ph_logs | i heard the thunder [open]

i heard the thunder [open]

Who: Phil and you!
What: May/June open
When: Late April and through May, probably June too
Where: Around town, the skies over the island, the Library, the hot springs
Warning(s): nudity in the hot springs prompt

but i find i got the question wrong [exploring]

A whole town. A whole island. Imagine that.

It's almost overwhelming, honestly, but Phil figures he may as well start big and wide before getting into the real nitty-gritty of it. So once things are slightly settled, once he has the time, he takes off. It won't be so unusual for people to see his silhouette soaring in the sky. If something fascinating catches his attention on the ground, perhaps he'll come down to check it out; his eyes are fit to see detail miles away, so distance is hardly a problem. Perhaps he'll land near you, or you can find him freshly landed someplace else. This is a lot more flying than he's done in years.

i was trying to run away [around town]

And of course, there's the glory of having more than a couple dozen other people to talk to. Phil makes himself a real neighbor's neighbor; he introduces himself to as many people as he can, he chats up anyone who seems free enough, he wanders place to place in the town, invites people to lunch or a drink or what have you. Sometimes he'll just be sitting around, pleased to be people-watching.

but a voice told me to stay [library]

Ah, weather. His old friend.

He's got to brush up. Get back into the swing of it, you know? And he's got to figure out what sort of currents and forces are acting on the meteorology of the island. Phil schleps down to the Library then, and spends long days tracking down research material for the case: he cross-references reports in the newspaper archives, digs up a scientific textbook on the global climate and its impact on the island, and even fishes up a few academic papers of... uh, dubious helpfulness, but it's fine.

Exhaustion catches him more easily these days than it used to. He's not terribly proud of it, but more than once he dozes off him his chair. Then shakes himself awake, then... dozes off again. At least he's not drooling on the books.

put the feeling in a song [hot springs] (cw: nudity, artistic nudity painting the link)

One of the things he'd spotted from above was, of course, the hot springs. There's even some signage nearby, so this is definitely both a public space and safe to take a dip in. Not saltwater, not chlorinated... jeez, it feels like it's been ages since he's been able to take a proper soak without having to take on some shape that got rid of his feathers. It's a relief. A good place to keep in mind if he has a particularly awful flare, too. (Although getting here would be tricky if he's gotten that bad.)

One day or another, Phil stops up there by himself. Undresses. Sighs a long sigh as he rests in the water. Lounging below the water or up on the grass, anyone is free to encounter him (and his shockingly sculpted figure), although he'll certainly hear you coming.

(And of course, do mind the wedding band he's wearing as a necklace.)

wildcard

[ hit me! ]

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With his keen ears, if they aren't currently preoccupied with the sights and sounds of watching the town, he may hear someone engineering a way to climb up to the roof from the other side. If one starts on the second floor and has a blatant disregard for their own safety in terms of should they be standing on the balcony edge, it can be done, though it is a strain on the arms, and she's used to just hauling herself up and kind of inelegantly scrambling to get situated on the roof before she's high enough to sit properly and just relax.

Except, as it turns out, she's not the only person who had the same idea. No, there's Phil, who is never someone she'll be displeased at seeing.

"Looking for time to yourself, or is someone earthbound allowed to intrude on such heights?"

Despite the levity in the statement, she does mean the question - if Phil wants to just be Phil, it's not like she can't leave him to it and see him later.

Perhaps if it were anyone else he might depart for another rooftop, but the cloud of white hair is a comfort to see.

"Always," he hums, getting up and trotting over to offer his hand and help pull her up. "And then what shall we do? Sit quietly together or chat? I'm okay doing either. I was mostly up here to be outside."

Much easier to get up this way, and there's a murmured thanks as she does, finding her footing on the roof.

"I actually came to just look at everything and everyone below. We could sit, and then talk if anything comes to mind?"

It's the best compromise she can think of, with how at the same time she feels suddenly full of words and yet unable to pick a place to start speaking. There's everything that happened before he arrived, wondering if he remembered any more than the rest of them as to what happened at the end, asking if he and his were fine after the battle...but, sitting together quietly has its own appeal. Particularly if she can stay nearby.

"Sure. I'm fine with that." More than fine, really. It gives him time to think too.

Phil strolls off and sets down where he'd been perched earlier, gesturing with his head to a spot besides. There's a pretty good view of the streets below from here. Phil, for his part, has been watching a horse bother someone's window.

It only takes her a few seconds to join Phil, sitting on the rooftop and then just drinking the town in. Spring is doing her best to dry out the damp left over from the flooding, but more than that, there's things in the streets. People walking wherever they would. Horses moving along, things that have been there before them and will be there afterwards.

It's reminding herself it's still there. That going back on a ship ended, that she hadn't retreated into some place in her mind. There's the wood of the roof under her hands. There's the breezes, and the different scents, and the salt in the air isn't as oppressive as it was. They lived. They escaped. It feels both so near and utterly far, the hazy things Fever remembers about the end. The town in front of them is what's clear, and it keeps her thoughts from lingering too long on her own death and nigh-death, while urges cling to the depths. Outside of the battle, the chaos, both ships, she's a little more relaxed, though still alert as ever.

The silence is almost a comfortable thing, wrapped on them like a blanket. To sit and stare at the town, in favored company - it hasn't looked this charming before this hour in time.

It's a soothing thing, crowds. Phil may have spent so much of his life in a podunk town, but it was not much more podunk than this, and on a festival day no less; and other than that, he's spent his whole life in cities. Noise, it's about noise. It's about being next to something that's making noise.

Phil doesn't move very much. At some point, his head stops turning. The breeze rustling his feathers is standout.

They don't have to move. It's about experiencing it, about watching a cat pick its way across the path with tail held high until it disappears from sight. It's the sun warming exposed skin the way it's supposed to.

All the things she wants to say drift back and away, when out of the corner of her eyes she can watch how the breeze plays with his feathers. Freedom looks good on him.

There's only one question to ask, really, when it all falls away. Her voice is soft, trying to not break the spell.

"What do you see?" What captures his attention, at this moment? What of it draws him in?

At first there's no indication that he's heard her. Then he shifts, gesturing somewhere with his head, straight across the street below.

"In the alley over there, someone's dropped food on the cobblestones, an orange I think. See? And there's lines of ants walking all over it. I haven't seen ants in years."

On Earth, on land, you'd never be without them.

"Those are harder to get to here. This might be their first ever orange."

Now that he mentions it, she sees them too. It's too far for her to see all the details, but the dark lines of ants pop out once you're looking. Something so small, but just another sign of life.

"So it's a big day for both of you."

The corner of his mouth quirks.

"They'll probably be starting to get more common now that that skeleton pirate guy promised to bring us food from our homes in exchange for citrus. Hopefully those ants'll get more bounties of it in the future. More days for something good."

"Who knows, they could dream even bigger. Someone dropping something from their home that doesn't exist anywhere. A once-in-a-lifetime experience."

She knows the pirates are good for it. They've definitely already done some deliveries.

"Still a bit of a quest to get the goods. But very worth it - for the ants' sake."

Phil nods, and he means it entirely sincerely. It’s good to live in a place where the wheel of things exist, where everything leads to one another and back again.

“They deserve as much, for everything they do. And not once have they ever asked for thanks.”

…

“Oh, a fly’s getting in on it too.”

Craning her neck a little, she sees it when it hovers over the bright orange of the fruit - bigger than the ants, but still so small. Living their own existence, unaware of the giants that are bearing witness.

"...A caterpillar showed up in my apartment," she says, as they watch the insects. Sure, the bug ship had been ghastly, but these ones aren't doing anything but existing in their own space. "Before you came to these shores. Had to figure out how to care for it, feed it. They eat so much."

A tiny steadying presence while her mind had whipped around like a tempest, still hellsbent on survival. And she will never ask if it was a message, or the most wonderful coincidence.

Edited (icons) 2024-06-06 18:03 (UTC)

His head turns in her direction, only a little. He still faces the street.

“You didn’t try to release it outside?” His tone is curious, not interrogative. It would’ve been much easier.

"Could have, but...it was really early in the morning, and I wasn't thinking the clearest. I just thought they eat plants and snuck out in my nightclothes to go find something."

There'd been less neighbors, then. No one to see. And a sense of one must.

"And then when I'd actually slept, I thought, it came to me, so it was my duty to keep it safe until it grew its wings."

“Has it, yet?”

He has a few things that may or may not be relevant to say, so that bit’s important.

"Yes. I saw it turn to the chrysalis. That was incredible, how it just...became. Shedding its skin like it was trying to get out of too tight clothes. And then it was just a matter of patience. Until I woke up one morning and it had shed that covering too."

The fondness she felt for the little thing is clear in her voice.

"When its wings were dry and strong, that's when I let it go."

…

“Did you know,” he starts softly, “that in the chrysalis, they don’t just turn from caterpillar to butterfly? They turn into liquid first. It digests itself. They’re full of these specialized cells called imaginal discs, they’re full of the same stuff that encodes the shape of any creature or plant, everything that ever lived, so… there’s no brain or heart in there or anything. And no matter how much it got shaken up, you’d still start to get a butterfly.”

Edited 2024-06-08 06:16 (UTC)

Her head turns to look at him a little more as he explains, wanting to ask how, how is that even possible that somewhere something inside of them knows what to do, how to reshape itself out of such destruction. Magic, she wants to call it, for that's how it seems. But it's more than that. Something right at the core.

"That's how extreme the change is? Not just growing the new parts?"

Utterly destroyed. No brain. No heart. Do those rebuild themselves, out of the liquid of all that they were?

“No. If you cut the chrysalis open before it formed, all you’d get is goo. You know what else? The butterfly still remembers things it learned as a caterpillar. We have no idea how.”

"Huh. Even without a brain in that middle part."

There's a whole contemplation she'll have to do now that she knows that, lying on her couch and thinking, the idea of all you are dissolving and then rewoven. Not terrifying. Just...extreme.

"...Part of me just wants to ask you more and more questions, or go hunting in the library for answers. And the other part says no, give the man a while to breathe, we're looking at insects that aren't cursed."

If she's frank about it, it can become something amusing, instead of twin desires both fighting to get out. Give him room to experience all this on his own, instead of smothering him with endless hows and whys, boiled over from the great abyss in her head. But honesty commands more, and so she extends one more piece.

"I hoped you would come."

He’s about to say something about the way his knowledge actually applies now, how learning and sharing it with others is part of how he learned to live at all, until she says something wlse.

For the first time since he pulled her up onto the roof, he turns to look at her.

“… Yeah?”

Fever nods, looking up and meeting his gaze when she feels it on her.

"When so many of us got carried to these shores, and we started reuniting, I looked for people. I looked for you. Couldn't find you anywhere, so I had to just keep faith that you'd turn up later. There were so many of us, after all - surely some people had to come later." A breath. "I wanted you to come here. Somewhere that was alive, and real, with actual weather, because that matters to you. Somewhere where you might not be expected to suffer all the time."

And then, at the end of a very long list of good reasons, is the quietest one at all - that she wanted to see him again. Each day, a thought concealed from even herself, that it might be the day he shows up.

"So, I held out hope that you were just delayed. Things happen, after all."

He's still getting used to it. Being thought about positively. Even more than that, being missed. That someone wishes the best for him. That someone was ever waiting for him. It's an abundance that he doesn't know what to do with, a tree bearing fruit that he can't have all to himself; it'll be wasted on him.

What do you say in the face of something like that?

...

Phil scoots in, leaning into her side, a wing to wrap around her shoulders. He lifts one of her hands and presses the worn knuckles to his lips.

"I'm not going anywhere," he says.

Someone might argue that none of them can promise that, utterly and truly. They're all pieces of evidence that things beyond them can affect their lives in ways they barely have any say in. No one can promise they really won't go.

Her fingers curl around his all the same.

It feels safe enough feeling Phil at her side, her under the touch of his wing, to believe it for now. At least right now, he's right here. He did make it. Words can't precisely express the particular mix of emotion that she has for that - a relief, a thing settling, the first breath of the crisp air from his Mantle on that ship, the little currents of gladness that skitter on her ribcage to see him again.

But she can look at him. That can be sufficient.

They can fall back into that comfortable silence, unhurried as to when to continue speaking - if something comes to mind at all. Below them, the town continues on with its processes, its rhythm brought back into focus. The ants continue to enjoy their rare treat, and in the distance, the train sounds, the signal carried up by the winds.

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i heard the thunder [open]

exploring/wildcard.

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i kept losing this notif auaugh

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