new fic

So I've poked and prodded and turned this strange idea into a series of 5 vignettes, which I originally expected to be funny, but instead I ended up sort of wallowing in the rustic domesticity of it all. I'm a sap, it's true. No particular rating, no particular pairing, though a hint of Timbertrick for flavor.

Untitled au





* * *


Sometime in the last five months, Chris had stopped wondering how he’d got here.

He kept his eyes on the line where the high grass met the tapering edge of the woods. His knees ached, but he’d heard something moving there, about twenty minutes ago. If he stayed low and stayed quiet, he might get a clear shot.

He knew why he was here right now. Face down in the pale, high September grass, with an old rifle braced against his good shoulder, and something that had just crawled up his left pant leg, itching like hell; he was here because Justin and JC refused to actually shoot at animals, and because his distance vision was better than Joey’s.

Lance’s rifle sounded abruptly, and Chris jumped. He was a lot closer than Chris had thought. Two birds flew up from somewhere behind him, but wheeled around too fast for him to get a good shot. Whatever had been rustling around up ahead made a dash back towards the trees.

He let out a whistle to signal to Lance and waited until he heard it returned. He stood with his knees and back stiff and cold, scratching at his leg. It was getting dark. There still were two traps to check on the way home.

The grass grew paler in the dusk, and against it Chris suddenly made out Lance, loping along towards him, something slung over his back.

Chris set off to meet him. He’d also stopped wondering when he would go back.



* * *


Although it’s dark, and getting cold, Justin is conscientious about shaking out each piece of laundry. He left it out too long, he’d been down at the creek, and forgotten about the beetles that liked to hide in the folds of sheets and shirts when evening came.

He’s cold in his shirtsleeves. The nights are getting colder, longer. He’s begun to understand what’s coming, now the summer is ending; last night on his way to the paddock he felt a wind that came straight down from the mountains, so sharp it went right through him.

He’s careful to catch all the clothespins. They are cold and nobbly like stones in his hands; he had whittled and whittled, getting used to the feel of the knife in his hand, learning how to cut with the grain of the scraps from the firewood pile. There are pants and nightshirts and some of JC’s longjohns, he gets cold easily, all bobbing and swaying slightly in the dark. Justin thinks they look like ghosts who are missing their top or bottom halves. There is a high, thin moon behind the woods away to the east. Chris and Lance aren’t back yet.

Justin pulls down socks and dishtowels and underwear, quickly. It’s all quiet except for the flapping of the laundry and he tries not to waste time listening. The clothesline is up on the little bluff away from the cabin, and without seeing, he wants to get back into its circle of light and noise.

He looks again to the woods, but it’s dark and gives back nothing. When Chris and Lance go out together, they’re always gone so long. This isn’t the first time; he should know by now.

He grabs the last shirt, gives it an impatient shake, stuffs it into the big basket with the broken handle, and jogs back down the hill.


* * *


Joey isn’t sure when it became natural to sit at the table at night studying a weather-beaten volume on vegetable gardening. The water-stained pages are dim by the lamp, and he’s only half-skimming it, really, and half-talking with Jayce about planting that last bed in the garden, though it’s late in the season. It’s natural in a comfortable way that Joey can’t really define. He takes that as a sign that maybe he shouldn’t bother, and passes over it without much negotiation.

He watches Jayce clatter around over the stove, humming and talking and chopping and scraping. The lamp over the sink lights up the tan side of his face and neck when he leans forward. His pants are short and show his ankles; they’re probably Justin’s. Joey goes back to the yellowed page. Turnips. Peas. No, not peas, it’s late, it’s already September.

It’s not just this, the kitchen, the food smells, the heat and wood smoke and dust, Joey thinks. There’s the sun and the smell of the long grass, the daylight work. The garden and the woodpile and the paddock for the cow, the chicken’s roost, and the half-finished root cellar. There’s the nighttime, too, there are beds that aren’t comfortable, but seem good. Natural. There’s the cabin, marking the center of his orbit.

Joey watches JC’s quick brown wrists, stirring and peeling and shucking. JC hums and Joey hums with him, squinting again at the page.

"The sun’s been down an hour," JC says suddenly.

"Mm," Joey agrees. "The two of them like to take their time."

There’s an especially big water stain on the left page that erased the last four words of every line. The old paper has gentle ridges and valleys, like the bottom of a dry river. Joey hums again, and after a minute, JC picks up the tune.

When Justin comes high-tailing in, pink-cheeked and spooked-looking with his big basket of laundry, Joey thinks that seems natural, too.


* * *


JC can’t sew. His attention wanders and his stitches get big and his thread gets tangled up. He stitches whatever he’s sewing onto his pants, sews buttons onto the insides of shirts, and mends holes into awkward little puckers that always pull, and tear again.

Chris’ stitches are small and tight and determined, but never run straight. Joey’s are probably worse than JC’s. Justin does most of the washing and is exempted from sewing. Only Lance makes precise and even little stitches, but refuses to say when he learned how to sew, and who taught him.

At night Lance will take the pile that needs mending and sit patient by the lamp, and Chris will fiddle with the battered banjo, picking, tuning. Chris’ new fierce quiet came quickly, but JC trusts it; he trusts Chris’ adaptability because it has always been something he’s held to when things change.

Chris will play and then Justin will throw out a line of an old, rusty-sounding song, and like Lance’s sewing, this has unknown origins in Justin’s past. JC feels that there are unexpected wells in each of them, stores of things slowly being uncovered; he savors the slowness. It seems there are new things even in the games they’ve always played, and JC loves oblique discovery. Things are tilted, inclined here. He has time to find them in his periphery first.

At night Joey, rubbing elbows with Justin over the washing-up, picks up and spreads out the sound, and JC is just pulled right along into the melody. This is his favorite time.

After that he feels pliant and warm and wants to go up to the loft, to sleep next to someone and let morning come. He likes other things, too: he likes being the first one to collect the eggs from the roost in the bright squinting morning, each one warm and smooth and speckled in his hands. He likes cooking them over the stove, likes to draw the other four to the table, coming down soft-footed in sleepshirts and longjohns or brisk with morning cold and dew.

The first time they’d killed one of the chickens, JC’d been afraid Justin might try and argue. When he found out Justin had actually named all the chickens, he was pretty sure Justin would get at least a little sniffly about it. But Justin just swallowed and said he’d be back, he was going down to the creek. When he came back he hadn’t asked which one had met its end; Justin liked his meat as much as any of them, and had cleaned his plate.

These days JC is looking out of the corners of his eyes. He’s watching change come quietly, settling like a blanket around old outlines. He knows to trust their silhouettes.


* * *


At the creek, Lance sometimes feels helpless.

All that water just flows and runs on by him. He’d followed its course for a good long way, at least several miles, he estimated, but when he cupped his hands and lowered them down its snow-melted cold cut into his fingers just the same as it did miles behind him. It’s the closest thing to a road he knows here; the presence of direction, constant, tugs at him.

There’s wild mint growing in the wet shady places, and small shadows circling in the deeper pools, where Chris and Justin would skinny dip when it was warmer. The overhanging brush and trees block his view of the sky, and in the absence of clocks he needs its circular timetable more than ever. When he hikes up out of the little gully and sees the long pale sloping stretches of the hills that lead to the mountains under the open sky, the helplessness goes. The wet sharp smells of damp dirt are blown away by the hot smell of dry grass, and wide spaces. He imagines concentric rings in the earth beneath the rippling bleached waves, burned into the dirt by the orbit of thousands of suns, always following the same course, and feels comforted. Here, Lance only trusts things that repeat themselves.

When he wakes in the morning, for the first time it’s cold, and not light, that wakes him. He hears JC encouraging the fire downstairs and Joey snoring. When Lance gets up, Chris stirs and looks over; crammed in behind him is Justin, his face pressed between Chris’ shoulders and his mouth open on Chris’ skin.

When he steps outside, everything’s been made prickly with frost, and he sucks in a breath fast, feeling it sharp and a little painful in his lungs. It’s so quiet he can hear dishes clattering and voices from inside. He takes crackling steps toward the paddock, the sky pale and open above: everything new has happened before.