle has a pattern almost identical to the pelt of the seal you sawThe myths are curling around you now, puffing up little eddies of questions and you can’t decide if you want to ignore them anymore.

The man asks you if you’d like to leave when you get back to the house. You have no reason to say ‘No’, but you find yourself saying it anyway. The man grimaces and tells you he’ll be back in a week. “But that’ll be your last chance,” he says.

You see the girl  on the edge of the beach again as he shoves off. Her eyes are a deep pool of black. Then the wind whispers in your ear and this time you hear it.

[wingsplants]

B A S I C S 0 4: s u b s t r a t e s

a lot of people shy away from having houseplants because of how potentially messy having soil in the house can be, and that is completely valid. 

i love doing my plant care either at the dining table or on the living room floor, either way i always end up making a huge mess anyways and usually vacuum and quickly mop after. 

with that being said, a good thing about these tropical plants is that some of them do survive in just water. leca is a type of clay pebble substrate that are often soaked in water and personally i quite enjoy the look. 

this is where I want to talk about the pros and cons of two different substrates that I have experienced with - and a list of substrate i will be exploring in the next few months!

[ 1/     S O I L ]

p r o s: 

usable for all types of plant

different types of soil mix can be used to further provide the specific nutrients your plants need - often up to a long period of time “months”

won’t harm your roots

c o n s

fungus gnats and pests love soil 

its messy - no matter how careful you are, but its not bad to clean up (except on your clothes)

it’s easy to overwater especially if the soil doesn’t provide enough drainage - make sure to empty your saucer so the roots don’t sit in still water and rot, also add perlite/sand if your soil has poor drainage

carnivorous plants cannot tolerate any fertilizer at all so be aware 

you can reuse, unless it is infested then outside it goes for me haha 

[ 2/     L E C A / W A T E R ]

p r o s:

i like the look of it - you can see the root system develop 

cleaner - no muddy mess 

easy to care for 

your plant is basically in water all the time, so you never really have to worry about it drying up - maybe a good alternative if you’re away a lot? 

c o n s:

doesn’t contain nutrients inertly, so a weak water soluble fertilizer is required to feed the plants 

root rot can happen easily if the water isn’t “fresh” enough - i usually top my leca jars up with fresh water, but change the entire jar of water every month :p 

can easily damage root if you’re rough with the plant when taking it out - mediate by gently tipping the jar and fully supporting your plant, rotate to let the leca fall out

[ W I N G ‘ S    S U B S T R A T E     W I S H L I S T ]

PON - i heard a lot of good things about it, i think it is similar to leca?

SPAGHNUM MOSS - i am planning on building a moss pole for some of my philodendron and monstera plants, but this project has kind of taken a backseat as wedding planning is in full steam ahead mode

ORCHID/AROID MIX - sydney plant guy on youtube has really good videos on making moss poles, as well as creating your own substrate mix to keep your plants in - i am just excited to mix a bunch of different substrate for myself haha